The Utopian Dimension in the Philosophy of Social Betterment in the Scottish Enlightenment

 

 

The Utopian Dimension in the Philosophy of Social Betterment in the Scottish Enlightenment

Maria Pia Paganelli

Trinity University

 

Can we improve society? Should we? How do we know we improved it?

The 18th century Scottish enlightenment thinkers, most importantly Adam Smith and David Hume, but also John Millar and Adam Ferguson, generally answer these questions differently from many of their European contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. In contrast to many others, Scottish enlightenment thinkers generally lack a utopian dimension to their philosophy of social betterment.

I use here the term social betterment to highlight the differences between the macro-level improvements and the more micro-level, local improvements which characterized the Scottish Enlightenment as an “age of improvements” as we will see below. Indeed, for the Scots, micro-level, local improvements may be a consequence of reason or virtue, but macro-level social improvement (what I call social betterment) does not take place as a result of virtue, reason, or design. Social betterment, in the sense of improvement at the macro level, can and does happen, but it is generally the result of a combination of luck and the unintended consequences of human interactions. Reason and virtue are meant to understand human conditions and the limits of what humans can achieve. Reason and virtue are meant to avoid or contain the deterioration of society caused by the hubris of utopian dreams rather than bettering society. Social betterment, for the Scots, generally, simply implies the ability of a society to increase its population, in terms of decreased child mortality and increased life expectancy, and that ability comes, generally, with the improved standards of living of commercial societies.

What does social betterment mean?

Social betterment, or social improvement at the global, macro level of a society, is hard to define and hard to measure. Among the different possible definitions, I offer three, which were present in the 18th century. They should not be considered exclusive. Two of them are generally rejected by the Scots. The third one is closer to Scottish thinking.

Social betterment may mean individual betterment which then expands to the aggregate: to have better people means having a better society. Alternatively, social betterment may mean having more rational institutions: we can redesign institutions with reason so that they follow a rational plan, as opposed to having them emerge randomly. Finally, social betterment may mean social evolution which allows the survival of more people and the improvement of their standards of living: the more people alive and the longer their life, the better off society is. Perfecting individuals to create a better society is often, but not always, associated with religious utopias or plans of social betterment. Examples of these could be found in Scotland before the Enlightenment (Smith 2005; Smith 2006). Individuals could also be bettered with education, as in Jean-Jacques Rousseaus’s Emile ([1762] 1979). Alternatively, rational redesign of society seemed to be feasible with the advent of the French revolution (Fest 1992), or with more moderate plans of institutional redesign following a rational design such as in Condorcert (Lukes and Urbinati 2012), or Jeremy Bentham (Schofield and Harris 1999). Finally, looking at the number of adult people alive in a society, in terms of decreased child mortality and increased life expectancy, to measure social betterment offers another possibility for understanding social betterment (Hayek 2013). The Scots tend to see social betterment as an increase in the number of people alive in a society. They tend to reject visions of social betterment associated with perfecting individuals or rationally constructed institutions.

Judging social conditions by the size of society’s population can be seen as a rejection of utopian standards. The standard of virtue can have an ideal perfection. The standard of reason can also have an ideal perfection. The increasing capability of a society to support life does not imply perfection. It is just a tool of analysis. The focus on population, as the Scots, and Adam Smith in particular have, is not to see a specific population level as a target, but as an unintended consequence of improved living conditions. Increasing population is not an ideal aim, but a proxy that captures the improved ability of a society to better life expectancy through its improvement in the standards of living, and higher wages, especially for the poor1.

The ability of a society to support a growing number of individuals would eventually be embraced by evolutionary theorists. The fittest survive, as it was said after Adam Smith. So the ‘better’ societies are the ones where population grows. I used ‘better’ in scare quotes because if one measures social betterment via population growth, one may run into problems. The idea of ‘better’ has a normative component which natural evolutionists do not necessarily include. What survives and grows is not what is ‘better’ but simply what survives and grows (Hayek 2013). It is only when we believe that life is ‘better’ by some other standards that we can say that a society that is able to support more individuals is better. But it is only in recent decades that scholars have been willing to separate the idea of normative progress from the idea of evolution and growth. Scottish thinkers were not necessarily willing to make that step in the case of human population. More life is indeed better for them. Societies that are able to support life are better societies than the ones unable to support life (Paganelli 2013; Paganelli 2017). Furthermore, according to Smith, societies with an increasing population are the happiest ones.

