Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment

Rating:
Summary: A new look at some old whipping boys
Review: First, a romantic note - Rothschild dedicates this book to her husband Amartya Sen, and Sen dedicated his last book ('Development as Freedom') to her. So these books will lie side by side on my shelf. Both are well worth reading.

There is more than just a familial connection. Sen clearly used his wife's research on Smith and Condorcet in the writing of 'Development as Freedom' since the Adam Smith that appears in his book is not the cold and callous economist of myth. One suspects that Rothschild's perception of Smith and Condorcet had been coloured by Sen as she presents them as more than just economists as we understand the term, but concerned with a far wider range of phenomena in politics and sociology. In fact they were exactly as much an 'economist' as Sen himself is. As any reader of Sen knows, he covers an extremely broad range of factors in his work, not just GDP and income.

Rothschild argues that Smith's example of the 'invisible hand' that regulates free markets would have as easily been meant as a malign as a benign regulator. Traders who influence markets by bribery or trickery are as much an 'invisible hand' as an imagined self-regulating mechanism. In fact, the beneficient invisible hand was very much a product of later economists. Smith was not as negative on government regulation as he was made out to be by later writers, though strongly against price-fixing by government fiat, guilds which prevented fair competition, and over-zealous regulation of trade and commerce by insiders, profiteers and parasites.

Condorcet comes across as a very attractive human being, passionate and commited to his beliefs. Accused of Utopianism, he struggled with his conviction that he had no right to dictate opinion to others. Yet he believed that his liberal philosophy was best.He was concerned with the 'ordinary man in the street', and rejected any idea that he/ she should be indoctrinated with the 'right' ideas by a state-supported educational system. He wrote for the rights of women, believing that all humanity were entitled to equal rights.

I have to say the book is dense and quite difficult at times. However, it is the ideas that are difficult, not the presentation. It will probably repay a second reading.But I feel after reading this that I have had an excellent introduction to two first-class and important (in a world-historical sense) intellects.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting but Frustrating
Review: The subject is interesting. Putting Adam Smith in a historical context can reveal much about what he really wanted to say. But Emma Rothschild's writing style is frustrating. Time and again I would read a sentence and then ask "what did she just say?" and realize that it was a banal generality or that she could have expressed herself more directly. I studied history when in college and have read many well written books on intellectual history. Rothchild's book isn't one of them.

Rating:
Summary: Truth in advertising
Review: The title "Economic Sentiments" is intriguing. How can "sentiments" be "economic"? Is "sympathy" economic? Or "greed"? Or maybe the "desire to better one's conditions," which is neither greed nor thrift nor entrepreneurial adventurism, but maybe a little of each. Unfortunately Ms. Rothschild does not deliver on the promise of the book's title. She is very learned and obviously knows her stuff, but most readers will likely be disappointed by the slighting of Smith in a book that, judging by its title, presumably would treat Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. But close textual analysis is not Rothschild's bag (as Austin Powers might put it). There is, however, an extended discussion as to why Smith's "invisible hand" is just a big joke, but that is not a verifiable argument, nor can Rothschild draw on her considerable learning to make it. After all, how can you prove that a joke is a joke? And nothing prevents a joke from being both ironic and true. Emma invokes the reductio ad inegalitarium to argue that Smith could never have believed in an "invisible hand." It is argument by proximity. I know Smith, Smith is a friend of mine, and the Smith I know could never have assumed the inegalitarian vantage of the omniscient observer. Ergo the "invisible hand" is a joke. Is that convincing? She then launches on an extended comparision of Smith and Hayek that attempts to assimilate Smith to Hayek--as if Smith were not difficult enough to understand on his own. For a scholar who clearly thinks that historical context is the greater part of intellectual history, Rothschild's eagerness to make Smith relevant is at odds with her method. There is an interesting book here that Rothschild did not write, a book about Smith's portrait of this new man, economic man, the man who Smith in fact depicts in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Unfortunately Rothschild has written a book that is half learned exposition, half contemporary polemic, and a whole lot less than the sum of its parts.

Rating:
Summary: Invisible sleights of hand
Review: This is a nicely done zoom level retrieval of the real Adam Smith (or one of them) before conservative ideologists appropriated his name and theories, resulting in amnesiac palpitations and the fulminations of Karl Marx. Adam Smith is an historically ambiguated figure whose reputation fluctuated very quickly between the era leading up and throughout the French Revolution and the era thereafter. We blame Rousseau for wicked deeds, in a snort at the Revolution, but similar 'misgivings' attended the radical Smith. This is a well done account, with a good critical history of the 'invisible hand' scenario, and a reminder of the dangers of historical hallucination curable only by hard labor at the historical record.

