Politics in Commercial Society

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith

Istvan Hont, Béla Kapossy, Michael Sonenscher

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674286191
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen as a critic of modernity, Smith as an apologist. Istvan Hont, however, finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society and from surprisingly similar perspectives.In making his case, Hont begins with the concept of commercial society and explains why that concept has much in common with what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called unsocial sociability. This is why many earlier scholars used to refer to an Adam Smith Problem and, in a somewhat different way, to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem. The two problems—and the questions about the relationship between individualism and altruism that they raised—were, in fact, more similar than has usually been thought because both arose from the more fundamental problems generated by thinking about morality and politics in a commercial society. Commerce entails reciprocity, but a commercial society also entails involuntary social interdependence, relentless economic competition, and intermittent interstate rivalry. This was the world to which Rousseau and Smith belonged, and Politics in Commercial Society is an account of how they thought about it.Building his argument on the similarity between Smith's and Rousseau's theoretical concerns, Hont shows the relevance of commercial society to modern politics—the politics of the nation-state, global commerce, international competition, social inequality, and democratic accountability.

1

Commercial Sociability:
The Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT commercial society and how to understand politics in it. It will attempt to tease apart the different sorts of political vision that are currently relevant to us by using the history of political thought as a guide. It takes a pair of thinkers who are usually contrasted rather than likened to each other because one is undoubtedly a republican whereas the other is usually seen as not. How similar or different their politics were is what we shall see. My aim, at least rhetorically, is to produce parallels and contrasts that are surprising. It is not unusual to contrast Rousseau and Smith, with the former seen as an enemy of, and the latter as an apologist for, modernity. To repeat this outcome, even in a more sophisticated form, wouldn’t be very interesting. Rather, the attempt here is to learn from the revisionist historiography of political thought of the last thirty years. Our pictures of both Rousseau and Smith have changed, or at least they ought to have changed. Now, what happens if we take these new views of Rousseau and Smith and juxtapose them? Perhaps new aspects, fresh views, of their thought will come into focus and we can gain more in our understanding of their work. The view from Cambridge is that the new historiography of political thought has become stale and needs a push forward. John Pocock, who used to work on the seventeenth century and now works on the eighteenth, has complained about the Cambridge fixation with the seventeenth century. The chapters that follow are designed to help this leap forward.

The main title of the first two of these chapters indicates that Rousseau and Smith shared a view of the type of society whose politics they wanted to change. The subtitles of these particular chapters also indicate that there might well be a “Jean-Jacques Rousseau problem” as well as an “Adam Smith problem,” and that there is a tension and maybe even a paradox hidden in the assumption that there is a common denominator underlying the ideas of the Genevan and the Scotsman (emphatically, we must not call them a Frenchman and an Englishman). I claim that many of Smith’s ideas were much closer to Rousseau’s than is commonly thought. In addition, I advance a seemingly radical argument: I will argue that both Rousseau and Smith—not only Smith, as is conventionally argued—were theorists of commercial society. It is their theoretical proximity, at least on some key issues, that makes them proper and interesting subjects of comparative study. Rousseau as a theorist of commercial society? This sounds paradoxical, at least from the point of view of our standard understanding of Rousseau. Of course, the suggestion here is precisely that the common view of Rousseau might be seriously inadequate.

I am a Smith scholar, and my interpretation is driven by my longstanding struggle to understand him. Nonetheless, in this book, Rousseau is not simply a foil. Their work intersected, not through personal acquaintance but academically, through Smith’s reading of Rousseau. He reviewed Rousseau, and there is every reason to assume that this review offers an important key to a possible new reading of both Rousseau and Smith. I will get to an account of this review by the end of the chapter. My main task till then is to prepare you for it.

There is already something called “Das Adam Smith Problem,” pointing to a difficulty with the view that Smith was a genuine moral theorist of commercial society. I will briefly analyze this issue at the end of this chapter. At this moment, it should suffice to say that I want to extend this reading of Smith and assimilate Rousseau to it, to make it a case of two intertwined problems, “Das Adam Smith Problem” and the analogous “Das Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem.” I hope that this will illuminate the ideas of both thinkers significantly. The pivot on which this pairing turns is the notion of commercial society. Once it is factored into our understanding of the two philosophers, it may make some of their ideas look paradoxical. This chapter is an introduction to this apparently perverse approach. I ask the following questions: How does the concept of commercial society serve as a fundamental term for comparing Rousseau and Smith? What is commercial society? What is its meaning and history as a concept?