The question can morph into a debate on what kind of society is better. Robert Wallace ([1753] 1969), for example, claims that ancient societies were better, and thus more populous, than modern ones. David Hume ([1752] 1985), in his essay “Populousness of Ancient Nations”, argues instead that the estimates of population of antiquity are overestimations. Modern commercial societies are in fact more populous, and better, societies (on the Wallace-Hume debate see, e.g., Stangeland [1904] 1966). Adam Smith, following Hume, in his introduction of The Wealth of Nations (WN) ([1776] 1981), tells us that in non-commercial society, poverty is such that it forces people to abandon their children, their elderly, and their sick to die by exposure to the elements or “to be devoured by wild beast” (WN introduction 4: 10). Later on in the book he tells us, again following Hume, that “The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe. […] In all great towns several [children] are every night exposed in the street, or drowned like puppies in the water” (WN I.viii.24: 89-90). Pre-commercial poverty forces parents to kill their children. The wealth that commerce brings about lets children live.

Even though there is some debate amongst the Scots, the larger point remains, that population growth is an indication of improvement and is not something that is rationally planned or designed, and this marks them out from other thinkers of the time (Spengler [1942] 1980). Adam Ferguson makes the point:

“the statesman who by premiums to marriage, by allurements to foreigners or by confining the natives at home apprehends that he has made the numbers of his people to grow is often like the fly in the fable, who admired its success in turning wheels and in moving carriages: he has only accomplished what was already in motion; he has dashed with his oar to hasten the cataract; and waved with his fan to give speed to the winds” ([1767] 1995, 137).

Adam Smith brings the analysis a step forward: it is not just the total number of people that matters, it is the rate of growth of population. He links social betterment with the ability to sustain a growing population. Smith’s description of whether an economy is growing, sedentary, or declining, is linked with a growing, stable, or declining population. Growing economies support life, declining economies hinder life: “The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants” (WN I.viii.23: p. 87-88). North American colonies are not very populous, but they are growing, and have growing opportunities for social improvement. Population doubles every 25 years. People are industrious, have the opportunities to fulfill themselves, to marry young and have many healthy children who grow up to adulthood. Wages are high. “The greatest body of the people seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable” (WN I. VIII.43). We know it because:

“a young widow with four or five young children, who, among the middling or inferior ranks of people in Europe, would have so little chance for a second husband, is there [in North America] frequently courted as a sort of fortune. The value of children is the greatest of all encouragements to marriage. […] [T]here is a continual complaint of the scarcity of hands in North America. The demand for labourers, the funds destined for maintaining them, increase, it seems, still faster than they can find labourers to employ” (WN I.viii.23: 88).

China is rich and populous, but its economy is stationary. Its population is stationary too. People have lost their entrepreneurial spirit and enthusiasm. They marry and have children, just to “drown them like puppies” as mentioned above. The population is “dull”, not “cheerful” (WN I.VIII.43).

In Bengal, on the other hand, the economy is declining and opportunities for social betterment seem non-existent. People are “miserable” and “melancholic” (WN I.VIII.43):

“many would not be able to find employment even upon . . . hard terms, but would either starve, or be driven to seek subsistence either by begging, or by the perpetration perhaps of the greatest enormities. Want, famine, and mortality would immediately prevail . . . till the number of inhabitants in the country was reduced to what could easily be maintained by the revenue and stock which remained in it, and which had escaped either the tyranny or calamity which had destroyed the rest. In [that] fertile country [of Bengal] which had before been much depopulated, three or four hundred thousand people die of hunger in one year” (WN I.viii.26: 91).

Note that the Scots usually do not address some of the problems that later scholars, such as David Ricardo or Thomas Robert Malthus, see in an increasing population. For the Scots, there is no risk of a glut of lower income workers, or of over-population problems. Smith, in a sense stunningly, claims that “the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men” (WN I.viii.40): population increases only in a growing economy where there is a high demand for labor, which causes wages to increase and thus the ability to raise a numerous family. The Scots do not even foresee the future problem of very wealthy societies like ours, where population tends to decrease, if not compensated for with migrants.

