Originally published in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press
I. The paradox of commercial society
III. Moral economy, police and political economy: the grain trade debate
IV. Political economy and natural jurisprudence
“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable …Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the greater, [the labourer’s] accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy — and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.”
— Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
Since, however, according to Smith, a society is not happy, of which the greater part suffers — yet even the wealthiest state of society leads to this suffering of the majority — and since the economic system (and in general a society based on private interest) leads to this wealthiest condition, it follows that the goal of the economic system is the unhappiness of society.
— Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’
No clear definition of the identity of political economy in eighteenth-century Scotland can be given unless an account is offered of the central questions which Adam Smith was trying to answer when he wrote the Wealth of Nations. This in turn requires that we should be able to understand the relation between Smith’s concerns as a moral philosopher, as a professor of jurisprudence and as a political economist. The claim made in this paper is that there was a central question about modern ‘ commercial society’ which Smith identified in his moral philosophy, in his jurisprudence lectures and in the `early draft’, and which the final version of the Wealth of Nations was intended, above all other purposes Smith might have had in mind, to answer. Commercial societies were more unequal in their distribution of property than any previous stage of society, and yet they remained capable of satisfying the basic needs of those who laboured for wages. Primitive societies, by contrast, were more equal, but miserably poor. Why was it that the ‘ productive labourers’ of a commercial society were able to carry such a huge burden of ‘ unproductive labourers’ upon their backs and still manage to provide adequately for their own needs? For Smith this was a question about the unique productivity of modern forms of labour. Why, moreover, were free labourers, who depended for their subsistence on markets in labour and food, more productively employed and better fed than slaves, whose subsistence was the responsibility of their masters, or savage tribesmen, who retained the whole produce of their labour? Smith’s division of labour theory and his natural price model — the central core of his economic argument — were deployed, so we argue, to explain the compatibility of economic inequality and adequate subsistence for the wage-earner within a free market system. These new economic arguments, we maintain, were developed in the context of an intense eighteenth-century debate about the inequality and luxury of modern commercial societies, and, as arguments, were designed as a defence of modernity against those who condemned commercial society from the vantage point, either of the classical civic humanist ideal of a virtuous republic which delegated productive labour to slaves, or of the Christian ideal of society as a positive community of goods.
Our argument is that the Wealth of Nations was centrally concerned with the issue of justice, with finding a market mechanism capable of reconciling inequality of property with adequate provision for the excluded. Smith was simply transposing into the language of markets an ancient jurisprudential discourse, carried into modernity by Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke, about how to ensure that private individuation of God’s dominion would not deny the propertyless the means of satisfying their needs. Yet the answer which Smith gave to this problem — that a system of competitive markets in food and labour could guarantee adequate subsistence to the labouring poor — was a scandal in his own time, to those, even within the ranks of political economists themselves, who insisted that government should ‘ police’ the market in subsistence goods, and to those who believed that the poor had rights to subsistence which must have priority over the property claims of the possessors. This sentiment was still at work in the later anti-Malthusian quip that political economy was a `dismal science’. Yet Smith’s arguments were designed to show how an economy of abundance could be created in which this ancient jurisprudential antinomy between the needs of the poor and the rights of the rich could be transcended altogether.
I. The paradox of commercial society
The very first pages of the Wealth of Nations — the ‘ introduction and plan’ —clearly identify the feature of commercial society which Smith selected as the starting point of his analysis. It was a feature, he explained, which emerged clearly from a comparison between commercial society and the `savage nations of hunters and fishers’ which had preceded it in the history of human refinement. In the savage nations, the population was not divided into productive and unproductive classes. ‘Every individual who is able to work is more or less employed in useful labour’ and endeavours to provide both for his family and for those unable to work for themselves.’[1] In such societies, as he had explained to his students in his jurisprudence lectures, there were ‘ no landlords, no usurers, no tax gatherers ‘. [2]Everyone retained the produce of his labour. In so-called civilized societies, on the other hand, Smith mordantly observed in the ‘ early draft’ of the Wealth of Nations:
the poor provide both for themselves and for the enormous luxury of their superiors. The rent which goes to support the vanity of the slothful landlord is all earned by the industry of the peasant. The monied man indulges himself in every sort of ignoble and sordid sensuality, at the expence of the merchant and the tradesman to whom he lends out his stock at interest. All the indolent and frivolous retainers upon a court are, in the same manner, fed, cloathed and lodged by the labour of those who pay the taxes and support them.[3]
In a civilized society, the poor wage-labourer, ‘he who as it were supports the whole frame of society and furnishes the means of the convenience and ease of all the rest’, was rewarded with a ‘very small share’ from his own productive labour and was ‘ buried in obscurity’, ‘thrust down into the lowest parts of the earth’.[4] He and the artisan bore on their backs not only landlords and monied men, but also a mass of ‘unproductive labourers’, whom Smith listed in the Wealth of Nations: menial servants, churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc.; not to mention the most onerous burden of all, a standing army and ‘the sovereign with all the officers of justice and war’.[5]
In primitive societies, however, although each retained the whole produce of labour, everyone was so `miserably poor’ that `from mere want they are frequently reduced or at least think themselves reduced to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people and those afflicted with lingering diseases to perish with hunger or to be devoured with wild beasts ‘.[6] Such societies were egalitarian, but theirs was the equality of poverty; they were incapable of freeing their populations from the grip of natural scarcity.
In commercial society, on the other hand, the division of produce was ‘by no means made in proportion to the labour of each individual: on the contrary those who labour most get least’.[7] Yet ‘in the midst of so much oppressive Inequality’, Smith asked, how was it possible to ‘account for the superior affluence and abundance commonly possessed even by [the] lowest and most despised member of civilized society, compared with what the most respected and active savage can attain to?[8] Why was it, as Smith said in the Wealth of Nations, that the ‘industrious and frugal peasant’ in a commercial society was able to live better than an ‘African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of 10,000 naked savages?’[9] There was no economic mystery in the material well-being of the rich and powerful’. In any society he ‘who can at all times direct the labours of 1000’s to his own purposes’ could be expected to live well. The distinctive feature of ‘ commercial society’ was that those who `provide both for themelves and for the enormous luxury of their superiors’ should themselves be able to retain from the produce of their labour both the necessities and many of the simpler conveniences of life. This was the central question laid bare by any inquiry into the conjectural history of progress — why was it that a modern society which did not return the whole produce of labour to the labourer provide a better standard of living for the very poorest than the societies of the past? How was extreme inequality of distribution in modern society compatible with the satisfaction of the needs of its poorest working members?
For Smith the answer to this question lay in the distinctive productivity of modern division of labour. As he put it in the `early draft’, `the division of labour by which each individual confines himself to a particular branch of business can alone account for the superior opulence which takes place in civilized societies and which, notwithstanding the inequality of property, extends itself to the lowest members of the community’. It was the division of labour which explained why `so great a quantity of everything is produced that there is enough both to gratify the slothful and oppressive profusions of the great and at the same time abundantly to supply the wants of the artizan and peasant’. The division of labour accounted for the fact that in opulent societies labour was ‘dear’ while work or goods were `cheap.[10] In such societies, therefore, a ‘liberal reward for labour’ was a ‘ natural symptom of increasing national wealth’ and not, as mercantilists and civic moralists alike supposed, a sign of incipient corruption.”[11] Since the epoch of Colbert, advocates of the `mercantile system’ had insisted that keeping down wage costs was the key to maintaining competitive prices in international markets. Low wages, moreover, enforced the industry of the poor. Those few observers who believed that the labouring poor would respond to higher wages with higher output were unable to explain how the unit prices of goods sold abroad could be kept competitive with those manufactured in low-wage economies.[12] What Hume had found insupportable about low-wage strategies for economic growth was that a nation’s progress was purchased at the expense of the ‘ happiness of so many millions of its own labourers ‘.[13] In his polemic with Josiah Tucker, he had argued for a world free-trade system in which rich countries would specialize in high-price, high-wage goods, while poor countries would concentrate on primary production, using their low-wage advantages to give them a toe-hold in the international division of labour. Smith emphatically accepted Hume’s endorsement of a high-wage economy for the sake of its advantages for the labourer, and he was convinced that rich, high-wage countries could compete successfully against low-wage countries by reducing the unit price of their goods through the application of the division of labour. So decisive were the advantages of rich countries which resorted to the division of labour that only the commission of some ‘ great error’ in their `commercial police’, such as loading taxes on subsistence goods and artificially driving up the price of labour, could cause them to forfeit their lead over poor countries.[14]
Smith was neither the first philosopher to point out the paradox of commercial society, nor the first to identify the division of labour as its solution. Anticipations of these themes can be found in the economic pamphlets of the post-Restoration period as well as in the natural jurisprudence tradition. Locke’s property chapter in the Second Treatise and Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, for example, both contained the rudiments of a division of labour theory.[15] Yet in the case of Mandeville, the argument was not linked to a vindication of a high-wage economy. Mandeville’s strongly Augustinian insistence on the corrupting influence of luxury led him to conclude that rich countries would be pulled into a cycle of decline unless they used low wages to compel the poor to be industrious. Smith’s decisive contribution was twofold : he provided an analytical demonstration that a high-wage economy, employing the division of labour, was not threatened with the Polybian cycle of decline into corruption; and he used this argument to invalidate those critiques of commercial modernity which appealed to the Christian ideal of the positive community of goods or to the slave republics of the virtuous classical past. He admitted the living force of ‘ levelling’ and egalitarian ideology in his own time when he said that modern people were apt to look on a man of ‘ huge estate’ as a ‘ pest to society, as a monster, a great fish who devours up all the lesser ones ‘.[16] Such a man, he insisted, `eats no more than what any other man does’ — i.e. his consumption of necessities did not deny the poor theirs, while his ‘ accumulation of stock’ made it possible to extend the division of labour which rendered labour ‘ dear ‘ and work ‘ cheap ‘. To be sure, he admitted, `rent and profit eat up wages and the two superior orders of the people oppress the inferior one ‘.[17] But because modern economies were the first capable of sustained ‘ improvement ‘, because they were the first to draw themselves beyond the cycle of luxury, corruption and decline, the share of the labourer could continue to grow in absolute terms, even though the oppression of the superior orders might prevent it from increasing in relative terms.
