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  5. THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY IN ADAM SMITH

THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY IN ADAM SMITH

 

THE HISTORY AND THEORY OF THE “SYMPATHY WITH THE RICH AND THE GREAT” IN DAVID HUME AND ADAM SMITH


Hume and Smith grant a socially integrative function to sympathy. The esteem for the rich and great belongs to a category of sympathetic feelings primarily accounting for vertical differences- interpersonal comparison and social distance.


A) David Hume: sympathetic identification and atavism


In line with his overall method in the Treatise, Hume sets out to inquire into the causes of the esteem of the wealthy. He then flags three classes of causes as candidates for an explanation of the admiration for the rich. (THN 2.2.5)1


Initially, Hume merges the first class of causes into the third. Recalling the principle of the double relation of ideas and impressions as applied in the case of property and riches and the pride or humility2 that it triggers, Hume concludes that we pass easily and smoothly in our imagination from the idea of the object to the idea of proprietor. Therefore the sympathetic pleasure stemming from the sharing of the rich man’s pleasure is more comprehensive that the sympathetic pleasure deriving simply from the view of an agreeable object such as houses, gardens or any attractive possession. (THN 2.1.10, 2.2.5)3 We should be able to enter sympathetically into the potential satisfaction of a rich person’s might because she is able to buy any means to happiness without actually doing so (THN, 2.2.5). Sympathetic participation to the rich man’s life is the explaining principle. (THN 2.2.5)4 Furthermore, Hume explores the second hypothesis, namely the interested “agreeable expectation of advantage” from the rich and powerful that he rules out once confronted to the “uniformity of human experience”. Very few can gain favors from the wealthy while the admiration of wealth and power is ubiquitous. The esteem towards a noble family, “a long succession of rich and powerful ancestors” amounts to the deference shown to the lineage of dead ancestors from whom we expect nothing in return. (Taylor, 2015: 78-82)5 Note the integrating force (Finlay, 2007: 10)6 of this form of sympathy for the system of social ranks without any personal acquaintance between social inferiors and superiors. (THN 2.1.10, Of Refinement in the Arts, 277)7


Hume’s analysis of the sympathy towards the rich and great should be profitably associated to his narrative of feudal, servile dependence - especially his Essays... such as Of Refinement in the Arts. In this context, Hume underscores the subordination to and the material dependence of the poor on the rich and powerful that create a situation similar to Asian despotic regimes in terms of arbitrary power of the barons and enslavement of the subjects. This explains why people are bound to think that we esteem the rich because of the expectation of advantages from him, in other terms by the “selfish hypothesis’. To put it bluntly, the long past of European history has created an atavistic expectation of protection and succor from the wealthy that is still alive in people’s minds in a quasi-inertial way although the socio-economic reality has drastically evolved. In Hume’s account, a modern theory of authority should be able to provide an illustration of the respect paid to the wealthy disencumbered of feudal remnants, of “aristocratical or monarchical tyranny.”(Hume, Of Refinement in the Arts, 277-8) The harmony of a correspondence of sentiments with spectators is the privilege enjoyed by the wealthy and powerful, not the control of an army of protégés or the upholding of a patronage network –in other words sympathetic identification with the wealthy is disinterested and, in Hume’s view, should be understood in aesthetic terms: it is the prestige and the lifestyle of the wealthy and great to which the dazzled spectators vicariously participate. In dissecting the psychology of subordination in the Treatise, Hume constructs an approach of social stratification that goes beyond what he develops in his Essays and seems proper to commercial modernity. Therefore he points to a natural history of sympathy with social authority that begins with the rise of commons and the emergence of ‘middle stations of life.’ (Of the Middle Station of Life, 547) However such a natural history of the sympathy with the rich and the great has never been fully developed.