Note also that this increase in the means of supporting a growing population is not a consequence of, or anyway linked to, individual moral improvement. The overall system of morals may become better, in the sense, for example that the wealth of a commercial society allows us to see and avoid the “so dreadful a violation of humanity” and “the most unjust and unreasonable conduct” (TMS V.2.15) of some practices, such as infanticide, which are commonly accepted and in poor non-commercial societies and “undoubtedly more pardonable than in any other” societies (TMS V.2.15). Similarly, the wealth of commercial societies is a fertile ground for the development of a set of virtues linked to humanity. But for the Scots, it is not the individual moral improvement that creates a better society. It is the “tranquility” and the opulence that commerce brings about that may offer the opportunities for human beings to flourish (TMS III.3.37). For the Scots, individuals are imperfect and it is not feasible for them to shed their imperfections. It is not that perfection is unwelcome: it is that perfection is not feasible. Within themselves, individuals have a mix of social and selfish sentiments, of virtues and vices, of passions and reason. Adam Smith criticizes his “never to be forgotten” teacher, Francis Hutchison, because he relies excessively on benevolence, which is unrealistic. He criticizes also Mandeville, because he relies excessively on selfishness, which is also unrealistic. David Hume criticizes those who aspire to a better society by eliminating vices, because a perfectly virtuous person is not a feasible possibility ([1752] 1985).

Given our inability to achieve perfect virtue and eliminate all vices, we need vices to compensate other vices, just “as one poison may be an antidote to another” (Hume [1752] 1985, 279). So we are better off accepting human beings for what they are, with their functioning, even if imperfect, combination of vices and virtues. As a matter of fact, not only can we not be made perfect by institutions or character, but attempts to do so are going to make us worst off (Hume [1752] 1985, p.279-280). We can use reason only to understand our limitations and our vices, and to avoid creating utopian illusions that may cause social disasters, rather than betterment (Farrant and Paganelli 2005).

Adam Smith, like David Hume, sees the possibility of social betterment in our vices, as well as in our virtues. It is the combination of our different passions that can, unintentionally, generate good outcomes for society. So, for example, the fall of the oppressive system of feudal lords and the emergence of the system of natural liberty seem to be linked to the unintended consequences of our voraciousness: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the master of mankind. As soon, therefore, as [the great barons] could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons” (WN III.iv.10, 418. See also WN V.i.g. 25, 803). Which means that “most childish, the meanest and the most sordid of all vanities” which hopelessly attract them to the glitter of a “pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or […] something as frivolous and useless” (WN III.iv.10, 418-419) induced the great feudal lords to “gradually bartered their whole power and authority” (WN III.iv.10, 418-419) and eventually sell their birthright and their estate. According to Smith, therefore, the “folly” of gratifying “the most childish vanity” brings down the feudal system and allows for the growth of the system of commerce and liberty which helps to sustain an increasing number of people. No government, no rational plan, no army, no virtue, no moral perfection improved human conditions in this case. For Smith it is despite (or maybe even through) moral imperfection that mankind stumbles into social betterment.

Another way to interpret the strength of the presence of imperfectible institutions and the anti-utopian thinking of the Scots may be to look at one of their neighbors, Johnathan Swift, whom Smith highly admired, and his Gulliver’s Travels (Swift [1723] 2005). Gulliver travels through utopic perfect societies which, despite their perfection, seem to fail. Leaving religious interpretations aside, Lilliput seems to decline both “because of the ‘degenerate nature of man’, no institution can guarantee good government or moral virtue” and because of Lilliputian “did not understand their own degenerate nature” (Radner 1992, p. 53-54). Swift seems to criticize the idea that hypothetical perfection of institutions may make society better, claiming that even if we had perfect institutions, ‘the degenerate nature of man’ will corrupt them. The Scots, in contrast to Swift, do not even allow for this hypothetical perfection. Institutions are not and cannot be perfect. Perfect institutions do not exist, nor do they have to exist, Smith tells us, criticizing the Physiocrats who instead insist in demanding perfection. Human beings are comfortably functioning even if they are not perfect. Very few people for example have perfect eye sight, yet, they can still function relatively well (WN, IV.ix.28, p.673-4).