Smith’s concern with inequality should be traced to his engagement with the natural jurisprudence tradition, rather than to the Anglo-Irish civic humanist discourse on political personality. In this latter discourse, inequality was a problem only in so far as the new fortunes created by commerce and speculation threatened the ‘ balance of the constitution’. The Country party and Commonwealthman opposition to the Walpolean ascendancy argued, for example, that the Court and the Ministry had entered into a corrupt alliance with the speculators enriched by the system of funded debt, to buy elections and subvert the independence of the Parliament. The focus of this discourse was upon maintaining equality among the political nation of franchise-holders, not between them and the unenfranchised poor.[18]
The central commitment of civic discourse, moreover, was to ‘ virtue ‘, to political activism among the propertied elite, while the central commitment of Hume and Smith was to justice. In civic discourse, the societies of Europe were compared in terms of their forms of government and of the degrees of political liberty they afforded to their political nation. In Humean and Smithian analysis, societies were to be compared on the basis of how securely they grounded rights of property and how adequately they met the needs of their labourers. This set of preferences is clear enough in Smith’s dictum that no society could be considered happy ‘ if the far greater part of its members are poor and miserable.[19] Hume had written that even the absolute monarchy of France, whom English Commonwealthmen and radical Whigs execrated as a despotism, was no less a ‘ regular government’ than the English. Like the English, it guaranteed property and it met the needs of its poorest inhabitants. As Duncan Forbes has pointed out, the Humean line on `regular government’ pricked the balloon of the ‘ vulgar Whig’ contrast between continental despotism and English liberty.[20]
Civic discourse, especially in its Scottish Fletcherian form, lamented the attenuation of martial virtue and the absorption in private self-interest of commercial peoples, exemplified in their delegation of martial functions to standing armies.[21] Smith’s division of labour argument enabled him to take a radically different position on the historical development of the privatized personality of commercial men. In Book V, he took over the format of the history of property within the natural jurisprudence tradition and developed it into an account of the progressive delegation of civic and martial duties to state functionaries and standing armies as societies progressed from the hunting and gathering stage to the agricultural and commercial stages. Against those who lamented the loss of the undivided personality of the civic republics of ancient times, Smith insisted that it was only in ‘ the barbarous societies’ that men could be at once both a producer and a `statesman, a judge, a warrior ‘.[22] In the natural progress of opulence, men’s increasing interdependence in the division of labour forced them to delegate civic and martial functions. Such a delegation unproductive functions by productive labour was crucial to increasing the yield of labour itself. Book V demonstrated that the disintegration of the undivided personality was irrevocably linked to commercial society’s best feature — its capacity to feed and clothe its poorest members. For all his undoubted sympathy for the civic ideal of undivided personality and his advocacy of martial education to combat the stupefying and privatizing effects of the division of labour, Smith was convinced that it was impossible to restore human beings to an integrated identity as productive labourers and soldier-citizens.[23] Justice to the needs of the poor ought to have priority over civic virtue.
II. The invisible hand
Smith was concerned to theorize the resolution of the paradox of commercial society not only in economic terms — i.e. in the language of the division of labour — but also to explain a benevolent ‘ result — i.e. the satisfaction of the basic needs of the poor — without imputing benevolent ‘ intention to any of the contributory actors. In a market society, as he explained in his lectures and in the introductory chapters of the Wealth of Nations, although a man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only’. To impute benevolence as a motive or a cause of the distributional results of modern society was to fail to take man as he really was, and also to neglect the fact that in commercial society these relations of benevolence were significantly weaker than they were in feudal society.[24] How was it exactly that in modern society we could count on our dinners by appealing not to the humanity’ of the butcher, the brewer or the baker’ but to their self-love?[25]
His other, and related, problem was to assess the moral quality of the mechanism — the generalized pursuit of material wealth — by which the end which he clearly endorsed — the liberal reward for labour — was achieved. It would be plausible to assume that he who valued the end would value the means. Certainly, Smith attached immense positive significance to the plain facts of a modern labourer’s material abundance and he dissented strongly from the civic moralist jeremiads on the impact of luxury upon the morals and industry of the poor. Yet it is notorious, from his contemptuous references in the Wealth of Nations to the medieval lord’s fascination for the baubles and trinkets’ of trade goods, and from his sardonic strictures in the Theory of Moral Sentiments on men’s passion for accumulating objects of frivolous utility’, that he believed material prosperity was purchased, more often than not, at the price of a measure of what he himself called deception ‘.[26] At first sight, it is not an easy task to reconcile his evident distaste for the vulgar materialism of the great scramble’ of commercial society with his clear endorsement of economic growth. In the last edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, completed in the months before his death, he added a chapter which argued that the great and universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments’ lay in the disposition to admire and almost to worship the rich and the powerful and to despise or at least to neglect persons of poor and mean conditions ‘.[27] This disposition was at the root of commercial men’s material insatiability. Basic needs were capable of satisfaction, but the desire for pleasure, channeled in commercial society into the accumulation of baubles and trinkets’, was altogether endless ‘.[28] These material desires were insatiable because men judged their individual satisfaction in comparison to those higher or lower in the ranks system of an unequal society. It was inequality in conditions of economic progress which fueled the particular material avidity’ of modern commercial men. Smith and Hume were careful to historicize this propensity: in more equal and backward societies, the incentives and opportunities for material accumulation were limited. Hume explained in `Of Commerce’ that exclusively agricultural societies were fated to remain locked in backwardness and ‘indolence’ as long as incentives, in the form of manufactured goods, were lacking to induce farmers to produce marketable surpluses.[29] Smith agreed: our ancestors were idle for want of a sufficient encouragement to industry’. As residents themselves of a poor country on the periphery of European economic development, they were both made keenly aware that, far from being able to take economic man’ for granted in their analysis, they had to explain his historical possibility as a psychological type.[30] Only in commercial societies, with the emergence of a town—country division of labour, as Smith explained in the baubles and trinkets’ passage of Book III, had the purely privatized drive for the accumulation of commodities become the ruling principle of every individual.
Yet this distinctively modern pursuit of baubles and trinkets’, not for themselves but for the esteem they would bring, not for their real utility but for their symbolic or aesthetic signification, was built upon a deception — that wealth would bring happiness. The game, Smith insisted, was hardly worth the candle. Power and riches’ were enormous machines’ which required the labour of a lifetime to create and which, while made to give their possessors happiness, could not protect them from the real sorrows of life :
They keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger and to death.[31]
This is Smith at his most darkly Stoic. It was the Stoics, he said, who had rightly taught that happiness was altogether or at least in great measure independent of fortune ‘.[32] Besides the classic Stoic texts — Zeno, Epictetus, Cicero — Smith had also meditated upon the modern discourses on the vanity of human wishes’, chief among these being Rousseau’s Second Discourse, which Smith examined at length in his Edinburgh Review article of 1755. Rousseau is an important if unavowed interlocutor in the passages in the Theory of Moral Sentiments which Smith devoted to the pursuit of wealth in modern society.[33]
Smith broke decisively with the modern Stoic and Rousseauian critique of modern deception. `It is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner’, he wrote. Were the majority of human beings capable of Stoic ataraxia, were they capable of seeing through the lure of baubles and trinkets, and were they to act upon their occasional flights of nostalgia for a life of detached and Stoic simplicity, the species would have been condemned to an eternity of egalitarian barbarism. It was the ever-receding lure of happiness in material things which first prompted men to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths and to invent all the sciences and arts which ennoble and embellish human life’. It was true, as moralists charged, that the rich sought only the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires’, but their stomachs were no bigger than those of poor men. They could not, by their own consumption of food, starve the poor of their necessities, as Rousseau supposed when he painted a picture of the privileged few gorging themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the bare necessities of life ‘. The consumption of rich and poor in basic necessities was not a zero-sum game’. The demand of the rich set in motion a cycle of production and employment which by an invisible hand’ led a commercial society to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants’. Thus, without intending it, without knowing it’ and certainly without benevolently desiring it, the rich advance the interest of society and afford means to the multiplication of the species ‘.[34]
The invisible hand’ passage in the Theory of Moral Sentiments explained the paradox of commercial society as an outcome of unintended consequences — the subsistence needs of the poor being served through a machine kept in motion by the blind cupidity of the rich. This has sometimes been taken as a Mandevillian solution — justifying private vice in terms of its public benefits. In his reply to Berkeley, however, Mandeville made it clear that his was not an argument from unintended consequences. Public benefits could only be drawn forth from private vice if there was a statesman at the helm constantly regulating the circulation of private interest.[35] Smith himself took pains to reject the Mandevillian position which, he argued, had labelled as vice ‘ a range of private activities which could only be justly regarded as vicious if pursued in excess or with harm to others. Mandeville was in fact a strict moralist, condemning commercial society by an ascetic standard of virtue to which in everyday life no ordinary mortal could aspire.[36] The task of a realistic account of moral sentiments was to explain, not how a perfect being’ should act, but how so weak and imperfect a creature as man actually and in fact’ acts. In practice, ordinary men’s self-interest was constrained by their need for the approval of others. Since men, as Malebranche and Hume had said, were mirrors to each other, each man’s self-respect, his amour de soi as Rousseau had called it, depended on the approving gaze of the other.[37] This need for approval was the check which self-interest imposed upon itself. It guaranteed that ordinary men could be counted on to obey society’s rules of propriety. Mandeville had called this need for the approval of others vanity’ and in doing so, Smith argued, he had confused the frivolous desire of praise at any rate’, which was simply selfishness by another route, with the desire to deserve’ the praise of others, which was necessary to a human being’s self-esteem. Men, Smith went on, were neither incapable of, nor indifferent to, the distinction between winning and deserving praise. They did indeed seek to deserve praise, and this guaranteed that the competitive search for social esteem was not simply a game of vain deception and self-deception.