B) ADAM SMITH I: FROM MATERIAL DEPENDENCE TO DISINTERESTED SYMPATHY


Thus Hume sets the argument up with his abstract discussion of time, custom and authority.8 Smith seems to embrace and further historicize this Humean position within his unfinished project of a “theory and history of law and government.” 9


Several things tend to give one an authority over others. 1st, superiority of age and wisdom which is generally its concomitant. 2dly, superior strength of body; and these two it is which give the old an authority and respect with the young. 3d, superior fortune also gives a certain authority, caeteris paribus; and 4thly, the effect is the same of superior antiquity when everything else is alike10. (LJA, 129: 321)


Before the institution of property, in the societies of hunters, the natural superiority of body, mind, age or wisdom entails authority11. During this period (Hont, 2009: 143)12, material dependence and sympathy with social authority are almost completely disconnected insofar as authority is slim – no social ranks properly speaking exist -, it concerns only the security of the group and cannot be inherited. (LJA, 9-10, 202-203) In the pastoral age, the property of flocks and herds created a mass of poor deprived of any means of subsistence and as a result completely dependent on a few rich proprietors. Smith contends that the leaders in the nations of shepherds bequeath their fortune to their offspring and as a result the distinction of birth takes place among them. Antiquity of family and antiquity of wealth become synonyms and cause a customary subordination while authority becomes a heritage, an inherited authority. The authority of the superior over the inferior is a matter of tradition; the great shepherd is respected because of his wealth and the number of those who depend upon him for their subsistence, namely for his material power. He can then be revered for “the nobleness of his birth, and of the immemorial antiquity of his illustrious family.” (WN, V, )


Smith analyzes the mechanics of material dependence that sustain the real authority of the chieftains very subtly. It relies heavily on the bare fact of the direct dependence on the chieftain both of the poor and the less important proprietors of flocks and herds. The lesser shepherds realize that the security of their flocks depends on the security of the chieftain and the authority of their restricted nobility on the great authority of the rich chieftain (LJA, 7-9: 202-3). To be sure, no recourse to naked violence was needed to account for shepherd inequality; the military chief has served as judge during peace and has amassed great wealth through gifts from the clients who require his service as arbiter of private conflicts. (Hont: 2009: 154)13 As a result every leader creates a mass of servitors who depend on his jurisdiction and survival during peace while they obey his orders and follow him blindly to war (LJA, 130-2: 322). In other words, genuine authority—that is, veneration and spontaneous subordination—is based on wealth and the power that results from it. Therefore there is no sympathy strictly speaking with the chieftain; The subordination of the poor or the less powerful to the immensely powerful shepherd seems to rely heavily, according to Smith’ analysis, on material dependence and so on self-interested behavior; the veneration for the nobility of ancient families and the contempt for upstarts has become a customary reflex.


In the chapters of the Wealth of Nations bearing respectively the titles “Of the rise and Progress of the Cities and Towns, after the Fall of the Roman Empire” and “How the Commerce of the Town contributed to the Improvement of the Country’ (Book III, iii and iv) Smith sets out to account for the transition from feudality to post-feudal commercial modernity. Feudal regimes were post-shepherding regimes in the sense that their elites, lords and barons had the attitude of the chieftains of the pastoral age of society, despite the King’s effort to restrain their power and violence. At this point, Smith’s famous description of the violence and anarchy of feudal institutions turns into an explanation of their collapse. Retrospectively we grasp why he has laid so much emphasis on the lack of luxury consumption during the pastoral age: the chieftains didn’t have the possibility of dissipating their fortune. The gradual development of manufacturing and foreign commerce through the cities and the towns of feudal Europe provided to the rich barons the opportunity to spend their fortune in other ways than by maintaining tenants and retainers. (WN, III, iv, 418-9)14 The emergence of market relations, that is of the limited dependence or relative independence of merchants and tradesmen from lords and barons marks the beginning of the history of disinterested sympathy that is the sympathetic identification with the rich and the great. (LJA, 117-8)15 This is a true turning point in the history of authority, with far-reaching consequences.


