Theology, Morality and Adam Smith

Jordan J. Ballor, Cornelis van der Kooi, Jordan J. Ballor, Cornelis van der Kooi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000605891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

This work details the theological sources and moral significance of the life and work of the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790).

The panel of contributors deepens our understanding of Adam Smith in his religious and theological context and the significance of this understanding for contemporary moral, economic, and political challenges to modern social life. The chapters cover a broad range of disciplinary and historical concerns, from Smith's view of providence and his famous "invisible hand" to the role of self-interest and benevolence in Smith's social and economic thought. A better appreciation for the moral and theological dimensions of Smith's thought provides not only a better understanding of Smith's own context and significance in the Scottish Enlightenment but also promises to assist in meeting the perennial challenges of properly connecting economic realities to moral responsibility.

The book is of interest to advanced students and scholars of the history of economic thought, historical and moral theology, intellectual history, political science, and philosophy.

1 Bourgeois Culture Understanding Adam Smith’s Moral Horizon

Govert J. Buijs

DOI: 10.4324/9781003082064-2

Adam Smith as a “Phenomenon”

How can we understand the historical “phenomenon” Adam Smith? Of course, Smith is an author who writes and argues, who tries to convince his readers and we can, as humble peers, engage with his arguments, compare his insights with other writers whom he does or does not quote, and so on.

But Smith is also a historical or cultural phenomenon. We can easily get a sense of this by a couple of exaggerated comparisons. Imagine Adam Smith writing either on his Moral Sentiments or his Wealth of Nations in Ancient Egypt, say in the time of Ekhnaton, or in China during the Han dynasty, or in Ethiopia during the Zagwe dynasty—this is simply unthinkable. One could say the same of the work of Newton or Kant. This is not to belittle their individual genius. But even the brightest individuals do not escape their own time. Each stands on the shoulder of giants, as Newton famously said in his 1675 letter to Robert Hooke.¹ But the metaphor can be taken further: each does not only stand on shoulders of persons but also stand within a particular landscape, so to say, within a particular social and cultural infrastructure, within, to use Charles Taylor’s phrase, a particular “moral horizon” (Taylor 1989).

The moral horizon is the ontological and moral framework in which strong evaluations are embedded and that consciously and subconsciously informs the moral judgments that one makes. A moral horizon is not a chapter in a book of a particular philosopher or ethicist, neither is it a chapter in the history of ideas. It is more like a basic set of symbols, icons, and assumptions that within a certain culture are more or less generally shared and that people employ, consciously as much as unconsciously, as basic and more or less undisputable reference points for their evaluations in terms of good and bad. We hit upon our moral horizon when we tend to let a moral judgment be preceded by the expression “of course.” Of course, we tend to say, within our modern moral horizon, all humans are equal. Of course, humans have human rights. Of course, we need to work in order to have a life, and this work should be safe and preferably even meaningful. Of course, children should not work. Of course, we need to help those who cannot help themselves. Of course, handicapped people have a right to live (something which Aristotle certainly would deny, given what he, apparently from within a quite different moral horizon, presents as a clear-cut matter on this issue: “let there be a law that no handicapped child shall live” [Aristotle 1957, VII.16.20]).

A moral horizon is bound up with a particular “social imaginary,” another term that Taylor employs in his later work (2004, 2007). The moral horizon informs the social imaginary. Whereas the moral horizon is the more or less agreed upon idea of what good is, the social imaginary is the more or less agreed upon idea of a good society. Both are subject to historical changes and sometimes struggles, even revolutions, but also exhibit regional and cultural differentiations.

Now we can formulate our main question: what is the moral horizon within which Adam Smith’s thinking is situated and how does this inform his social imaginary, his idea of a good society? What in Smith’s project presents itself as almost obvious moral reference points, that Smith apparently experienced almost as air to breathe, but that with hindsight are not obvious at all, as soon as we try to uncover the historic and cultural background of these insights? In answering these questions, I propose to follow a somewhat Taylorian procedure, which implies: telling a historical narrative of changing conceptions of the good and of the good society through time, focusing on Western Europe up until the eighteenth century, the time Smith wrote his masterworks.