Moreover, Smith contended that the passion for present enjoyment’, the often violent ‘ and essentially insatiable pursuit of material baubles and trinkets’, had to be distinguished from the calm and dispassionate’ desire for self-improvement. The latter `interest’, Smith argued, seems not only to predominate, but to predominate very greatly’ over the ‘ passion’ for present enjoyment. Were this not so, Smith maintained, we could not give any account of the immense accumulation of capital and stock in modern commercial societies. The predominance of the principle of `frugality’ over the principle of `expense’ in commercial men’s vocabulary of motives indicated that they were capable of self-restraint in the pursuit of self-betterment and were not simply swept away in a deluded scramble after things.[38]
Against Mandeville, and Rousseau, Smith insisted that economic self-interest did check itself, through self-imposed observance of the rules of propriety and the calculus of saving for the future. The pursuit of baubles and trinkets’ by a whole society was deluded, but its moral quality was validated by its immensely positive unintended result, provided of course that economic self-seeking was constrained by the disciplines of free competition. Smithian propriety required for its enforcement a free market society. The road to virtue and the road to fortune, he explained, were one and the same in those ranks where market success itself depended on a reputation for probity and propriety — i.e. among the independent professional men, manufacturers, and tradesmen of the middling sort.[39] The chief danger to propriety in a market society came from those great merchants and monopolists whose market power enabled them to widen the market and narrow the competition’ against the public interest.[40] The system of natural liberty’ which Smith advocated thus had the normative purpose of guaranteeing the economic conditions of competition necessary for the enforcement of common rules of propriety in market relations.
III. Moral economy, police and political economy: the grain trade debate
III. Moral economy, police and political economy: the grain trade debate
If, as Smith had argued in the invisible hand’ passage of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, the moral legitimacy of distribution in commercial society lay in the fact that those who were left out in the partition’ of property, i.e. the wage-earning poor, received adequate subsistence, it remained for him to explain in the Wealth of Nations exactly how this was achieved. In a commercial society, wage-labourers were `independent’ : that is, they did not depend upon their masters to provide them with subsistence, and their rate of remuneration was determined by the supply and demand for labour and by the customs of their trade, and only ultimately by what was necessary for their bare subsistence. Smith and Hume gave the strongest positive endorsement to modern `independence’ : it was this praise of independence which put a distance between them and the civic humanist nostalgia for a classical ideal of citizenship which was economically dependent upon the delegation of productive labour to slaves.[41] Yet those who did consider the example of the classical ideal as well as the more recent heritage of feudal dependency’ —Andrew Fletcher, John Millar and, in some measure, Robert Wallace and James Steuart — pointed out that the subsistence of dependents had been guaranteed by their masters, and asked how the subsistence of modern wage-labourers was to be guaranteed.[42] Given the recurrence of dearth, even famine, and the omnipresence of underemployment in the European economies of their day, it was natural for even those who styled themselves political economists to suppose that the subsistence of the labouring poor could only be safeguarded by a police’ of the market in grain, by magistrates and central authorities, to ensure adequate stockpiling in case of famine and to regulate subsistence prices even in high-price years. The police’ of grain was the central element of `mercantilist’ regulation of the economy in all ancien regime societies; no society, as Polanyi once said, can be considered a fully market society until it dismantles such a structure and allows a free market in subsistence goods. To question the necessity of a ‘ police’ in grain was to challenge the ‘ right to subsistence’ of the labouring poor which ancien regime governments had always been obliged to honour and which the French Revolution only reiterated for modern times as a natural right.[43] This was precisely the cluster of assumptions which Smith’s ‘ system of natural liberty’ seemed to put into question. The most radical of all his theoretical claims, both in his own day and since, was that if the market for labour and the market in food were freed of meddling interventions, in the long run the price of labour and the price of food would balance out in such a way that the labouring poor would never go hungry. It was this claim which earned Smith the reputation, even in his own day, of being a dogmatic ‘ projector’ for the application of long-term models of natural market processes as a guide for practical policy.[44] The European grain-trade debates of the 1760s, in which Smith’s thought took shape, were a crucial battleground for the reception of the idea of natural economic order. The debates divided philosophes and economistes into those like Smith and the Physiocrats who believed that food should be a ‘ natural’ commodity like any other, which should be left to find its own price, and those like James Steuart and Abbe Galiani who believed that food was a `political’ commodity whose price should be regulated, in situations of grave necessity at least, by the government. The debate was not only about how far market forces should be left to themselves; it was also about property. Since the grain clearly belonged to somebody, the crucial issue was whether the government should align the force of law with the property rights of grain merchants or with the claims of the poor in distress? The debate was also about the uses of natural modelling itself. Since human beings starve in the short term rather than in the long, the problem of guaranteeing food supply in a free market was the sharpest possible practical challenge to the correctness of long-term natural models as guides for practical policy.
Edward Thompson would have us understand the debates over bread prices and the grain trade in eighteenth-century England as an encounter between the new political economy and a ‘ moral economy’ of the crowd which was a popular reflection of a paternalist body of regulation dating back to the days of Elizabeth.[45] This structure of market supervision and consumer protection was infrequently enforced, lapsing during times of good harvest and moderate prices, but invoked again in crisis years. It was by no means a dead letter, and whenever magistrates were slow to act or resistant to enforcing its provisions, the crowd was quick to exert the pressure of demonstration and riot to force the magistrates to regulate the market place. If magistrates refused, the poor took the matter in their own hands, intercepting shipments of grain, breaking open granaries and distributing supplies at `just’ prices. By recovering the moral economy of the poor and the regulatory system to which they made appeal, Thompson has set the iconoclasm of the Smithian position in sharp relief, crediting him with the first theory to revoke the traditional social responsibility attached to property. Yet the antinomy — moral economy versus political economy — caricatures both positions. The one becomes a vestigial, traditional moralism, the other a science ‘ disinfested of intrusive moral imperatives’. To the extent that favouring an adequate subsistence for the poor can be called a moral imperative, it was one shared by paternalists and political economists alike. Smith’s case for dismantling the Assize of Bread, for example, was not based on dogma for its own sake, but on the claim that the Assize had kept the price of loaves above their natural competitive price. Likewise, he opposed export bounties because they distorted the price of corn for the benefit of the farmer at the expense of the consumer.[46] On the other hand, to call the moral economy traditionalist is to portray it simply as a set of vestigial moral preferences innocent of substantive argument about the working of markets. In fact, so-called traditionalists were quite capable of arguing their position on the same terrain as their political economist opponents. Indeed, and this is the crucial point, debate over market or ‘ police’ strategies for providing subsistence for the poor divided philosophers and political economists among themselves no less deeply than it divided the crowd from Smith. Indeed, it makes no sense to take Smith as typical of the range of opinion within the European Enlightenment camp. This becomes apparent if one moves beyond the English context, to which Thompson confines his discussion, and considers the debate in its full European setting. The crucial context for Smith’s `Digression on Grain’ was not the encounter with the English or Scottish crowd, but the French debates over the liberalization of the internal trade in 1764-6, which occurred, it should be remembered, when Smith himself was in France.
Between May 1763 and July 1764, the police of the grain trade in France was withdrawn by a series of edicts allowing anyone to deal in grain, ending the requirement of public-market sale, abolishing the intendants’ power to commandeer grain supplies in times of dearth and freeing the import and export of grain up to a certain price threshold.[47] As was the case in England, free trade in grain was not a contentious issue as long as harvests were adequate. Thus, prior to these edicts, the royal administration had adopted a policy of benign neglect towards the grain market in good years. The issue at stake was whether they should continue to step in to suspend the property rights of grain merchants and landowners when high prices threatened to cause hardship and unrest among poor consumers.
The liberalization of the internal trade had been proposed throughout the eighteenth century, but it was the Physiocrats who made the most complete analytical case in economic terms. Their argument was that the freedom of the trade would raise agricultural prices and draw investment into agriculture away from what Quesnay called ‘ the improper employment of men and wealth in the manufacture of luxury goods.’[48] With a strong agriculture, France could become fully self-sufficient in food, using grain exports to purchase ‘ sterile ‘ luxury goods manufactured in countries like Holland and Switzerland which could not produce enough food of their own. High agricultural prices would increase the productivity of agriculture and improve supply. As Quesnay put it, ‘ abundance plus dearness equals opulence’. High prices would not endanger the wage-earning poor because their money wages would rise in equivalent amounts, while the productivity effects of high prices would guarantee that farmers’ profits, proprietors’ revenue and the king’s tax income would all increase ahead of the increase in wage costs. The key to Quesnay’s whole argument was his insistence on inverting the old commonplace which equated good times with cheap prices. ‘ Enforced poverty’, he insisted, was ‘ not the way to render the peasants industrious’. He wanted to lift the whole economy out of its low-price equilibrium which he saw as a cycle of perpetual poverty. Quesnay’s economic arguments in turn were supported, as he made clear in his Encyclopedie article on ‘ natural right’, by the contention that absolute property right, in this case in grain, was crucial to creating the incentive for improvements to agricultural productivity. Systems of police which requisitioned grain from their owners fatally compromised these incentive effects.