In a very revealing passage of the LJ((LJB, 13: 401,16Winch, 1983: 261)17, Smith clarifies his intentions on this topic by pointing to his theory of sympathy with the rich and the powerful (Haakonssen, 1981, 184)18. Despite the republican critique of luxury in commercial society or Rousseau’s (Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, 1990: 122)19 denigration of the calculation of interest as the emblematic passion of modernity, Smith emphatically states that “the great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness”. (TMS, I.iii.3, 62)20 Note that Smith parallels Rousseau’s concerns about misery; he is nowhere near oblivion regarding the pathologies of poverty and the necessity to address them as intrinsic ills in commercial society.21 He also shifts the attention to a different direction. Is sympathetic identification with authority a properly modern or a trans-historical phenomenon? (Hont, 2009: 151-2)22


Indeed, the fact that the sympathy towards the rich and the great does not proceed from “any dependence that the poor have upon the rich”, is a specifically modern phenomenon unknown to the pastoral stage or the feudal society (Haakonssen, 1981: 128)23, and is due to the emergence of the modern institution of the market. (LJB “…for in general the poor are independent and support themselves by their labor, yet tho’ they expect no benefit from them they have a strong propensity to pay them respect”). Thus the doctrine of sympathy with the rich and the great in Hume and Smith is more subtle than Istvan Hont contends in his masterly paper on “the history and theory of law and government” with regard to its role in integrating the members of different social ranks into an hierarchical order. On the other hand the claim that “The moral psychology that Smith identified in his theory of sympathy operated throughout history”(Hont: 2015, 154) can be challenged on the abovementioned distinction between materially based and disinterested sympathy with the wealthy. Indeed “modern deference” does not reflect the balance of power. (Hont, 2009: 153)24


Smith closely follows Hume25 in this line of thought (Hont, 2009, 153 n.72)26 but he gives a different twist to the argument. Modern deference relies heavily on opinion not on force. The role of the nascent public opinion in modern liberty and modern deference is therefore prominent. (Winch, 1978, Bernardi, 2012).