But where to begin? With hunter-gatherers? With the Ancient Near Eastern empires? With the Roman Empire? With Christianity? Fortunately, there is a rather well identifiable starting point on which thinkers as diverse as Smith and Marx would concur: it is the break with feudal society as it took place in the West. For Smith it is the rise of “commercial society,” the take-off of which he locates in the growth of cities and towns after the fall of the Roman Empire, or better in what was often described in Smith’s time as the dark, “Middle Ages” (WN 3.3). This fits the final stage of the “four stage conception of human history,” which Pocock (2006) has identified as being quite popular among eighteenth-century intellectuals, including Smith: hunting, herding, tillage, and commerce. Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto fully agree with Smith on this point: the true revolution in world history is the break with feudalism, which took place in the chartered towns of the Middle Ages, the “medieval communes.”² In the Manifesto a new term is introduced for Smith’s “commercial society,” namely “bourgeois society,” a name that since has become widespread. From Marx onwards, the term bourgeois has taken on quite negative connotations. For this reason, I have also used burgher culture as a more neutral indicator (Buijs 2013). Recently, Deirdre McCloskey (2006, 2010, 2016) has strongly argued for the rescue of a positive use of bourgeois, as the epitome of an entire set of virtues, indispensable for an “age of commerce.” Without Marx’s contempt, and without McCloskey’s exaltation, I will use burgher and bourgeois interchangeably to denote a society and concomitantly a type of human that emerge in Europe, somewhere from the twelfth century onwards. So we can rephrase our main question as “what is the moral horizon of commercial or bourgeois or burgher society? What characterizes the bourgeois or burgher social imaginary?”

In this chapter, I discuss, all too briefly, seven developments that together form if not the heart of this commercial or bourgeois revolution, or at least key elements of it. Moreover, I will relate these developments to the rise of Christianity in general and some elements in particular to the rise of one particular branch of Christianity—Protestantism. In this way, I will relate the work of Smith to religion. I hence leave aside any discussion of Smith’s personal beliefs, which are irrelevant for my purposes. Nor do I discuss, or need to discuss, whether Smith ever read some of the authors that I will quote as representative of some of the changes in the moral horizon that accompanied the rise of the bourgeois society. What I am claiming is that Smith thought and acted within a cultural context that was deeply informed by Christianity and more particularly by Protestantism, and even more particularly by a moderate form of Calvinism. Adam Smith as a phenomenon is understandable only against this background—or so I would claim. This was the air he was breathing, the water in which he was swimming—and like a fish never really questioned this water but took it for granted, or to be more precise: he took it for truth and even was inspired by the historical promises that were harbored in it. Smith neither was nor attempted to be a pre-Christian like Confucius or Aristotle, nor was he or attempted to be a post-Christian like Nietzsche (who did thoroughly question and even attack Christianity and its concomitant moral horizon, although even he was and remained deeply immersed in it). Smith remained consciously within this Christian horizon. He did not even care to present himself as a confessing Stoic, though he certainly was an admirer of this remarkable branch of classical philosophy that both in antiquity and in early modernity was at that time considered so adaptable to and compatible with Christianity. Particularly in moderate Calvinism for a long time it was the case that one did not feel the need to make a choice between Calvinism and Stoicism because of this high degree of compatibility in personal and social ethics.³

Seven Remarkable—Even Revolutionary—Characteristics of Smith’s Project

What are some of the seemingly obvious—but when projected on a larger, world historical scene rather revolutionary—insights that Smith seemingly naturally incorporated in his project, insights that can be seen as representative for the moral horizon and the concomitant social imaginary within which his work can be located?