Quesnay’s model and the French policy experiment which it supported turned out to be vulnerable to the stubborn niggardliness of eighteenth-century grain supply. As long as harvests were adequate, protests against liberalization were muted, but once harvests went short in 1768-9 and prices began to rise sharply, many philosophers who had been friends of liberty’ drew back from their earlier enthusiasms. The ensuing debate — which pitted Galiani, Diderot, Voltaire, Necker, Grimm, Linguet and Mably against Quesnay, Baudeau, Roubaud, Dupont, Mercier, Morellet and Condorcet — split the party of humanity’ down the middle, between those who insisted that government must stabilize prices in the short term to prevent harm to the poor and those who maintained that such interference jeopardized a long-term solution to the recurring crises in agricultural productivity.[49] This was not a debate between modernity and traditionalism. Many of those who spoke for liberty in every other sphere drew back on the question of liberty in grain. Diderot, for example, supported Turgot on the abolition of artisanal corporations, but not on the grain trade.[50]
The most influential attack on liberalization came from someone who was himself a political economist, author of a formidable treatise on money, Abbe Galiani. His Dialogues sur le Commerce des Bleds of 1770 can be read as a rueful reconsideration of the virtues of natural liberty which his earlier economic writing had celebrated. Franco Venturi suggests in fact that it was Galiani’s experience of the Tuscan famine of 1764-5 which caused him to rethink his earlier enthusiasms.[51] The skeletal poor covered with sores and vermin whom he had seen in the street with his own eyes left him convinced that subsistence could not be left either to the ‘ natural’ force of the harvest or the market place.
The objective of modern policy, he said, was not to submit to nature’s laws but to use human reason to ensure that society was never at her mercy. Nothing was truer in theory, he said, than that a system of free internal trade would allow grain to flow naturally from areas of surfeit to areas of scarcity, seeking the highest price and thus bringing supply and demand into balance. Yet such theories of the natural long-term process were dangerous because they simply ignored short-term frictions. Any failure of local supply, be it a delay of as little as a week, could bring starvation in its wake. Men, he said pointedly, eat real bread, not potential bread. If free exportation were allowed, the triggering mechanism of the ceiling price might not operate quickly enough to redirect supplies from export to areas of domestic dearth, especially in an economy dogged with poor transport. If national grain dealers were allowed unlimited freedom of purchase in local markets, they would buy up all of the grain before the needs of the local poor were met. Galiani was not opposed to freedom of trade in years of plentiful supply. In such times, national purchasing agents served a useful purpose in equilibrating supply among regions. Yet free trade was positively dangerous in high-price years. It was all very well to consider `letting the sails free to the wind’ when the sea was calm; but any prudent helmsman of state ‘ would trim his sails when the sea got rough’. Accordingly, he insisted that the state retain its authority to commandeer supplies and to force local farmers to sell in small lots to the local poor before disposing of the surplus to grain dealers. In essence, his position was that once the priority of distributive justice had been served, the property rights of landlords and merchants could be allowed their head. It was this position, and not that of the Physiocrats, which carried the day. The administration of Terray introduced a national grain police between 1769 and 1774.[52]After Turgot’s attempt to return to free trade in grain was exploded in the guerre des farines of 1775, the Physiocratic school disintegrated and the police of the grain trade was brought back.[53] It endured until the Revolution. By 1776, Smith remained the only standard-bearer for ‘ natural liberty’ in grain.
These French debates were closely paralleled in Scotland. James Steuart had been educated in the language of continental natural jurisprudence and had spent some of his years as a Jacobite exile in Tubingen, where he became familiar with the German science of ‘ police ‘ — Polizeiwissenschaft.[54] In the Scottish context of recurrent arguments from the mid 1750s until the 1770s about how to provision the towns and how to regulate the import and export of grain and oatmeal, Steuart took a line consistent with Polizeiwissenschaft and with the Galiani position. While he is often understood as a paternal traditionalist, he was nearly as accomplished an analyst of the economy as a natural process as Smith. What he denied insistently was that the natural course of things ‘ in the long term should constitute the definitive guide for the ‘ art’ of economic policy. He said that natural causes should never be allowed to run unchecked when the effects would be followed by injustice.[55] It was the local government’s job to make economic circumstances conform to justice. Nowhere was the intervention of ‘ the statesman’ more necessary than in the market of subsistence goods. Even if prices were self-correcting in the long term, in the short term panic-buying, hoarding and speculation could cause real misery to the poor and unleash the avoidable disorders of `meal mobs ‘.[56] It was to prevent such `sudden revolutions in the prices of markets’ that Steuart proposed the public stockpiling of grain in state granaries and the orderly sale of this grain in times of high price. As an additional measure of price stabilization, he endorsed a duty on imported grain and a bounty on exports. He had no quarrel with the argument that high prices were the key to increasing agricultural productivity, but insisted on a mechanism to reconcile high prices with regular subsistence for both the labouring poor and those dependent on charity.
While Steuart’s public granary scheme would have required more administrative capacity than most local governments of the time were capable of, his import and bounty proposals were closer to the common sense of his day. Such a system had been a feature of English Corn Law legislation since the Restoration, and the most recent act of 1772 instituted a bounty and import system which shut off exports and allowed in imports whenever the domestic price rose above 48 shillings per bushel. This was designed to reconcile high agricultural prices for producers with price stability and adequate supply for consumers. The act also repealed Elizabethan legislation against forestalling and regrating — the practices, that is, of speculative purchasing and avoiding local markets by direct purchase from farmers. The act, in other words, steered a middle course between liberalization and police ‘.[57]
If the act of 1772 incarnated the cautious common sense of the day, Smith’s comments on it indicate how far beyond the common sense consensus his advocacy of ‘ natural liberty’ had taken him. The act, he said resignedly, was `the best which the interest, prejudices and temper of the times would admit of’.[58] Import duties were a political inevitability, given the prejudices and influence of the farmers, but `were all nations to follow the liberal system of free exportation and free importation’, he wrote, the whole continent’s agricultural production would come to be specialized where yields were greatest. Smith insisted that protectionism actually aggravate[d] the unavoidable misfortune of a dearth into the dreadful calamity of a famine’ by obstructing the free flow of grain to where it was needed most.[59]
Smith’s endorsement of freedom in the internal trade was no less uncompromising. He regarded the laws against speculation in grain and those regulations requiring farmers to sell first in local markets as nothing less than an invasion of the rights of property :
To hinder … the farmer from sending his goods at all times to the best market, is evidently to sacrifice the ordinary laws of justice to an idea of publick utility, to a sort of reasons of state — an act of legislative authority which ought to be exercised only, which can be pardoned only in cases of the most urgent necessity.[60]
Hume had taken it for granted that magistrates had the right to open private granaries and distribute grain to the poor at set prices, not merely in a situation of actual starvation, but `even in less urgent necessities’. He had used this example to argue that the rules of equity or justice depend entirely on the particular state and condition in which men are placed ‘.[61] In situations of `extreme necessity’ it was ‘ perfectly useless’ to insist on maintaining an unlimited right of private property. Smith followed this line, but seems to have closed off the case of `less urgent’ necessities. Only actually impending starvation appears to qualify as the ‘ case of most urgent necessity’ which would justify the suspension of property right in grain.
Even more striking was his endorsement of the role of grain merchants in rationing supply. By holding back supply in expectation of higher price, merchants helped to restrict demand and conserve supply for periods of still more acute shortage. Smith admitted it was ‘ avarice’ to ‘ raise the price of corn somewhat higher than the scarcity of the season requires’, but this at least prevented the premature dumping of grain at low prices, which would result in famine when supplies ran out at the end of the season.[62] Now, as Smith himself said, not even stock-jobbing drew more odium to the whole market system of a commercial society than grain speculators. To endorse such speculation was to go further in justifying the ways of the invisible hand than anyone but the Physiocrats dared to go.
The adequate subsistence of the poor, like everything else in the Smithian system, depended on growth led by increasing productivity in manufacturing. The only way agricultural surplus could be induced was if manufacturing sectors of the town produced goods which would serve as an incentive for production of food for sale.[63] A manufacturing country could free itself of dependence on the uncertain bounty of its own domestic harvest cycle by developing manufactured goods to trade for food in the international market. The ability of the domestic wage-labourers to purchase this imported food depended in turn on investment in the division of labour in manufacturing. Only if the unit labour costs of manufactured goods for export were driven down could the real wages of the poor continue to rise. If landlords and poor consumers alike paid less for their manufactured goods at home, they had more income available for agricultural investment and consumption of food. The proper role of the state, therefore, was not to regulate prices but to remove obstacles like the bounty and the import duty system which would upset the proper division of labour between town and country, driving investment capital into agriculture away from manufacturing. The Smithian solution to agricultural productivity, therefore, was profoundly counterintuitive — to expand the manufacturing sector and to induce the agricultural sector to produce surpluses in exchange for finished goods. While almost all of his contemporaries, even the Physiocrats, were obsessed by the vulnerability of the economy to the vagaries of the harvest cycle and the uncertain bounties of the earth, Smith was looking forward to an international division of labour in which developed economies like England would use their manufacturing capacity to draw themselves forever beyond the closed limits of nature. In his view, the key to growth lay in a natural distribution of resources and a division of labour between town and country. Neither the Colbertists nor the Physiocrats had understood the delicate interdependence of manufacturing and agricultural sectors; the one bent the rod of policy too far towards agriculture, the other bent it too far towards manufacture.[64] In the natural course of things’ the optimum distribution of labour and investment between sectors would establish itself of its own accord. Such an analysis, it hardly needs saying, simply dismissed as misguided moralizing the entire civic moralist and Country party jeremiad on the parasitical’ and corrupting’ growth of towns.[65]
The Smithian case for natural liberty’ was never conducted only on economic grounds. The second plane of his argument was jurisprudential. As we have seen, he insisted on the all but absolute priority of the property rights of grain merchants and farmers over the claims of need made by poor labourers. Lest it be thought that the Smithian position on property was simply a reflection of the naturalized common sense of his time, it should be recalled that in the French debates on grain the equivalent position had been regarded as a scandal. Diderot thought the Physiocratic position on property when applied to famine conditions a cannibal principle’, and he exclaimed, ‘ Isn’t the sentiment of humanity more sacred than the right of property? ‘ [66] Linguet, for his part, had gone so far as to argue that the needs of the distressed constituted a claim of right as binding as the rights of property, and Morelly had grounded this argument in the ancient jurisprudential hypothesis that the world had been originally granted to men in positive community of goods, to which state it reverted in conditions of necessity.[67] In claiming relief of their distress from the property of the rich, in other words, the poor were merely reclaiming what was theirs, as common members of the human species, in the first place.