The use of reason and virtue to build rational and good plans for social betterment are not only going to fail, they are actually going to make us worst off (WN IV.ii.9-10: 456). The “man of system,” so enamored with his beautiful rational plan, may forget that people are not as he may dream. The consequence of his attempt to implement his “wise” system will cause misery and social disorder (Smith [1759] 1984. VI.ii.2.17). But if we cannot use reason and virtue to plan macro-level social betterments, we can use them to avoid worsening our condition, to understand and accept our limitations and avoid the generally inevitable disasters caused by the hubris of planning. This implies that active policies are necessary, so the Scots’s interest in unintended consequences does not lead them to counsel inaction. They welcome reforms. But being a reformer is not necessarily the same as being a “man of system.” A reformer, even an improver as we see below, is someone who understands (or at least tries to understand) the nature of things and does not try to change it in ways that are not “natural.” A reformist, an improver, unlike a “man of system” does take into consideration that the pieces on the human chessboard have a will of their own and does not try to move them in ways that are contrary to that will.

Similarly, social improvement is possible for the Scots. We need to use reason to understand its nature and its causes. Indeed, even if institutions are not perfect, they can allow society to function relatively well. These functioning yet imperfect institutions, as we will see below, are the results of “human action but not of human design”. The lack of conscious design at the macro level implies the lack of purpose, which implies the impossibility of utopic planning or even utopic reflection, thus explaining the anti-utopian view generally associated with the Scottish enlightenment.

How do we get social betterment?

Most utopian ideas do not offer a concrete path to reach utopia. We are seldom given directions to go no-where. It may not be by accident that utopia is generally described second handedly. It is a report of someone who met someone else who visited utopia. And the way to utopia is more often than not accidental (Davis 2008).

The French revolution seems to be a watershed (Claeys 1994, p. xxvi). The French Revolution may be one of the expressions of a faith in Reason which can construct Utopia here and now. Reason shows its greatness and its possibility. Thanks to the correct use of Reason, man creates. He creates new goods and new technologies; he develops sciences and applies them to everyday life. Thanks to Reason, man creates factories; he creates new vaccines to fight old diseases; he rationalizes his knowledge, making it more fruitful. Reason can do, can make, can modify its environment, can control and direct the destiny of men toward a better world. Man can finally improve on the imperfections of his condition; man is able to recreate the world. Reason replaces the old God of the old religion; the goddess Reason replaces the crosses in the churches. Reason does acquire the characteristics of the old God: omnipotence, omniscience, and capacity of creation ex nihilo. Man puts himself in the place of the old creator and corrects his mistakes (Fest 1992).

Perfectly rational societies may be appealing for some in theory, but they are not livable in practice (Claeys 1994). An example of this is found, again, in Swift. Swift warns us about it even before the French revolution and its consequences: Gulliver encounters the Houyhnhnms, naturally virtuous creatures who “cultivate Reason and [who are] wholly governed by it” (242) so that all aspects of their society are organized according to logical patterns. Yet, in “a society which [Gulliver] feels to be truly ideal, […] he is not fit to live there” (Houston 2007, p. 433).

Another consequence attributed to the rationalistic revolution is that utopias started including accounts of revolutions and establishment of new regimes (Claeys 1994). Violence becomes an acceptable option, if all else fails (Popper [1989] 1992; Berlin 1991).

While French surrealism eventually presents itself as an alternative to extreme forms of rationalistic utopias and as attempts to “free ourselves from the tyranny of rationalism” (Gardiner 1995, p. 95), in 18th century Scotland, writers such as Adam Smith and David Hume in particular distance themselves from this rationalistic utopian approach preferring a more realistic description and prescription of social betterment instead. In Scotland the alternative non-utopic social betterment may be achieved by the working of history, by accident, by evolution, not by reason. There are of course uses of reason to improve, but they are limited to a local, a micro, level, rather than used to a macro improvement, a betterment of the whole society. Reason can and should be used to improve our standards of living, for example, not to redesign society.