One must admit, from the outset, that despite its current ubiquity in the historiography of political thought, “commercial society” is not a term that is readily understood or widely used. There is perhaps a clear notion or concept underlying it, but in modern usage, the term is not unambiguous. “Commercial society” is Smith’s own term; perhaps nobody else used it in quite the same linguistic fashion, even if strong theoretical affinities with his usage did exist. It is Smith’s own use of this expression that validates it historically, but this validation is not outstandingly strong. It is just barely there.

Normally, “commercial society” refers to a society of traders or of market economic agents in general, describing a society in which there is much commercial activity. It was this quite ordinary, if not terribly common, meaning that Smith stretched further in order to make it a theoretical object for moral and political inquiry—as a fundamental type of society. He also used the term to describe a kind of society in which, quantitatively, there was a great deal of commercial and market activity. The quantitative increase of commercial or commercial-type transactions in a society was for Smith an important index of social change. As we shall see in his account of the Greek polis, he used the presence of a quantitative increase of transactional activity in a society as an index of qualitative changes in the basic modus operandi of that society. He then stretched the term to describe a society whose members related to one another as interactive commercial individuals, behaving generally as merchants act when entering a market. What Smith wished to say was that their social relations within their own society became market-like, governed by the utility that such market liaisons both demand and entail.

The issue was not whether the members of such a society traded a great deal with one another but whether they related within such societies as traders. A commercial society is first of all constituted commercially on the inside, rather than through its external activities. The concept of commercial society describes the constitutive moral quality of the membership of this society, not the actual material trading activity itself. Traditionally, Christians heavily criticized commercial society. A partnership of Christian traders might be designated as a commercial association or trading society in the conventional sense. But their external trading activities wouldn’t necessarily turn their group into a commercial society in Smith’s sense. Theirs could remain a society of Christian fellowship, with large doses (at least in theory) of beneficence, friendship, and solidarity to glue it together. However, once they started to behave toward one another as traders, as market agents rather than as Christian brothers, they would become a commercial society in the full Smithian sense.

Commercial or market society is obviously a fundamental type of society, which we should readily be able to comprehend under this name. Alas, we often cannot. Although today the term “commercial society” is fashionable in scholarship, it is more often than not used incorrectly and in a theoretically imprecise sense. In fact, as a theoretical category, commercial society is hardly used correctly at all. This kind of problem is, of course, a general feature of political discourse. Most of its central categories have no properly designated and accepted names. We speak and write by using many ambiguous and confused descriptors. It is perhaps sufficient to mention the fundamental ambiguity surrounding the term “state.” In fact, the issue of commercial society is a particularly important component of the answer to the question, what is the modern state? The phrase “politics in commercial society,” given to the title of this book, refers to the problems involved in identifying the kind of state that might best complement a commercial society.

This difficulty of naming our central political categories is not a new problem, although one might have expected some progress in the wake of recent developments in historical contextualism. Experience shows that contextualism helps in identifying particular idioms of speech within historical political discourse, but it is less productive when naming key concepts that transcend linguistic fashion. Think about the notorious problems involved in identifying the meaning of terms like “republics” or “republicanism,” or of particular types of liberty. The ambiguity of naming political phenomena and concepts is not simply a problem for historians; it is deeply embedded in the historical subject matter itself (just think about the untranslatability of such key terms as the Greek polis and the Latin civitas) and it often persists over a very long time.

The phrase “commercial society” first emerged in the context of eighteenth-century political language. What would be a later category that captures its sense most productively? Perhaps the best-known modern signposting is the Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft distinction of the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, originating from 1887, from which the modern American political language of communitarianism has developed.¹ Importantly, Tönnies was a historian of political thought. He was a Hobbes scholar, and his categories were fundamentally translations of terms prevalent in Hobbes’s Elements of Law: Natural and Political (a text that Tönnies edited) and his De Cive. Knowing this fact restores some historical sense to Tönnies’s categories, for it allows us to see that instead of regarding Smith and Rousseau as having anticipated Tönnies, as is usually stated, Tönnies was in fact adapting even older categories of political language to modern usage. This eliminates prolepsis, the one sin on whose rejection the Cambridge School unanimously agrees, at least in theory if not always in practice. Some historians of political thought find it depressing that one can never get away from Hobbes in the history of English-speaking political thought, but in the case of the Gesellschaft–Gemeinschaft distinction, such a regress, if that is what it is (fortunately it isn’t an infinite regress), is historically justified.