Smith’s position, like Morelly’s, drew upon the long-established vocabulary of natural jurisprudence. It was not simply carpentered together to provide justification for the economic interests which his analysis endorsed. Following Hume’s analysis, Smith simply took it for granted that institutions of property had emerged historically because of their utility and necessity. Had human beings been naturally endowed with generosity’ and benevolence’ towards their fellow beings, and had there been no limits on nature’s bounty, no institutions of property would have been necessary.[68] It was the facts of limited human benevolence and natural scarcity which required the elaboration of rules of private individuation. Without such rules, security of human life would have been out of the question. As Hume put it, it was by establishing the rule for the stability of possession’ that the insatiable, perpetual and universal avidity of acquiring goods and possessions’ was rendered compatible with social order and stability.[69] Moreover, and this was a crucial argument, absolute security in private possession was the necessary precondition for pushing back the scarcity limits of nature. Without a guarantee that a man could keep what he had improved, he would have no incentive to make improvements.[70] This guarantee, Hume insisted, had to be perfect ‘ : property right, to be a right at all, could not admit of qualification. Doubtless, Hume admitted, the parcelling out of the world into exclusive individuation must frequently prove contradictory both to men’s wants and desires — and persons and possessions must often be very ill adjusted’. Specifically, possession was rarely correlated with virtue or desert : the idle unmarried bachelor, if he had a better title, would accede to property ahead of the virtuous poor man with a numerous family. Yet any system which allocated property according to need or desert or some ideal of distributive justice was infinitely contestable, since every man had a different estimation of his own or another’s merit. Any attempt to distribute according to such principles would be fatal to the stability of possession necessary to social order and the improvement of economic conditions. Particularly pernicious would be distribution according to `ideas of perfect equality’. Render possessions ever so equal, men’s different degrees of art, care and industry will immediately break that equality.’ Worse, any attempt to restrain these differences in human talent would destroy incentives and thus reduce society to the most extreme indigence’. Instead of preventing starvation and beggary, the equal partition of possessions would render it unavoidable to the whole community ‘.[71]
Yet if property must be absolute, how then were those excluded from the partition of the world to be provided for? Smith’s answer to this question made reference to the distinction in natural jurisprudence between perfect rights’, such as property, which were enforceable at law, and imperfect obligations’, such as charity, which was a moral duty incapable of legal enforcement. This distinction between `justice’ and benevolence ‘ had the effect of denying that the excluded poor had a perfect right to the charity of the rich. As Smith told his students, a beggar is an object of our charity and may be said to have a right to demand it — but when we use the word right in this way it is not in a proper but a metaphorical sense ‘.[72] The law had no business commanding men to be benevolent: in any case, benevolence must be freely given or else it was not a virtue at all. The proper province of justice was the enforcement of suum cuique, ‘ to each his own’, i.e. the rules of property. Without such rules, the immense fabric of human society must crumble into atoms’. Without benevolence, on the other hand, society would doubtless be a mean and harsh place, but it could subsist as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection’. Yet Smith believed, as did Hume, that even in a market society, pity and compassion towards the unfortunate would remain natural and unprompted motives of action. It was to this discretionary sentiment that they looked to the relief of the necessities of the poor in any emergency.[73] Yet, as we have tried to show, the whole burden of the analysis of the Wealth of Nations was intended to demonstrate that by stimulating agricultural production in a system of competitive markets, the adequate subsistence of the labouring poor would cease to be a matter either of benevolence or of the drastic justice of grave necessity. Neither the generosity of individuals nor the interventions of the magistrate would be required.
This position effectively excluded distributive justice’ from the appropriate functions of government in a market society. Smith insisted that the only appropriate function ofjustice was commutative ‘ ; it dealt with the attribution of responsibility and the punishment of injury among individuals.[74] Distributive justice, which dealt with the allocation of superfluity according to claims of need, or desert, or merit, was not properly in the domain of law, but of morality.
The essential function of government was to protect property from the indignation’ of the poor. Smith was under no illusions that the existing distribution of property in a market society could legitimize itself to the excluded : ‘ It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security.’[75] Yet in denying that the poor’s needs constituted a claim of right against the property of the rich, Smith did not extrude the question of justice from his political economy. On the contrary, he transposed the question from the terrain of jurisprudence and political theory to the terrain of political economy, using natural modelling to demonstrate that by raising the productivity of agriculture, commercial society could provide adequately for the needs of the wage-earner without having to resort to any form of redistributive meddling in the property rights of individuals. Growth in conditions of natural liberty’ would explode the whole antinomy between needs and rights.
To be sure, Smith knew full well that to insist upon establishing, and upon establishing all at once, and in spite of all opposition’, any systematical plan of reform, specifically a system of natural liberty, must often be the highest degree of arrogance’. If a reformer could not conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion’, it was quite wrong for him to attempt to subdue them by force’. He must accommodate himself as well as he can’ to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people ‘.[76] Yet Smith’s model itself was not any less uncompromising an argument for natural liberty’. Its structural properties were not altered in any way by Smith’s awareness of the practical difficulties standing in the way of its implementation. These structural properties, as we have seen, were given by property theory: property was either `perfect ‘ and absolute or it was meaningless; and while in cases of real famine, necessity must overturn property, this was an exception and in no sense a permanent qualification of property right; to grant the distressed a right to the property of the rich would be to overturn all stability of possession, even in normal times, and would compromise the incentive effects which stability of possession provided for improvement. Accordingly, government must concern itself with commutative, rather than with distributive justice. To regard this argument as the contingent legitimation of interest would be to ignore the fact that its terms can be traced back to a tradition which antedated ‘ commercial society’ and political economy alike. Smith himself left no doubt that in crafting his argument for a ‘ system of natural liberty’, he was deploying terms whose provenance had to be traced to Grotius, the founder of modern natural jurisprudence, and to his reformulation of the heritage of Aristotle and the Schoolmen. It was Grotius, he said, who had been the first to make a rigorous distinction between ‘ the laws of police’ and ‘ those rules of natural equity which ought to run through, and be the foundation of the laws of all nations ‘.[77] It was by thinking in these categories that Smith developed a conception of political economy’s task as criticizing the contingent, historical structure of ‘ police’ by the criterion of a `system of natural liberty’. Even more important, the natural jurisprudence philosophers were the first to propose that the theoretical reconciliation of the claims of the propertied and the claims of the excluded could be achieved by shifting the terms of analysis from a language of rights to a language of markets. It is to this tradition and to this constitutive move in the making of classical political economy that we now turn.
IV. Political economy and natural jurisprudence
The story begins with Aquinas, because it was he who set the terms of the argument on the origins and limits of property right in the grain-trade debates of mid-eighteenth-century Catholic Europe.[78] For Aquinas the world was God’s property and had been given to the collective stewardship of the human species as a community of goods. In addition to this ‘ competence ‘ as trustees of the world’s resources, individuals had a second ‘ competence’ to care for and distribute these resources. This second competence rendered private possession legitimate, for under private possession each person takes more trouble to care for something that is his sole responsibility than what is held in common by many’. Under communal property, there was no reliable incentive to labour and no reliable means of adjudicating the quarrels which were inevitable when things were held in common. Following Aristotle, therefore, Aquinas argued that ‘ the individual holding of possession is not … contrary to natural law; it is what rational beings conclude as an addition to the natural law’. Aquinas thus qualified the radical line in earlier Church thinking which, in the writing of St Basil, for example, had denied that it was legitimate to preclude others from the use of common property. It was individuation which made possible a responsible and productive management of God’s estate, both for those with property and those without. In the extreme case of famine, however, property was to be overruled altogether, and the poor could reclaim their original share in the community of goods :
If, however, there is so urgent and blatant a necessity that the immediate needs must be met out of whatever is available as when a person is in imminent danger and he cannot be helped in any other way, then a person may legitimately supply his own wants out of another’s property, whether he does it secretly or flagrantly.[79]
The history of European natural law can be understood as a series of attempts to re-arrange the elements of the puzzle left by Aquinas. It was possible either to posit an original community of goods and then to limit individual property right accordingly, by the hypothesis of a return to the original condition of a community of goods in times of necessity, or alternatively to insist on the necessity of private property for the productive management of man’s resources and for ensuring peace in conditions of scarcity. The logical corollary of the first position was that men should restrict their needs to what was natural and necessary in order always to have superfluity to distribute to the needy, while the corollary of the second position was that private property created the incentive for improving God’s dominion in such a way that everyone’s needs could be satisfied without a system of austerity.
