William Dixon

Das Adam Smith Problem - A Critical Realist Perspective

The old Das Adam Smith Problem is no longer tenable. Few today believe that Smith postulates two contradictory principles of human action: one in the Wealth of Nations and another in the Theory of Moral Sentiments . Nevertheless, an Adam Smith problem of sorts endures: there is still no widely agreed version of what it is that links these two texts, aside from their common author; no widely agreed version of how, if at all, Smiths postulation of self-interest as the organising principle of economic activity fits in with his wider moral-ethical concerns. We argue that the enduring Adam Smith problem may be solved by recourse to a realist perspective that recognises the different levels of social reality to which Smith refers in his discourse. Essential to Smith, we try to show, is the action-theoretic distinction between motive and capacity; between a typology of empirical human acts, on the one hand—self-love and benevolence in Smiths terminology—and the (non-empirical) condition of possibility of all human action—what Smith calls the sympathetic principle—on the other.

Performing Economics: A Critique of ‘Teaching and Learning’

Economics students find difficulty in developing effective learning strategies; they would also welcome and benefit from a more pluralistic teaching of economics. Nevertheless, economics teaching has become less pluralistic over the recent past. Recent benchmark statements seem content to underwrite an essentially monist approach to the discipline in the hope that a deepening crisis in economics teaching can be averted by expanding teaching and learning programmes taking the content of teaching as given and instead concentrating on presentational reform. The paper argues that such teaching and learning strategies are part of the problem rather than its solution.

Thomas Chalmers: The Market, Moral Conduct, and Social Order

Combining elements of Adam Smiths third-party perspective with the evangelical view of life as a trial, Thomas Chalmers argued for a market-based social order. The viability of this order would depend on the capacity to develop character in response to the choices made possible by the market itself. Character could replace administrative interventions. Chalmers saw well-intentioned administration, especially with respect to the poor laws, as both crowding out inner motivations and creating a focus for the fermenting of dissent over the terms of “legal charity.” Better, he thought, that there should be a reform in the composition of wages, abolishing all allowances, to foster the independence of workers and also then willing and productive work. The latter could be the basis of improving material and moral conditions.

Economics and the Act

A recognisably modern social thought begins around the time of Aristotle. ‘Man is a political animal’, he writes, and in so doing registers the insight that, amongst other things, human beings distinguish themselves from other species in virtue of the way that they associate (Aristotle, 1252b27). It cannot be clear today, however, how it was supposed to begin. The words of the fourth century (BC) Aristotle, understood in social epistemological terms, can be made to fit all kinds of social theory, from his day to ours’. Aristotle’s dictum can be made to fit the intellectual imperialism that is modern economics by reading into Aristotle’s ‘political animal’ the distinctive capacity to deliberate. Marx, whose relation to economic science is hardly straightforward, in this instance at least lines up four-square behind the economist: ‘what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees’, he writes, ‘is....that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality’ (Marx, 1974, p.174). It is this that makes his act ‘exclusively human’ (ibid.). It seems to follow that if the human act is distinctive, then so too is human sociality; for if we operate distinctively, then surely we must co-operate distinctively also. Further, it is tempting to assume that our operations and our co-operations are distinctive for the same reason: that they are both the product of deliberation, of a single mind in the first case and of several in the second. On this view, human co-operation is a special case of human operation: the co-operative act, insofar as it is ‘exclusively human’, requires of the co-operator no more or less than the exercise of the same powers of reason at work in the prosecution of the individual act, but now ranging over a (much) more complicated terrain. These apparently innocuous assumptions in regard to the philosophy of the act determine the way in which economic theory configures the relation between individual and society. On the economist’s view, although the activity of the individual human actor necessarily has an ethical or social substance, its form may be conceptualised without regard to the presence of other actors. We will want to argue that the distinctiveness of human action and interaction as minded activity does not have to seen in

The irreducibly social self in classical economy: Adam Smith and Thomas Chalmers meet G. H. Mead

The idea of a ‘natural harmony’ in human affairs runs like a leitmotif through Adam Smith’s work. Naturally enough, modern economics has read into this allusion its own preoccupations with the coordination of the strategic decisions of essentially egoistic actors. We will want to argue here, however, that for Smith and his disciple, Thomas Chalmers, successful human interaction is founded on a yet deeper competence and a more complex form of selfhood than conventional economic analysis has been able and/or willing to admit. We try to explicate that irreducibly social self that Smith and Chalmers have in mind by drawing on the philosophy of the act that characterises the work of the social psychologist, G.H. Mead.

Sentimentality, communicative action and the social self: Adam Smith meets Jürgen Habermas

There is a long and tortuous history of misinterpreting Smithian social theory. After rehearsing that history we offer here a way of understanding Smith that, unlike much of recent revisionist Smith scholarship, does not further add to this confusion. Our proposal is to understand the relation between moral and economic behaviour in Smith as analogous to the way in which Habermas makes strategic (and normatively oriented) behaviour parasitic on a more basic communicative competence. Given this analogy, it is ironic that Habermass own understanding of Smiths theory also leaves much to be desired.

Political Economy and the Historians: E.P. Thompson and the Moral Depletion Hypothesis

Thompson presents the movement from moral to political economy as a stripping away of moral bonds and the emergence of impersonal political economy. In his alternative Thompson looks to the movement of a self-active subject but in doing so, we argue, he gets closer to the reality of political economy than he realised. Political economy was an important element of the radicalism, for example of Thomas Paine, in which Thompson sees the emergence of a working class voice. Political economy responded to subjectivity in the context of opposition to ‘Old Corruption’, and then necessarily looked to rely on the capacities and needs of the people.

Das Adam Smith Problem

Abstract The old Das Adam Smith Problem is no longer tenable. Few today believe that Smith postulates two contradictory principles of human action: one in the Wealth of Nations and another in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Nevertheless, an Adam Smith problem of sorts endures: there is still no widely agreed version of what it is that links these two texts, aside from their common author; no widely agreed version of how, if at all, Smiths postulation of self-interest as the organising principle of economic activity fits in with his wider moral-ethical concerns. We argue that the enduring Adam Smith problem may be solved by recourse to a realist perspective that recognises the different levels of social reality to which Smith refers in his discourse. Essential to Smith, we try to show, is the action-theoretic distinction between motive and capacity; between a typology of empirical human acts, on the one hand—self-love and benevolence in Smiths terminology—and the (non-empirical) condition of possibility of all human action—what Smith calls the sympathetic principle—on the other.