Sometimes Hegel, rather than Tönnies, is mentioned in the context of the genealogy of the concept of commercial society. The precise meaning of his term “civil society” is too complicated to discuss here, but suffice it to say that Hegel’s civil society, or bürgerliche Gesellschaft, was the standard European vernacular rendition of the Latin term civitas, the very same term that Hobbes used as his baseline for his theory of the state. Often civitas was also translated as “state,” and Hegel’s argument was about the definition of the state or, more precisely, the people’s state, Volksstaat, which was to some degree innovative. For Hegel, the state was a Christian and post-Roman term. It was meant to signal more than a Roman state because it was to be understood as a modern synthesis of the Greek polis and the Roman civitas together, glued together with an application of Christian Trinitarianism. The other name of the state, civil society, signified a component or the infrastructure of the state. It described the heritage of the Roman civitas as modified for a non-slave-owning market society.

The idea that there must exist an appropriate modern terminology for commercial society that could serve as a vehicle for a comparative study of Rousseau and Smith (and potentially of many others) is simply an illusion. Most scholars use terms like “commercial society” to get away from Marxist language and the categories of sociology. Terms like “capitalism,” “bourgeois society,” and “inorganic society” now seem to be both loaded and disturbingly sloppy as categories. Adopting the term “commercial society” was a well-intentioned departure from this vocabulary. It is, however, an unfinished journey, and one purpose of this chapter is to throw some light on its possible use in political thought. In the next section, I intend to pursue this hunt for categories and concepts just a little bit further, in order to uncover layers of language that allow us to gain more fruitful access to our texts.

It is well recognized in the literature that Tönnies’s notion of Gesellschaft is directly indebted to Hobbes’s notion of the state. In contrast, there is a general assumption that Gemeinschaft is drawn from Romantic sources, subsequently spruced up by late nineteenth-century anthropology and sociology. This is not correct. Both concepts were derived from Hobbes. This has not been easily recognizable because the original Hobbesian terminology is all but forgotten. The Hobbesian pair of concepts were “union” and “concord.” These fundamental categories, which loom large in De Cive, became submerged in Leviathan, which focused exclusively on union. Tönnies knew his Leviathan well. He was, however, also the most important modern editor of The Elements of Law. It is in The Elements of Law and De Cive that the terminology of union and concord was prominent.

Union, not concord, was the primary concept of Leviathan. It was the root idea underlying Hobbes’s theory of the state by representation. In Tönnies, the Gesellschaft–Gemeinschaft distinction appears as “sociological,” as a differentiation between two concepts of society. In Hobbes, it was intensely political. The concord–union distinction was the central plank of Hobbes’s attack on republicanism and resistance theory. In De Cive, Hobbes attempted to erase the influence of the Aristotelian tradition by expressly denying that man was a naturally social being, because he wished to destroy the idea that naturally sociable beings could also be naturally political. He denied the political efficacy of natural sociability as the foundation of the state in any of its forms, including the utilitarian bonds created by commercial reciprocity. Instead, he constructed a theory of indirect popular sovereignty that offered stability and peace without any preexisting consensus or prepolitical social integration. On its basis, Hobbes claimed for himself the title of the founder of modern political science. He described his commonwealth or state as a “union.” The alternative model, which required preexisting consensus and hence a grounding in sociability, Hobbes called “concord.” This formal division of the types of commonwealths into two was built on preexisting distinctions, but his insistence on drawing a very sharp dividing line between them as sepa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editors’ Introduction
• A Note on the Text
• 1. Commercial Sociability: The Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem
• 2. Commercial Sociability: The Adam Smith Problem
• 3. Histories of Government: Which Comes First, Judges or the Law?
• 4. Histories of Government: Republics, Inequality, and Revolution?
• 5. Political Economy: Markets, Households, and Invisible Hands
• 6. Political Economy: Nationalism, Emulation, and War
• Index