First of all, Smith as a philosopher and moral scholar is interested in ordinary, everyday welfare. Apparently, material well-being for him is a matter of serious consideration. It clearly is the vita activa that is the primary and for him fully legitimate intellectual concern, not the vita contemplativa. And the legitimation for this “worldly” concern is not, as in Hobbes, the avoidance of the summum malum of a civil war, but in terms of promoting well-being of ordinary people. Everyday life matters, and matters deeply.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, there is a pervasive sense of the equal dignity of human beings. Who else before Smith wrote a book that started with an explicit concern for “the different ranks of the people,” the phrase that emerges in the title of Book I of the Wealth of Nations? It is clear that nations in Smith’s work does not simply refer to political entities but should actually be read as peoples, as Smith writes:

Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage, or as an inconveniency, to the society? The answer seems at first abundantly plain. Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part, can never be regarded as any inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

(WN 1.8)

And a little later, advocating material progress, he writes, “The progressive state is, in reality, the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society; the stationary is dull; the declining melancholy” (WN 1.8).

One could easily add to this other passages, most notably Smith’s concern for the spiritual well-being of those, actually “the great body of the people,” who through dull labor may become “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to become”—they should be enabled to develop themselves by education and reading books, to remain fresh and alert (WN 5.2). This is important in itself, as people who are bereft of all education “are mutilated and deformed in a still more essential part of the character of human nature.”

Whence this remarkable concern for the intrinsic well-being of all (though Smith provides ample utilitarian arguments for his position as well)? For Smith this equal dignity of humans also extends to women, who should be educated as well as men (and women, Smith notes, usually make better use of their education anyway).

This solidarity with the different orders of society is combined in Smith with a clear contempt for those who try to dominate and subjugate other people for their own interest, as he accused the feudal masters and lords of doing systematically—domination and exploitation even characterize history until the revolutionary break wrought by the rise of commercial society: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind” (WN 3.4).

So commercial society is a revolutionary correction to “every age of the world”—it is a new phase in the history of mankind, in which the hierarchical exploitation of the many by the few is finally overcome: “What all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about” (WN 3.4).

Third, Smith sees “labor” as the obvious way of creating wealth, not agriculture or large conquests, or the acquisition of precious metals. Whence this choice for—or better, this almost sleight of hand introduction of—something which in many other cultures, and certainly in the often referred to Greek and Roman culture was despised and looked down upon? Whoever is fond of presenting Smith as a Stoic redivivus has to deal with the fact that the Stoics certainly were more positive about everyday labor than Plato or Aristotle but still had the strong tendency to extoll otium-cum-dignitate, leisure spent on philosophy and education, as a condition for the good life, at the expense of negotium, the restlessness of “work,” which anyway for the Stoics primarily meant political activity, not handicrafts.⁴

Fourth, Smith not only chooses labor as the central human characteristic by which humans can create wealth, but he famously argues emphatically for the division of labor and its advantages. Why is that? Smith seems very much impressed by the observation that, although people are among themselves not by far as different as other types of animals, they develop a very sophisticated level of cooperation, each person developing his or her own unique talents and bringing the fruits of them to the assistance of others. Humans are cooperators:

By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a grey-hound, or a grey-hound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd’s dog. Those different tribes of animals, however, though all of the same species are of scarce any use to one another. The s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Exploring Adam Smith’s Theological Contexts, Sources, and Significance
• 1 Bourgeois Culture: Understanding Adam Smith’s Moral Horizon
• 2 A Survey of Adam Smith’s Theological Sources
• 3 Calvin and Smith on Providence, Morality, Virtues, and Human Flourishing
• 4 Self-Love and Its Discontents: Trajectories in Reformed Moral Philosophy and Theology before Adam Smith
• 5 Smith and the Scholastic Tradition on Markets and Their Moral Rationale
• 6 Adam Smith’s Seventeenth-Century French Theological Sources
• 7 Smith and Enlightened Augustinianism
• 8 Adam Smith’s Theological Hinterland
• 9 Butler and Smith’s Ethical and Theological Framing of Commerce
• 10 Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Vicegerents of God
• 11 Adam Smith’s Theology and Virtues as Conditions for the Potential of Free-Market Economies to Contribute to Human Flourishing
• 12 The Adam Smith Problem Theologically Reconsidered
• 13 Smith on Moral Agency and the Significance of Context
• Index