Reason for improvement vs betterment

The examples of these improvements are innumerable, so much so that the Scottish Enlightenment is often referred to as the “age of improvement” (Phillipson 1970). Yet this is not an age of utopic improvement. Improvement implies an understanding of reality, an increase in knowledge, which allows us to be better off, given our constraints. Utopic social betterment instead seems to imply more of a design of an ideal, independent of constraints.

An example of this difference could be the improvements that the presence of financial instruments brings. Adam Smith believes that banks and bank credit, and free banking in particular, are successful instruments of improvement. The economic boom of 18th century Scotland is due in part to the innovation of banking. The system was not perfect, nor could it be made perfect, but it could be improved. For Smith the improvement would come from legal restrictions on interest rate, on small denomination notes, and on the ability of banks to suspend convertibility. For Hume the improvement would come from a reform of the banking system so that it would eventually resemble the one in Amsterdam (Paganelli 2014; see also Dimand 2013; for a general overview on the debate on money see Arnon 2011). At their time, these were simple reforms, not design of a system in the way that a “man of system” would do.

The concept of improvement for the Scots provides a justification for experimentation and change. But these are all individual, local, changes, not global ones. Even when we think of their interest in the relationship between men and the environment, and how man can influence the environment or how the environment can influence men, especially in the case of agriculture, we are still not dealing with attempt to redesign nature according to some standards of perfection.

“The Scottish Improvers set out to improve Scotland literally from the ground up” (Bonnyman 2014, p. 5) and to do this they engaged in a large variety of experiments with an equally large variety of success rates. The aim was not to make nature perfect, but to understand how it worked and gradually improve knowledge of agriculture. The introduction of spade husbandry and potato cultivation, as well as sheep farming, were successful experiments dating to this time. The cultivation of rhubarb too, thought to be a remedy against indigestion, sees now his presence first in Scotland and then spread to the possessions of the East India Company. The attempts to improve cultivation also included the failure to grow Chinese tea in the Highlands of Scotland, which eventually led to the introduction of Chinese tea cultivation in India (Jonsson 2013). These are all local, micro, improvement attempts, based on the then-current understanding of the world, not grand ideal schemes to redesign the entire society and humankind.

The silent revolution of commerce

These improvements are thus the result of our better knowledge of reality, the same knowledge that prevents us from redesigning a “system”, a whole new society, precisely because it is aware of its own limitations. Reason can and should be used to understand our possibilities as well as our limits. So that understanding what we can and what we cannot do would allow us to avoid generally inevitable disasters of utopic hubris. The knowledge we come to understand is also that general macro social betterments are not the results of human plans (Smith 2006).

For the Scots, the improvement of society, which can be seen with the increase in population and what today we call life expectancy, is brought about by things other than human reason. It is commerce that brings social betterment. And commerce is not rationally planned. Commerce is a consequence of the division of labor. And:

“This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (WN I.ii.1: 25. Emphasis added).

Just like it is not design but, rather, our propensity to truck, barter, and exchange that brings about the division of labor, which is the source of improvements in living conditions, it is not design but, rather, the slow revolution of commerce, which dismantles the feudal order and allows commercial societies to prosper and support more life. The violent revolution eventually called for by the rationalistic French enlightenment is absent from the thought of the non-utopic, non-rationalistic Scots (Plassart 2015). Revolutions do happen, but silently and unplanned, with no individual and no government policy responsible for them. The silent and unplanned revolution of commerce achieves what no army, rational plan, or public governance would be able to achieve (e.g. WN III.iv.10, p. 418 and V.i.g. 24-25, p. 803).

The silent revolution of commerce brings about “order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals […]. This, though it has been the least observed, is by far the most important of all their effect” (WN III.iv.4, p. 412), as Hume before Smith recognizes (see also Rosenberg 1990). The silent and unplanned revolution of commerce therefore brings about a social betterment, which is “not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends [it]”, expressed also in the form of functioning systems of justice which proved indispensable for a growth and prosperity (Young 1997). The great chessboard of human society generates, again, “not [from] any human wisdom, which foresees and intends [them],” institutions, which allows for an increasing number of people, thanks to the sheer interaction of people. Adam Ferguson ([1767] 1995) coined the phrase which is usually taken as the one-sentence description of the main ideas of the Scottish enlightenment as it capture its spirit: functioning institutions are “the results of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (119).

