Month: October 2013

Antiurban political economists in Scotland after Smith

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James Anderson on
town and country

Untitled.
Image: Painter William Wylde’s
Manchester, from Kersal Moor (1852)
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A couple days ago I somehow found myself reading Adam Anderson, Dugald Stewart, Arthur Young, and James Anderson, all lesser economists of the Scottish Enlightenment. This was part of my background reading on the antithesis between town and country.

Last week I posted some classical bourgeois views on the issue. While James Steuart and the French Physiocrats idealized the countryside somewhat, assigning it priority over the emerging commercial and industrial centers of modern Europe, Smith stressed a kind of harmonious reciprocity or equilibrium between the two. Smith stood virtually alone in advocating for the city. His successors in fact opposed his position.

I’m reposting a section of James Anderson’s 1794 article “Of Manufacturing and Agriculture” here to give a sense of the deep conservatism of antibourgeois, anti-liberal aristocrats after Smith. Not until Ricardo and Sismondi were the main lines of Smith’s argument extended in any measurable way. Even then, Ricardo was never as keen on the novelty of capitalist conurbations, and Sismondi succumbed at times to romanticism in favoring “territorial wealth” (agriculture, the countryside) over “commercial wealth” (industry, the town).

The radicalism of Smith’s economic theory comes through especially sharply when contrasted with tracts like this.

William Hogarth's Harlot's Progress, Plate II (1732), in which Molly seduces a depraved Jewish urbanite

William Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, Plate II (1732),
in which Molly seduces a depraved Jewish urbanite

Of manufacturing and agriculture

James Anderson

Manufactures are subjected to great variations in the demand at market. Sometimes the orders for those of one sort are so great, that the highest exertions are required for supplying that demand. During this period every thing assumes the most inviting appearance. The master manufacturers have it in their power to enhance the price or diminish the quality. Their profits are great. Every one is anxious to obtain as great a share as possible in this gainful business; he tries to obtain as many hands as possible; journeymen, of course, become scarce, and obtain higher wages; this induces more persons to enter into that business. All is life and bustle; and smiling prosperity brightens every countenance. The lower classes of the people are enabled to pick and cull the nicest viands; for rearing which the farmer gets great prices, so as to enable him to abandon more common articles of produce. Continue reading →

Signs of rot

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Kailash Sreeneevasin posted a great quote from Lars Lih today:

When I look back at this period — when you could say that there was a mass movement, a Marxist mass movement that was genuinely alive — what was it that was alive? It was a sense of a world-historical mission, that the proletariat was “the Chosen People” — this metaphor was made many a time, that this group of people was going to bring the world to a final goal. So that’s what I’m wondering: Is this sense of a world-historic mission alive today, even among the Left? This is what I’m asking you: Is there a genuine sense of this group having a mission and a real sense that it is going to happen? That was the baby that the Left has thrown out, keeping the bathwater, which is very useful — Marx’s analysis of this, class analysis of all this stuff. The bathwater is great! But the baby seems dead or gone. Does this sense of world-historical mission exist and must it exist in order for the Left to be anything like what it was? And is there a way of making it happen if it doesn’t exist? You can’t artificially insist that people believe in a mission like this — or even make yourself do it, if the belief isn’t really there.

Lih is asking the right questions. Just fifty years ago, the quasi-Trot historian Isaac Deutscher was able to confidently assert that

Marxism is not an intellectual, aesthetic, or philosophical fashion, no matter what the fashion-mongers imagine. Continue reading →

Adam Smith’s neglected masterpiece?

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Corey Robin posted a brief write-up of a passage from Adam Smith over on his blog some weeks back. The text quoted was Smith’s earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s become quite popular in recent years to contrast this work with Smith’s magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations, which came a few years later.

One commenter, Diana, expressed more or less this exact sentiment. “Please keep blogging about the Theory of Moral Sentiments,” she wrote. “Everyone so associates Adam Smith with the other book [The Wealth of Nations] and forgets about this one.” Another commenter, Benjamin David Steele, immediately seconded her request, writing: “I agree. I’ve never read the Theory of Moral Sentiments, but I’ve been very interested in this lesser-known side of Adam Smith.”

For whatever reason, though the Theory of Moral Sentiments is an interesting work, it annoys me when individuals try to “correct” common misperceptions about Smith’s political and economic philosophy by redirecting attention away from what is undoubtedly his greatest work, The Wealth of Nations. (This is, of course, the work that libertarians and neoliberals like to cite the most in their anti-government diatribes, though this is simply because they never read beyond Book I). So I felt I’d write something along these lines. What follows is a brief exchange mostly between Corey Robin and me on Adam Smith’s moral philosophy and its ideological relation to aristocratic (versus bourgeois) virtue. Also at issue is the relative worth of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as opposed to The Wealth of Nations. Continue reading →

Lenin on the bourgeois revolutions

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Contra the “Leninists”

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Image: Jacques Louis-David,
The Tennis Court Oath (1793)

Introduction: Against leftist senility

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I am posting this here because of the widespread incredulity witnessed recently on the part of self-declared “Marxists” toward the historical legacy of the bourgeois revolutions. This is, I contend, the flipside to the tendency of leftists to claim all manner of backwater populists like Chavez or Allende — their tendency to disclaim truly revolutionary figures who come out of the bourgeois tradition, Jacobins like Jefferson or Danton and radical Republicans like Lincoln. Since they’ve had so few notable political leaders and organizers in recent decades, leftists have lionized sheepish socialists and reformists of all sorts while denigrating the accomplishments of bourgeois revolutionaries. Engels, addressing a crowd gathered in 1845 to mark the “festival of nations,” commemorated the protagonists of the great bourgeois revolutions, adding that “[i]f that mighty epoch, these iron characters, did not still tower over our mercenary world, then humanity must indeed despair.”

Needless to say, this goes double in a time such as ours. Despite the admirable efforts of historians like Neil Davidson, whose recent book How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? takes explicit aim at such blatant revisionism, neo-Stalinist academics like Domenico Losurdo insist that the category of “bourgeois revolution”

is at once too narrow and too broad. As regards the first aspect, it is difficult to subsume under the category of bourgeois revolution the Glorious Revolution and the parliamentary revolt that preceded the upheavals that began in France in 1789, not to mention the struggles against monarchical absolutism, explicitly led by the liberal nobility, which developed in Switzerland and other countries. On the other hand, the category of bourgeois revolution is too broad: it subsumes both the American Revolution that sealed the advent of a racial state and the French Revolution and the San Domingo Revolution, which involved complete emancipation of black slaves. (Liberalism: A Counter-History, pg. 321)

In an interview I conducted with him over a year ago, the Italian theorist expanded on this point with reference to bourgeois revolutions, faulting Marx himself. “I criticize Marx because he treats the bourgeois revolutions one-dimensionally, as an expression of political emancipation,” he told me. “I don’t accept this one-sided definition of political emancipation, because it implied the continuation and worsening of slavery…We have numerous U.S. historians who consider the American Revolution to be, in fact, a counter-revolution. The opinion of Marx in this case is one-sided.” (Losurdo conveniently forgets it was Engels — the “late” Engels of Anti-Dühring, no less, not a piece juvenilia penned by a supposedly “young” Marx — who maintained: “What the American Revolution had begun the French Revolution completed”). Continue reading →