C) Adam


  1. TNH 2.2.5.2: “First, to the objects they possess, such as houses gardens, equipages; which, being agreeable in themselves, necessarily produce a sentiment of pleasure to everyone that either consider or surveys them. Secondly, To the expectations of advantage from the rich and powerful by our sharing their possessions. Thirdly, To sympathy which makes us partake of the satisfaction of everyone, that approaches us. All these principles may concur in producing the present phenomenon. The question is, to which of them we ought principally to ascribe it.”↩
  2. TNH 2.1.11.4↩
  3. TNH 2.2.5.5,7 see also “Of property and riches”, 2.1.10↩
  4. THN 2.2.5.14: “Upon the whole, there remains nothing, which can give us an esteem for power and riches, and a contempt for meanness and poverty, except the principle of sympathy, by which we enter into the sentiments of the rich and poor, and partake of their pleasure and uneasiness. Riches gives satisfaction to their possessor; and this satisfaction is conveyed to the beholder by the imagination, which produces an idea resembling the original impression in force and vivacity. This agreeable idea or impression is connected with love, which is an agreeable passion. It proceeds from a thinking conscious being, which is the very object of love. From this relation of impressions, and identity of ideas, the passions arises, according to my hypothesis.”↩
  5. See J. A. Taylor, Reflecting Subjects. Passion, Sympathy and Society in Hume’s Philosophy, OUP, 2015, pp. 78-82. Regarding the sympathy with the wealthy and powerful as prone to to envious comparison when practiced within a small social distance, see the classic essay of A. Baier, “Master passions’ , Explaining Emotions, ed. Amelie Rorty, Berkeley CA, 1980, 409-411↩
  6. Chr. J. Finlay, Hume's Social Philosophy. Human Nature and Commercial Sociability in A Treatise of Human Nature, Bloomsbury publishing, Continuum, 2007, 10↩
  7. Hume seeks to show the influence on the passions for one in the position of powerlessness and for one who has an extreme power over others. The power of the master is the power to command another, to have another subject or in thrall to one. If we are masters, we have a “power or an authority over others [that] makes us capable of satisfying all our desires.” In contrast, “slavery, by subjecting us to the will of others, exposes us to a thousand wants, and mortifications” (2.1.10.11). Possessing this kind of power, having dominion over another, is a source of pride or vanity, as powerlessness or slavery is a source of shame or humility. Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), p. 287: “In rude and unpolished nations, where the arts are neglected, all labour is bestowed on the cultivation of the ground, and the whole society is divided into two classes, proprietors of land and their vassals or tenants. The latter are necessarily dependent, and fitted for slavery and subjection; especially where they possess no riches and they are not valued for their knowledge in agriculture; as must always be the case where the arts are neglected. The former naturally erect themselves into petty tyrants; and must either submit to an absolute master, for the sake of peace and order; or if they preserve their independency, like the ancient barons, they must fall into feuds and contests among themselves, and throw the whole society into such confusion, as it perhaps worse than the most despotic government. But where luxury nourishes commerce and industry, the peasants, by a proper cultivation of the land, become rich and independent; while the tradesmen and merchants acquire a share of the property…”↩
  8. See Chr. Berry, Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, chap. 11 “Hume and the Customary Causes of Industry, Knowledge and Commerce”↩
  9. The masterly recent posthumous book of Istvan Hont contains numerous insightful comments on the issue of authority in Adam Smith, I. Hont, Politics in Commercial Society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, B. Kapossy & M.Sonenscher (ed), Harvard University Press, 2015.↩
  10. Lectures on Jurisprudence, A, 129, 321, R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, P.G. Stein (eds.), Oxford : OUP, 1978.↩
  11. LJA, 129, 321: “Among nations of hunters, such as the native tribes of North America, age is the sole foundation of rank and precedency. Among them, father is the appellation of a superior; brother of an equal; and son, of an inferior. In the most opulent and civilized nations, age regulates rank among those who are in a every other respect equal and, among whom, therefore, there is nothing else to regulate it.”↩
  12. Istvan Hont, ‘Adam Smith’s history of law and government as political theory’, Essays for John Dunn, ed. R. Bourke and R. Geuss, Cambridge: CUP, 2009, 143: “Leadership arrangements were accepted voluntarily, for they answered a common need and were instruments of public utility, the salus populi. This kind of consent developed historically, through customary practice, because for ages there were no express stipulations that office-holding should be conditional on performing a genuine service for public utility. Rule by natural authority, Locke emphasised, was based on naïve trust and unguarded ignorance of the looming danger of cumulative and eventually irreversible corruption.↩
  13. Istvan Hont, ‘Adam Smith’s history of law and government as political theory’, op.cit., 154: “In the Wealth of Nations Smith claimed that significant inequality in property holding could never have been stabilised without the simultaneous emergence of the state to protect it. Shepherd inequality could survive only because rich rulers invented and used the state to protect themselves from the poor. This explanation was not quite sufficient. It still left open the question how the inequalities in wealth that needed the protection of the state could have arisen in the first place. Smith needed to fill in the missing historical and logical link between rule based on natural authority alone and the first shepherd states in which authority was assisted by power based on wealth.”↩