Can we do better than that?

While deliberate construction of a better social order is not feasible for the Scots, would (or should?) a natural progression into better social conditions be possible? This is a more complicated question embedded in the 18th century debate between historical progress and corruption. The two major sides of the debate, in a simplified form, are the progression from barbarism to civilization on the one hand, and a decay and corruption from natural state to modern state on the other. Better orders can be found in civilization and in the present, or they can be found in nature or in the past. The figure of the “noble savage”, as penned by Jean-Jacques Rousseau ([1762] 2002) for example, is an image to describe the corruption of modernity from a more pure state of nature. Nature is better than civilization. On the other hand, a rejection of the irrational past to embrace a more rational future is captured in Voltaire’s claim that “to have good laws, we need to burn all the old laws”.

In general, the Scots reject primitivism a-la-Rousseau (Paganelli, Rasmussen, and Smith 2018). The Scots are seen to be more favorable to the so-called stage theory, or theory of stages of development (Meek 1976). There is a progression in history among different kinds of societies, so that we go from hunter gathering societies, to pastoral societies, to agricultural societies, and finally to commercial societies. Commercial society is the peak of civilization. Non-commercial societies are rude and barbaric: commercial societies are polite and civilized. The “polite society” contrasts the “rude and uncivilized societies” of the past, expressing a superiority of modernity compared to the past (e.g.: Smith [1776] 1981; Hume [1752] 1985). Generally, the language (rude vs polite; savage vs civilized) is not simply a description of different institutions, customs, and stages, but is a language of superiority, improvement, and progress. Social betterment is possible. Just not by design. Human action but not human design generates different kinds of macro-orders, orders which can be classified and evaluated (Sebastiani 2013).

Some questions then emerge: is this progressive social betterment an inevitable consequence of history? Can (should?) it be helped along? Can we think of commercial society as a sort of utopian dream or even just a utopian standard against which compare our current conditions? David Hume in his History of England ([1762] 1985), and later William Paley ([1785] 2000, 328), in describing the British constitution, gives us a sense of why the Scots answers to these questions is generally no:

“The constitution of England, like that of most countries of Europe, hath grown out of occasion and emergency; from the fluctuating policy of different ages; from the contentions, successes, interests, and opportunities, of different orders and parties of men in the community. It resembles one of those old mansions, which, instead of being built all at once, after a regular plan, and according to the rules of architecture at present established, has been reared in different ages of the art, has been altered from time to time, and has been continually receiving additions and repairs suited to the taste, fortune, or conveniency, of its successive proprietors.”

Successful institutions are more like patchworks of chance than inevitable products of reason or nature. Joseph Cropsey ([1957] 2001) claims indeed “there is nothing in the nature of things which will or might ‘inevitably’ lead to the coming into being of the natural of the most expedient social arrangement” (73). The commercial stage in Europe seems to have arrived by chance and through a non-predicted path, according to Smith: “But though this natural order of things must have taken place in some degree in every society, it has, in all modern states of Europe, been, in many respects, entirely inverted.” (WN. III.i. 9, 380). Some economies for Smith started on the right path but then stalled, like the stationary state of the Chinese economy. The history of Bengal is regressive, not progressive. Bengal is in a declining stage, as mentioned above. Britain has progressed, but it is in serious danger of stalling or even regressing, if it falls prey to the attacks of mercantilism. The whole Wealth of Nations may be read as a warning sign that the march of progress may not be inevitable.

It may be that, as Mehta (2006) claims, “Establishing the ‘system of natural liberty’ under which every man is ‘left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way’ is thus for Smith a task, rather than something that comes naturally (WN, IV.ix.51). The paradox is that the very motive, self-interest, that allows that system to produce the beneficial consequences it does, constantly threatens to undermine it. It is the pursuit of their interests that leads merchants to demand monopolies and privileges that harm society; yet, those very same interests can, under the right institutional conditions, produce beneficial outcomes. The Wealth of Nations is an account of how the interests of all might be harmonized, not a claim that they are always, or naturally, in harmony” (257).