Rating:
Summary: In defence of the Enlightenment
Review: To their enemies the Marquis de Condorcet was the epitome of the worst elements of the French Enlightenment, fatuously optimistic, subtly intolerant and dangerous utopian with his emphasis on the "perfectability" of man, while the notoriously absent-minded Adam Smith was the architect of a notoriously callous and philistine economic theory. Aside from that, the enthusiastic and idealistic Condorcet does not appear to have much in common with the quiet and discreet Smith. Emma Rothschild is the husband of the nobel prize winning economist A. Sen, whose most famous work shows the devastating effect dogmatically applied free market rules can have on worsening famines. Yet this book is a defense of the two from the critics of the Enlightenment.

To a surprising extent she succeeds. Conservatives will be unpleasantly surprised to read that in the decade after his death, mentioning your support of Smith did not prevent Scottish democrats from being transported to Australia by reactionary Scottish judges. For many years Tories did not view Smith as the great economist or philosopher. Instead Smith was the man whose account of his friend, the atheist philosopher David Hume on his deathbed, enraged the pious for showing Hume's complete calm, class and lack of fear of eternal damnation. Rothschild notes how the great economist Carl Menger noted how prominent socialists quoted Smith against their enemies. (Oddly enough she does not quote the passage in CAPITAL where Marx cites an enraged prelate angry at Smith for classifying priests as "unproductive labor.) Smith was an opponent of militarism, a supporter of high wages, and a supporter of French philosophy (and not unsympathetic to the French Revolution,either). Reading of his relations with Turgot and Condorcet, it will be much harder to defend the view of a sharp distinction between a good sensible Protestant Enlightenment, and a bad, Nasty, atheist one on the continent.

In discussing Turgot and Condorcet's support for the free trade in grain, which Smith also supported, Rothschild helps remind us that laissez faire did not simply mean watching while people starved. Confronted with the threat of famine in Limousin in 1770, Turgot preserved the freedom of the corn trade. But he also provided workshops for the poor, increased grain imports from other regions, reduced taxes for the poor, and protected poor tenants from eviction. Condorcet and Smith were both sympathetic to these policies. Rothschild also devotes a whole chapter to Smith's metaphor of the "invisible hand." She points out how rarely it was used in Smith's work, and how on the centennial of the publication of the Wealth of Nation almost no-one mentioned it, even at a special celebration organized by William Gladstone. She then goes into how the concept is used in Smith's works. The concept is complex, and in my view not entirely convincing. But she is successful in pointing out how Smith did not follow Hayek in viewing pre-existing structures as the product of an infallible "organic" wisdom. In contrast to the cant of a Calhoun or a Kendall, Smith realized that the most tyrannical acts of government are those that are local and unofficial.

One should point out the defense of Condorcet as well. In an age where Francois Furet, Keith Michael Baker, Mona Ozouf and others have castigated the French Revolutionary tradition as inherently totalitarian, it is good to be reminded that Condorcet is firmly in the liberal tradition. Like Smith, Condorcet was a great supporter of public education, in contrast to the conservative critics of both. Rothschild discusses his views as an economist, and as a theorist of proportional representation. Surprisingly she does not discuss what were Condorcet's most admirable views, his support for female emancipation and suffrage. But she is excellent in pointing out how Condorcet opposed the crassness of the utilitarians. She notes how Condorcet had a view of the limits of truth and scientific inquiry that would have been approved by Karl Popper himself. She notes that he did not believe that voting could or should create a General Will, in the Rousseauean Sense. He did not believe in using education as a form of propoaganda in civic studies, while his opinions were closer to the reservations of a Herder, a Holderin or a Kant than previously believed.

The book is not perfect. Although studiously documented, most of the quotes are from Smith and Condorcet themselves. More historical context could have been provided. There should have been more about actual historical studies of famines, and more on the political and social context of modern Scotland would have been very informative. And her defense of Condorcet would have been stronger if Rothschild had confronted the well-deserved reputation of Condorcet's colleagues in the Gironde for hypocrisy and demagoguery. But this is an important work, and it helps link one of the most familiar of "english" minds into a full international context. That in itself is praise enough.