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 The face of economist Adam Smith on the
£20 notes |
In today’s centrist politics, they all love Adam Smith
But the 18th-century economist may not have found an evening with his modern-day disciples a very convivial experience,
guesses Christopher Price
ADAM Smith is currently a unifying figure in British politics. Gordon Brown has put his face on £20 banknotes and staunch Conservatives swear by him.
Tony Blair, Brown and David Cameron all claim him and all parties support the public and private spheres of human existence with a nicely balanced impartiality.
This new political “centrism” is a comfortable spot for today’s politicians; they can put their feet up and reassure us that the class war is over and that we can have our cake and eat it – while enjoying unprecedented prosperity in a society dedicated to “fairness”.
PJ O’Rourke, an American of Irish extraction, has now been recruited by Atlantic Books (an independent amalgam of US and UK publishing houses which have already given the Bible, the Qu’ran and Plato’s Republic the same sort of treatment) to unravel this phenomenon and explain Smith to the economic laity.
O’Rourke spends much of his time on Smith’s exploration of “invisible hands”, only one of which many of Smith’s admirers have seized on – the supposed economic miracle which flows from business unrestrained by governments.
For Smith, money was something to be generated and spent; hoarding it in the bank was useless. Spending galvanised a process which eventually made everyone more prosperous. What had real value was human work and inventiveness.
This set of apparent truths has attracted many aficionados over the years – some of whom are pretty unsavoury folk. Smith’s economic invisible hand had its apogee 20 years ago in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street, in which Michael Douglas preached the doctrine of greed being good.
O’Rourke, however, refuses to let Smith’s economic invisible hand stand alone. His first mention of this hand occurs in his discourse on social, rather than economic wellbeing when – in an earlier book he wrote, The Theory of Moral Sentiments – he discovers, in the human feeling of sympathy for others, an equally important force which holds human society together. This was, in reality, a Leftish concept of solidarity, which he refers to as “sympathy”.
Not that he saw anything religious or even ethically admirable about sympathy for others. It was not the particular preserve of either good or bad men and women. Nature – a word he used advisedly to avoid acknowledging the Deity – had just left traces of it in most of us and we were all better off for it.
It was only later that he balanced his individualistic and aspirational economic hand with his comradely social one.
Adam Smith was brought up in Kirkcaldy and today his sentiments remain very much more Gordon Brown than David Cameron; and if he were to return to Earth tomorrow, I doubt if he would find an evening with the more ideological members of the Adam Smith Institute a particularly convivial experience.
One reason why Smith could cope with such a dazzling spectrum of incompatible disciples is that few have actually ploughed their way through his works. They are all terribly long, often tedious and very dense. O’Rourke puts this down to the publishing habits of the day. The more you wrote, the more expensive the book had to be and the greater your royalties were.
O’Rourke has opted to be more court jester than serious interpreter (and rather more Yankee than Irish in his jesting), so some English readers may find his transatlantic irreverence hard to take.
I, however, liked his attempts to synchronise the 18th with the 21st century and use Smith’s wisdom to inform today’s dilemmas. Smith wondered how the Christian principle of everyone being equal was compatible with the idea of property rights – two contradictory ideas which have now been endorsed by the infant United States of America, the French Revolution and the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
O’Rourke’s initial – and somewhat Irish – comment on this grandstanding is one of gentle scorn: “High-minded screeds cobbled together by unrepresentative and, in some cases, slightly deranged, members of the intelligentsia.”
But then he goes on to remind us that Smith had already seen the problem in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Abandoning morality he simply said that treating people as equals and at the same time seeing them own unequal amount of property was simply a matter of fact; and since we were inadequate human beings, less capable of looking after ourselves than most animals, there was little we could do about it.
He was certainly against nanny state governments trying to resolve the issue. It is a book that should be compulsory reading for all those ambitious political researchers who believe that politics and politicians can change all that much. Going with the grain of invisible hands is more effective. |
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