The system of natural liberty to which Mehta refers is a typical characteristic of a commercial society and implies free trade. Even if the establishment or maintenance of it is a task, it is not task to be taken for granted. The “formidable” powers merchants and manufacturers have “intimidate the legislature” (WN IV.ii.43) so much that “[t]o expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it. Not only the prejudices of the publick, but what is much more unconquerable, the private interests of many individuals, irresistibly oppose it” (WN IV.ii.43, p. 471).

Yet, even if we want to think about commercial society as a task, the task is never to create it. It is just to use reason and virtue to maintain it and to prevent its degeneration into what today we would call rent-seeking society where monopoly powers eventually choke the economy, like in Bengal. Even if we believe that commercial order is the order that more successfully supports life, for the Scots, we should not forget that commercial order is the result of human action and not human design. It therefore cannot be imposed on societies that have not evolved into it. Their conditions would not be appropriate to support it without causing disasters. To impose a commercial order in a nomadic society would be not just ridiculous but disastrous (Millar [1779] 2006) since the chess pieces would move in disaccord from the planned design, to refer back to the image of the great chess board of society that Adam Smith uses.

Thus, not only is it the case that the social betterment that commerce brings about is not inevitable but it is subject to randomness of history and rapacity of human hubris, not only can it not be imposed in an environment in which it has not evolved, but it is generally not even an ideal standard. The commercial system that Smith describes, its ignorance, its immorality, its dangers, its imperfections, its injustices, and its fragilities do not give much space for considering commercial societies as a possible ideal standard. Even John Millar ([1779] 2006), more committed to stage theory than Smith, is also ready to point fingers at the defects of commercial societies, at its poverty and the presence of slavery. Commercial societies may be appropriate for certain economic conditions but are hardly a standard of perfection against which to measure all societies.

The Scots are generally not committed to the adoption of commercial society as an ideal standard for social betterment. Although the interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment proposed here is not as radical as Sharon Stanley’s (2009) interpretation of Diderot, there are enough similarities between its commercial society ‘standard’ and Diderot’s nature ‘standard’ to be helpful the understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment: for both there is no munificent ontology, there is no perfect political system based upon nature's voice in case of Diderot or upon commerce in case of the Scots. “There is only flux, change, and dynamism, and the inevitable political negotiations which must come with such an unpredictable world” (286). Stanley indeed claims that “Where Rousseau does provide an original nature, Diderot refuses such a construction. Change, flux, and instability constitute Diderot's nature, thus depriving it of any fixed content. Therefore, Diderot cannot contrast the vices of civilization with the purity and innocence of nature, and he makes this clear even in the Supplement. In the concluding remarks, A asks B, "So, in your view, jealousy does not exist in nature?" B immediately corrects him, "I wouldn't say that. Virtue and vice are all equally present in nature (SV, 68)” (283). Similarly for Smith and in his fellow-Scots, virtue and vices are all equally present in commercial society. This does not mean, like in the case of Diderot’s nature, that commercial society is not preferable to other forms of society. It means that for the Scots commercial society is a form of social betterment, but it is not necessarily the utopic standard of perfect social betterment.

Conclusion

The Scottish thinkers of the 18th century tend to believe that commerce, as opposed to reason or virtue, brings about social betterment. Reason and virtue help us understand and accept our imperfectible limits and hopefully prevent or contain social deterioration caused by human hubris. They do not seem to believe that the achievement of a commercial society is or should be a planned action meant to reach a perfect ideal state. Social betterment in Scottish thought is present but it is not utopic. It is achieved by micro rational improvements due to our better understanding of the world around us and the acceptance of our limitations, and by evolution at the macro social level of an order that is the result of human action but not of human design.

The Scottish enlightenment views are unique views in Europe at its time: social betterment for the Scots is the result of human action and not of human design, it is embedded in a commercial order, and it reflected in the ability of a society to maintain an increasing number of people and it.

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1. A British counterexample, William Goodwin ([1793] 1946), would imply instead that the pursuing of human perfection would generate both a perfectly communist society scarcity and immortality.↩