Grotius, the founder of modern natural jurisprudence, took up and transformed these polarities in the Aristotelian and Thomist tradition. He agreed with Aquinas that `if a man under stress of such necessity takes from the property of another what is necessary to preserve his own life, he does not commit a theft’. The reason for this, he explained, was not that the owner was bound ‘ by the rule of love’ or common humanity, but that ‘ all things seem to have been distributed to individual owners with a benign reservation in favour of the primitive right ‘.[80] In times of necessity, private property was suspended according to this ‘ benign reservation’ and primitive community of goods returned, giving the poor an absolute right in the superfluity of the rich.
This theory was linked to a historicization of Aquinas’s two competences This historicization is the origin of Scottish conjectural history.[81] In the original community of goods, man’s competence as a trustee of God’s resources held in common was to the fore. Common ownership of goods could only be maintained, Grotius continued, as long as `men continued in great simplicity or . . . lived on terms of mutual affection such as rarely appears’. The distribution of individual use rights in the common could only remain stable and peaceful so long as needs were constrained. `Men did not, however, continue to live this simple and innocent life’, Grotius went on, beginning to hisioricize the picture. Aquinas’s second competence, man’s ability to decide on exclusive private possession of scarce resources, came into play. As new needs emerged which could only be satisfied by labour, movable objects were hived off from common ownership; lands for grazing were divided up among separate tribes; and land was individuated by families within the same tribe. Disputes were bound to develop as each family applied its industry to the land, and to put an end to these disputes, a compact, either accepting existing occupation or explicitly dividing what had formerly been common, became necessary. This first division by compact was a unique act and could not be repeated. Anything not then divided was turned into private property thereafter by the rule of first occupation.[82] This property, once instituted by compact, became a full or perfect right which everyone else had to respect. It was this exclusive or absolute right which alone deserved the name of property, Grotius said. Such was the poverty of language that the word was applied indiscriminately to rights to use of common property as well. In a major clarification of jurisprudential language, he insisted that the term be applied solely to the modern type of exclusive dominion over things.[83]
In order to provide for those without property, however, Grotius had to argue that in times of necessity history stopped, as it were, and the movement away from community of goods was reversed temporarily. He also had to give an account of `just price’ — of the jurisprudence which ought to govern the markets in subsistence goods. While accepting that freedom of trade and commerce were derivatives of natural law, he insisted that such freedoms should be constrained by natural equity. In particular, freedom to trade in grain should be limited by the requirement that the price remain within reach of the poor. ‘ We affirm, therefore’, Grotius wrote, ‘ that all men have the right to buy such things at a fair price; unless they are needed by the person from whom they are sought; thus in times of extreme scarcity, the sale of grain is forbidden.’ This meant that grain should not be exported in times of dearth and should be offered for sale instead in the province where it was produced. Similarly, the right of engrossing ought to be controlled.[84] Positive or municipal law, he believed, should set limits to man’s natural liberty of trade.
Grotius thus placed great stress on the role of strict justice in regulating social life. But he took society as it was, operating beyond the constraints either of natural equity or artificial simplicity. The proper domain of justice was expletive, rather than distributive. It was properly concerned, not with desert or need, but with suum cuique. Expletive justice was about ‘ perfect rights’, the chief of which were rights of property. Distributive or attributive justice was about `imperfect rights’, such as ‘ generosity, compassion and foresight in matters of government’. Imperfect rights did not entail a strict reciprocal obligation : they were commanded by humanity, not by law. A perfect right was one which could be defended by force if need be.[85] Here is the seed-bed of Smith’s treatment of distributive justice. The distinctive feature of Grotian jurisprudence lay in so reducing the scope of distributive justice that the right of theft in necessity or the right to buy grain at a fair price — rights of desert and claims of need — were theorized as exceptions, rather than as rules, as they had been in Thomist jurisprudence. A man had a right only to what was his own. He had no right to what was his due. His imperfect right to be treated with humanity only hardened into a perfect right under conditions of gravest necessity.
Grotius left two major problems for his heirs. His claim that the parcelling out of the common into private property required a contract was ridiculed by his critics, among them the English monarchical absolutist Filmer, who found it entirely implausible that the whole structure of modern dominion could be traced back to an actual moment of collective consent.[86] More plausible, his critics insisted, was the hypothesis that God had granted dominion to Adam and to each of the sovereigns who had succeeded him, leaving it to the positive institution of the sovereign what the laws of property should be. To rebut such legitimations of the system of private property, the defenders of natural jurisprudence had to find a theory of the origin of property which avoided the embarrassment of a contract. The second difficulty was the Grotian thesis of the suspension of private property and the temporary return of community goods in times of necessity. Most natural-law theorists found this hypothesis dangerous : if the need claims of the poor were given priority over property, society could be reduced to a state of anarchy even in times of relative plenty. Pufendorf took up this problem. Against Grotius’s theory, Pufendorf argued that the obligations of the rich were better explained
if we say that a man of means is bound to come to the aid of one who is in innocent want, by an imperfect obligation which no one should, as a rule, be forced to meet; and yet the urge of supreme necessity makes it possible for such things to be claimed, on the same ground as those which are owed by a perfect right, that is, a special appeal may be made to a magistrate, or, when time does not allow anything of the sort, the immediate necessity may be met by taking the thing through force or stealth.[87]
By means of this distinction between ‘ perfect rights’ and ‘ imperfect obligations ‘, Pufendorf managed to find a way to provide for the poor without granting them, as Grotius did, a property right in the goods of the rich in times of necessity. In his theory, the poor simply came into a right by default of someone else’s obligation. This obligation derived not from the law of property, but from the natural law of humanity. The shift between Grotius and Pufendorf is decisive. In one, the focus was upon the rights of the poor, while in the other, it was upon the voluntary obligations of the rich. The implied nexus of relations between rich and poor shifted from the grounds of law to that of moral sentiment, benevolence on one side, gratitude on the other.[88] This rhetoric obliterated the linguistic possibility of expressing the poor’s right of desert in the property of the rich.
Having redefined the basis of provision for the excluded without recourse to a community of goods, Pufendorf was in a position to streamline the Grotian account of the history of property. He poured scorn on theorists who derived modern property right from the hypothesis of an original donation by God of exclusive dominion to Adam and his heirs. Likewise, he rejected the Hobbesian argument that property right was a natural relation between human individuals and things and hence the origin of that conflict in the state of nature which the creation of a sovereign was designed to stop. Property, Pufendorf insisted, involved consent, a man to man relationship, established after God’s initial grant of the earth to mankind in common in order to secure concord in the individuation of the world. Its purpose was to pre-empt the Hobbesian war of all against all, by requiring men to recognize that all human rights entailed correlative duties to abstain from the property of others.[89]
Yet like all natural-law theorists, Pufendorf had to explain both how individuation had occurred and whether it was consistent with God’s original intentions when he granted the world to man’s use. In thinking through these questions, Pufendorf made use of a distinction developed by the Spanish Jesuit Suarez between preceptive’ and permissive’ natural law. Had God granted the world to man preceptively’, that is, with specific injunctions in natural law as to how it was to be individuated ; or had he granted it to man permissively’, without express stipulations? Pufendorf agreed with his Spanish forerunner that proprietorship’ could not be considered to have been a command of preceptive natural law from the beginning. Proprietorship was introduced as the peace of men seemed to require’. A ‘ quiet and decorous society’ could not exist without distinct dominions of things’. Pufendorf reduced the range of preceptive natural law to a minimum: no man should hurt another’, and no man should take what rightly belonged to another. Men I had the liberty to initiate such forms of individuation as were consonant with these precepts.[90]
This distinction between preceptive’ and permissive’ natural law entailed a rethinking of the nature of God’s initial grant of the world to mankind. Using these concepts, Pufendorf argued that the donation of God, described in the Sacred Scriptures, sets forth not a definite form of dominion, but only an indefinite right to apply things to uses which are reasonable and necessary’. Accordingly, in the beginning, things were lying ” open to any and every person”, in the same sense [that] such things are said to be nobody’s, more in a negative than in a positive sense; that is, they are not yet assigned to a particular person’. In the beginning, therefore, the world belonged to the community of mankind, but it was no one’s in particular; it belonged neither to an individual Adam, nor to a primitive group of men. It was in a negative’ rather than a positive’ community, to use Pufendorf’s terminology.[91] If men chose subsequently to institute community of goods, they could do so, but they had to arrive at some explicit arrangement distributing individual use rights to the soil and to the products of nature. Such a system of distributive justice in a particular, positive community, moreover, could only remain stable and uncontentious, Pufendorf argued, as long as needs were confined to the same limited standard. This was both his and Grotius’s reply to the European tradition of nostalgia for the Golden Age of primitive communism, exemplified in More’s Utopia and Campanella’s City of the Sun.[92] Such communities could only persist as long as their inhabitants remained content to live at the same equal and rude standard. Pufendorf, moreover, firmly banished such communities to the historical past, arguing that as mankind multiplied and living conveniences were increased by industry, the necessity of preserving a social life led to the introduction of dominion’. The division of the earth did not begin all at once, with a contract, as Grotius supposed; rather there was a gradual passage from individuated use rights, which did not require the dissolution of a negative community, to exclusive property rights, which did require compact.[93] In the hunting and gathering stage, only a tacit convention’ was required for men to appropriate natural produce for use. Thus, An oak tree belonged to no man, but the acorns that fell to the ground were his who had gathered them.’ A tacit convention of this kind, permitting promiscuous use, could only persist without disturbance to the common peace ‘,[94] Pufendorf argued, as long as men lived in great simplicity’. Nor was full dominion required in the shepherding and agricultural stages as long as land and pasture remained in abundance and no individual was yet excluded. Full dominion came in only when land became scarce relative to population, and occupiers sought to push back the limits of scarcity by applying the labour of improvement to their plots. Following the line of argument in Aristotle, Pufendorf maintained that property right did away with the quarrels which were inevitable `if all men should labour in common and should lay up their earnings in common’. Those who did not labour were rightfully excluded. `It was improper that a man who had contributed no labour should have right to things equal to his by whose industry a thing had been raised or rendered fit to service.’[95] Yet in an economy without money, men had no incentive to appropriate more than they needed, and hence individuation into exclusive dominion did not, as yet, exclude others from the means of subsisting. In an economy without money, ‘envy and craving for more than they need’ had no means to develop. ‘Unlettered agricultural peoples’, Pufendorf argued, `were still ignorant of the enticements of the appetite, an easy living.’[96]
