On Tue, 17 Aug 2010, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Check out the full context. Smith was offering an explicit class
> analysis. Capitalists care about maximizing profits, often at the
> expense of the mass of a society.
It's true. But the first irony is that Smith is doing it in this chapter in favor of the land-owning class. He argues that, unlike with capitalists, their class interest does coincide with the public interest, because the level of rents rises in line with a rise in the general wealth of the nation. Therefore they are the proper governing class -- just as they happen to be in England in 1776.
The second irony is that Smith basically invents here the idea of a unitary "public interest" separate from class interests, and lastingly identifies it the growth of the wealth of nations, or what we will later call growth in GDP. And that is the beginning of the end for class analysis among bourgeois economists.
Michael