  14. WN, III, iv, 10, 418-419: “But 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. These gradually furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could exchange the whole surplus produce of their lands, and which they could consume themselves without sharing it with tenants and retainers. …For a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. The buckles, however, were to be all their own, and no other human creature was to have any share of them; whereas in the more antient method of expence they must have shared with at least a thousand people. With the judges that were to determine the preference, this difference was perfectly decisive; and thus, for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered their whole power and authority ”↩
  15. LJA, i, 117-18. ““a tradesman to retain your custom, may perhaps vote for you in an election, but you need not expect that he will attend you to a battle”↩
  16. LJB, 13, 401 : « Age and long possession of power have also a tendency to strengthen authority. Age is naturally in our imagination connected with wisdom and experience; and a continuance in power bestows a kind of right to the exercise of it. But superior wealth still more than any of those qualities contributes to confer authority. This proceeds not from any dependence that the poor have upon the rich, for in general the poor are independent and support themselves by their labor, yet tho’ they expect no benefit from them they have a strong propensity to pay them respect. This principle is fully explained in the Theory of moral sentiments, where it is shewn that it arises from our sympathy with our superiours being greater than that with our equals or inferiors: we admire their happy situation, enter into it with pleasure, and endeavour to promote it.”↩
  17. In a slightly different context, D. Winch claims that the “theory” component of the “theory and history of law and government” to which Smith refers to his famous letter to La Rochefoucauld “is likely to be the theory of natural justice, the social and psychological foundation of which were laid in the Theory of Moral Sentiments”. Therefore, the lectures should be considered as a bridge between the Theory… and the Wealth of Nations, “Adam Smith’s ‘enduring particular result’,” . 261.↩
  18. See the analysis of Knud Haakonssen, The Science of the Legislator, The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith, Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 184.↩
  19. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. I, edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, and Roger D. Masters, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990, 122.↩
  20. TMS, I.iii.3.2. See S. Tegos, "The Two Sources of Corruption of Moral Sentiments in Adam Smith", Adam Smith Review, 7, 2013↩
  21. As we now know from recent scholarship (Hanley, 2017, Rasmussen, D. (2016), Sagar, 2016: 3-4), the Adam Smith – Rousseau connection runs deeper. Smith showed interest in Rousseau beyond Rousseau’s Discourse. The piece of evidence here is primarily Rousseau’s Encyclopédie article, which would in time be separately published as the Discours sur l’économie politique↩
  22. In this essay I follow the thread of Istvan Hont’s approach in “Adam Smith’s history and theory of law and government” op.cit while challenging his conception of the history of the sympathy with the rich and the great: “Military rulers and judges were showered with gifts by the grateful beneficiaries of their activities. These gifts were a sign of respect towards such leaders, creating a custom whereby gifts were expected from those who wanted to avail themselves of such leadership services. Thus, when the transition to private property took place, wealth was already readily available to the natural rulers of early societies without any recourse to violence. The admiration of the rich, then, is not simply a feature of modern societies and commercial regimes. The moral psychology that Smith identified in his theory of sympathy operated throughout history. With all its potential weaknesses, it offered Smith a way out of the suggestion that the history of government and its corruption can be explained in a moralising way, as in Locke’s Treatise, by blaming luxury…”↩
  23. K. Haakonssen, The Science of the Legislator, The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith, CUP: 1981, 128. Therefore I think it is slightly misleading to claim, as Haakonssen does, that the “basis of this deference is that such ‘superiors’ naturally attract the sympathetic attention of other men”↩
  24. Hont, op.cit. 153 “Modern deference was not a faithful mirror of prevailing property relations, and hence of the balance of power, but diverged from it in this important respect.”↩
  25. In the essay Of First principles of government, (33-4) Hume introduces the subject by stating that obedience and government are founded on opinion not on power. Consequently, he classifies the different kinds of opinion in two categories, opinion of interest, i.e. the advantages reaped by the existence of government, security and peace, as reasons why people adhere to it, and opinion of right, which is divided into right to power and right to property. Opinion based on right to power transfers the significance of custom and habit as principles of Hume’s epistemology in the political realm through the ‘sanction of antiquity of ancient governments”: “Antiquity always begets the opinion of right... What prevalence opinion of the first kind has over mankind, may easily be understood, by observing the attachment which all nations have to their ancient government, and even to those names which have had the sanction of antiquity”’ (Of the First Principles of Government, 33)↩
  26. Hont, 153, n.72: “Smith’s remark in WN, I, p. 48, about the category error of equating modern market power with the political power that wealth used to convey to the rich through dependency relations in earlier societies”↩