Money was introduced, so Pufendorf argued, not because men were innately greedy, but because their needs began to expand once labour began to generate surpluses. Initially, these needs could be satisfied by barter, but since natural produce perishes, barter provided no mechanism for avoiding future scarcity. Following Aristotle, Pufendorf argued that money was introduced in order to break through the constraint on accumulation entailed in the natural spoliation ofunused produce. As long as wealth lay only in stores ofgrain, herds and the like, the desire for unlimited gain was ultimately quenched by the work involved in such things, the difficulty of handling them and the further fact that they were easily destroyed.’ But upon the introduction of gold and silver money’, Pufendorf explained, it is easy for avarice to amass even millions ‘.[97]
In this analysis of the coming of money, natural jurisprudence gave itself the occasion for a discourse on modern luxury parallel to that found in the civic humanist vernacular. Pufendorf did not deny that modern commerce had brought with it `luxury’, avarice, restlessness and inequality. Yet exchange in a money economy made it possible for societies to push back the limits on improvement posed by natural scarcity and the spoliation of natural produce. At the same time, Pufendorf did argue that the inequality occasioned by the emergence of money and commerce could only be justified in terms of natural law if those without property in the means of subsistence could continue to satisfy their needs. This was the burden of his insistence that consent, expressed or presumed, and not only the rule of first occupation, was required in the passage from use rights to exclusive property. ‘ It is impossible to conceive how the mere corporal act of one person — one man’s appropriation of a thing — can prejudice the faculty of others, unless their consent is given, that is, unless the pact intervenes.’ Man’s natural faculty to acquire dominion through occupation had its own natural boundaries. Consent limited individuation to what could be used :
Such was the generosity of God towards men that He supplied them abundantly with what serves their needs. But reason prescribed to men such bounds of possession, as would leave them content upon acquiring what would be likely to meet the needs of themselves and of their dependents. Nor yet does it want them to take no thought for the future, provided their envy and craving for more than they need do not prevent others from providing for their own necessities. If any person ranges too far afield and heaps up superfluous wealth by the oppression of others, the rest will not be blamed if, when opportunity affords, they undertake promptly to bring him into line.[98]
Yet if property had to serve the interest of all human beings and not merely the propertied, how were those excluded from the means of subsistence to satisfy their needs? A consistent theorist was required by this question to engage with the legitimacy of the money system in which the subsistence goods of the have-nots were priced. What was the just price’ at which such goods should exchange in a free market? Pufendorf was in no doubt that, in a market of free agents, the just price was the price the market would bear. Even if I should set an outrageous price upon a thing of mine’, Pufendorf said, no one can complain about it’ since they were free to refuse my offer of exchange. A merchant had a right to demand a profit in the commerce in subsistence goods, but he could be blamed for inhumanity if he either refuses to sell to one in need, or else is willing to part with them only upon very hard terms’. The avaricious merchant offended against his imperfect obligation’ to act humanely, and not against the law, except of course if he actually caused someone to starve to death.[99]
The only way to ensure justice as between haves and have-nots in a commercial economy, Pufendorf believed, was to guarantee the productivity of agricultural land by keeping market prices of agricultural commodities high. If in time of great abundance of money the price of land and its products should be low, the cultivators of the soil must needs be ruined, while if money is scarce and the price of land high, the other class of men must labour in want.’[100] Interfering with market prices in the interests of distributive justice for the sake of the poor consumer would only weaken the incentives to producers. The long-term interests of both required market prices to be set by the price of agricultural produce in lean years.
While Locke’s property theory belongs squarely within the continental natural jurisprudence tradition, he wrote in the vernacular of English property debates and did not follow Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s restriction of the use of the term property ‘ to its modern meaning of exclusive and absolute right of dominion. In the vernacular which Locke employed, property meant not only the absolute right in’ something, but also common right to use. The term also referred to man’s natural right to the means of his own self-preservation. A man’s life was also his property and as such was inalienable. This usage has created the impression that Locke was a positive-community theorist, arguing that God’s gift of the earth to mankind in common conferred a property right to the means of self-preservation to each and every man.[101] Yet Locke was quite explicit that this inalienable right to preservation did not presume a world given to mankind in positive community. The great common of the earth was open to any taker : it was a negative community, neither individuated to Adam, nor given to a positive community.[102]
Locke, like Pufendorf, should be seen as attempting to defend Grotian natural law by reformulating those parts of it, especially the doctrine of consent, which had been exposed by Filmer, his primary interlocutor in the Two Treatises. Locke improved on Pufendorf by eliminating the theoretical necessity of consent in the gradual emergence of private property. He did so by assuming that in the state of nature, land and natural produce were in such abundance relative to population that men had no rational reason either to contend with each other or to be required to make explicit arrangements as to their division.[103] ‘ In the beginning’, as Locke said in a famous passage, all the world was America’ : ‘ the Inhabitants were too few for the Country and want of People and Money gave men no Temptation to enlarge their Possession of Land or contest for a wider extent of Ground ‘.[104]
His second improvement was to specify more clearly than Pufendorf the natural boundaries which individuated shares would confine themselves to in the state of nature. In Pufendorf, this boundary was given by the extent of produce or land which any individual and his family could occupy and cultivate. Locke defined the natural limits of individuation in terms of a use’ and spoliation condition’. God gave the world to man to use, not to abuse or waste, and in the pre-money stage, he had no reason to accumulate anything beyond what he could use to satisfy his basic needs. Accordingly, the exceeding of the bounds of his just property’ did not lie ‘in the largeness of his Possession, but the perishing of anything uselessly in it ‘.[105] Locke also simplified the jurisprudential legitimation of private property by arguing that the act of first occupation — the taking of an acorn or the settling of a piece of ground —conferred a right to exclusive use because the act was a process of labour. Previous jurisprudential theory had always separated the entitlement created by first occupation from that created by labour. ‘ The measure of Property’, the natural boundary of what each man could rightfully individuate to his own use, was set by his labour. `No Man’s Labour could subdue, or appropriate all: nor could his Enjoyment consume more than a small part; so that it was impossible for any Man, this way, to intrench upon the right of another.‘ [106]
The major question about Lockian theory, for our purposes, is whether he theorized man’s right of self-preservation as conferring on the excluded a perfect or imperfect right in the property of the rich. God has not left man’, Locke wrote, so to the Mercy of another that he may starve him is he please.’ In case of necessity, Charity gives every Man a Title to so much out of another’s Plenty, as will keep him from extream want when he has no means to subsist otherwise.[107] Yet this obligation on the part of the rich was left to the individual. It was a side-constraint, rather than a structuring condition, on whatever property arrangements happened to be in force. As a side-constraint, moreover, it was not constantly applied but only in necessity. We are not obliged ‘, Locke argued, to provide with shelter and to refresh with food any and every man, but only when a poor man’s misfortune calls for our alms and our property supplies means for charity.’ [108] Locke added that the poor only had a right to appeal to the rich when they themselves had fulfilled their duty towards God to labour in a calling. Nobody had a right to live comfortably from other people’s labour. Nor were those in necessity entitled to be relieved in comfort. Only their bare necessities were to be relieved. Locke’s position on charity was neither more nor less generous than Pufendorfs.[109]
Like Pufendorf too, Locke believed that the just price in any market was simply the price which that market would bear. This was the case even with subsistence goods. The free play of supply and demand, as he argued in a note entitled ‘Venditio’, would necessarily result in just prices in the long run. In ‘ the mutual and perpetually changing wants of money and commodities, the buyer and the seller comes to a pretty equal and fair account’. If free trade were to be obstructed, for example by some measure specifying ‘ the utmost justifiable profit, there would be no commerce in the world, and mankind would be deprived of the supply of foreign mutual conveniences of life’. High prices in time of famine would draw forth supply. A merchant, faced with the choice between sending corn to Ostend where it could fetch 5 shillings or to Dunkirk where famine prevails and corn fetches 20 shillings, would send it to Dunkirk. Examination of the morality of this sort of transaction had been a feature of classical jurisprudence at least since Cicero.[110] But where Cicero condemned anyone who exploited or profited from another’s distress, both Locke and Pufendorf simply took it for granted that economic allocation was best served if someone’s hardship was another’s gain. Discrimination towards the poor in markets was indeed charitable, but it was not ‘ what strict justice requires’. Indeed, discrimination in their favour was an infringement against strict justice which has ‘ but one measure for all men’. Like Pufendorf, Locke admitted that merchants who exploited scarcity offended against the law of humanity, but he argued that they would only offend against strict justice if they actually caused someone to starve.
Where Locke differs from Pufendorf is in the historical account of the origins of the modern money-economy. Pufendorf, as we have seen, explained the origin of barter and money in terms of the emergence of scarcity, which in turn required the creation of property by consent. Wishing to avoid the necessity of a consent theory, Locke theorized the state of nature as one of abundance. Why then, if each man had more than enough for his needs, should he want to trade and barter? Locke, unlike Pufendorf, had to assume a natural covetousness in men, which operated even in the state of primitive simplicity. ‘ The Root of all Evil’, the ‘ Desire of having more than we need of (which Locke elsewhere insisted was evident in children ‘ as soon almost as they are born’), took hold of men and caused them to agree ‘ that a little piece of yellow Metal, which would keep without wasting or decay should be worth a great piece of Flesh or a whole Heap of Corn’. By consenting to put an artificial use-value on an almost useless commodity like gold, men were able to cheat the natural law limiting property to what one could use. Now they could trade away their perishable surpluses and hoard money in return, claiming that the possession of money qualified as ‘ use ‘. By agreeing to create a money system, men agreed, in effect, to create a system of inequality:
But since Gold and Silver, being little useful to the Life of Man in proportion to Food, Rayment, and Carriage, has its value only from the consent of Men, whereof Labour yet makes, in great part, the measure, it is plain, that Men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth, they having by a tacit and voluntary consent found out a way, how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one, these metalls not spoileing or decaying in the hands of the possessor.[111]
Even before money was introduced, ‘ the different degrees of Industry’ between men were `apt to give Men Possessions in different Proportions’.[112] The inequality created by the emergence of money was a faithful reflection of natural differentials in human industry. Such inequality could only have been contained if either God or man had determined that needs should be constrained. Yet Locke was adamant that God had given the world to mankind, not merely to satisfy their basic needs, but for ‘ the support and Comfort of their being’. `It cannot be supposed’, he said, that God intended that the world ‘should always remain common and uncultivated’ as it would have been had human needs been constrained from the beginning. God had given the world to the industrious and rational’ to improve without limit; he had not given it to the fancy or covetousness of the Quarrelsom and Contentious ‘.[113] Once, however, land became scarce relative to population and the excluded and landless faced the rational and industrious’, then a pact creating government and the positive laws of property became necessary to prevent the rapin and force’ which were sure to break out. Such laws stipulated that those excluded were not to meddle with what was already improved by another’s Labour: If he did ’tis plain he desired the benefit of another’s pains, which he had no right to.’[114] Locke’s improvement on Pufendorf, as Barbeyrac observed, was to have pushed back the moment in history when contract became necessary by virtue of a hypothesis of initial abundance, and then to have theorized the emergence of the inequality which would make necessary a pact establishing government.[115]
Locke’s distaste for modern inequality and covetousness was genuine enough. In other parts of his writing he sharply criticized modern man’s `fantastical uneasiness (as itch after Honour, Power, or Riches etc.) ‘ which the luxury of the Courts’ was apt to implant among the industrious sort to the detriment and dishonour of the useful and mechanical arts’.[116] Such comments, as we have seen in the case of Pufendorf, show that a critical discourse on modern luxury was by no means a monopoly of civic humanist thought. Yet Locke theorized covetousness as innate to human nature and not simply as a contingent historical curse of a commercial society. Its effects could be counteracted, chiefly by the laws of property themselves, but it could not be extirpated by a return to primitive simplicity. More positively, Locke argued that, however ungodly the modern scramble after money, the society which resulted from the scramble did not violate God’s natural law that all men ought to enjoy the means of their own self-preservation. Indeed, those who had no property but in their own labour had a more secure hold on their subsistence than their virtuous but impoverished ancestors. Exclusive dominion created the incentives necessary to increase the productivity of soil and to push back the limits of scarcity. Almost all of the conveniences of modern life were created by the application of human labour to God’s original gift. If we rightly estimate things as they come to our use’, Locke said, and estimate what in them is purely owing to Nature and what to labour, we shall find that in most of them 99/100 are wholly to be put on the account of labour.’ [117] Moreover, in modern times, labour was distinctively divided and therefore distinctively productive. It was this division of labour which explained, too, why numbers of men are to be preferred to largenesse of dominions’, why, in other words, countries with relatively weak natural resources were able to feed their populations without recourse to conquest. Increasing the productivity of land, Locke stressed, was the great art of government’ in modern states. This was best achieved by giving ‘protection and incouragement to the honest industry of mankind’ by means of laws of property. There cannot be a clearer demonstration’, Locke said, of the productivity of modern labour than the fact that the American tribes who possessed almost unlimited land have not one hundredth part of the Conveniences we enjoy’. A king of one of their large territories, Locke concluded, feeds, lodges and is clad worse than a day labourer in England ‘.[118]
With this comparison between the English day labourer and the savage king, we return full circle to the paradox of commercial society as Smith had described it, in almost identical terms, in the introduction and plan of the Wealth of Nations. As a participant in the economic pamphleteering in the 1690s, in the reformulation of Grotian natural jurisprudence, and in the philosophical inquiry into the moral implications of luxury in a commercial society, Locke’s work exemplifies the three major discourses in which the paradox of commercial society was first posed in the seventeenth century. In one of the important economic pamphlets of Locke’s day, one finds, for example, this explicit statement of the paradox :
Among the wild Indians of America, almost every thing is the labourer’s, 99 parts of a 100 are to be put upon the account of Labour. In England perhaps the Labourer has but 2/3 of all the conveniences of Life, but then the Plenty of these Things is so much greater here that a King of India is not so well lodg’d and fed and cloathed as a Day Labourer of England. [119]
Yet in none of this economic pamphleteering was the paradox posed as a problem of justice — of reconciling property claims against need claims. It was primarily as a problem in justice that the paradox came to occupy such a central place in Smith’s thought as the Wealth of Nations took shape during his period as a professor of jurisprudence during the 1750s and early 1760s. Thus, it is essentially in the natural jurisprudence tradition, rather than in the ‘ economic’ pamphleteers usually described as Smith’s predecessors, that the central question in the Wealth of Nations was set up. Moreover, it was within that tradition that we can see the preparation of a specifically ‘ market’ solution to the paradox, and to its key problem: how to enjoy the benefits of exclusive dominion without excluding the propertyless wage-earners from the means of subsistence. In both Pufendorf’s and Locke’s discussion of the necessity of high prices to call forth adequate supplies of subsistence, and in Locke’s specific identification of property and the division of labour as the key to increasing the productivity of land, we can see how the natural-law theorists had shifted the problem of adjudicating the need claims of the poor and the property claims of the rich beyond a juridical plane and had begun to consider how a market system could be run in such a way that the scarcity constraints forcing a choice between the claims of need and the claims of property could be overcome altogether. Once this key move had been made, it was possible for Smith to short-circuit the laboured jurisprudential account of the origins of a world divided into labourers and the propertied. As long as Western thought on property was dominated by the idea that the world had originally been given to mankind in common, each account of the actual private property of the modern world had been forced to provide a conjectural history which both accounted for and legitimated exclusive individuation. The Pufendorfian and Lockian account of the initial condition of the community as ‘ negative’ rather than ‘ positive ‘, and Locke’s elimination of even tacit consent as a necessary moment in the individuation of the common, cleared the way for Smith to take the distribution of property in his society as historically generated and to move on to a clear analytical demonstration of how markets in subsistence goods and labour could balance themselves out in a manner consistent with strict justice and the natural law of humanity. This becomes clear enough if we look at the entirely cursory way Smith pauses to consider the possibility of a world in which the ‘ whole produce of labour’ could belong to the labourer. In the beginning of the wages chapter, he says that such a state could only occur ‘in that original state of things, which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock’. Had such a state continued, Smith argued, the labourer would have reaped all the productive benefit of the division of labour, but, he tersely concluded, such a state would not have made improvements in the division of labour in the first place, lacking the necessary incentives to capital accumulation. Hence, he said, `it would be to no purpose to trace further ‘ [120] what would have happened had the world not come to be divided into labourers, capitalists and landlords. The world whose economic problems Smith set out to solve was a world where land was already private property; while he certainly used the `conjectural history’ embedded in jurisprudential theories of property in his lectures and in Book V, they themselves enabled him to conclude that a world ‘ before mine and thine’ was a distant historical chapter of no direct relevance to the modern world.
Natural jurisprudence — particularly its distinction between ‘ strict ‘ and ‘ distributive ‘ justice — provided Smith with the language in which his theory of the functions of government in a market society took shape. In this tradition, liberty was defined primarily in a passive sense, as the perfect right to enjoy and improve one’s property free from the encroachments of others. In such a conception, individuals could be virtuous — The Theory of Moral Sentiments showed they were at least capable of propriety — but the society as a whole, as the unintended outcome of discrete acts of self-interest, could not be virtuous. It could stand for `strict justice’, for the rigid enforcement of `to each his own’ — indeed, this was the pillar, as Smith said, which held up the whole edifice. But market society could not guarantee anything more than strict justice. As John Millar put it, justice was the sole allegiance of a ‘ people engrossed by lucrative trades … whose great object is gain, and whose ruling principle is avarice’. Yet this was ‘ not that nice and delicate justice, the offspring of refined humanity, but that coarse though useful virtue, the guardian of contrasts and promises, whose guide is the square and the compass, and whose protector is the gallows ‘. [121]
In the Renaissance civic paradigm, on the other hand, liberty was defined primarily in an active sense, not only as the enjoyment of rights, but as the exercise of active life and citizenship. In such a society, virtue consisted in the restraint of self-interest in the interests of civic good. History in the civic paradigm was understood, not as an account of the unintended consequences of private interest, but as the struggle of civic institutions of republican self-government to survive the cycle of corruption initiated by the republic meeting its fortuna. In such an account, if a society’s individuals were suffused with civic virtue, the society as a whole could be virtuous. The social structure as such could be moralized. It could stand for and embody the ideal of civic participation.[122]
Both of these paradigms exerted a profound hold on the imagination of the Scottish Enlightenment, and on Smith in particular. Yet he never ceased to insist that the civic ideal had rested ultimately on an invidious and unjust delegation of productive labour to slaves. These ancient republics, like the primitive tribes also celebrated for their martial virtue and simplicity of manners, were in fact barbarously poor. There could be no ‘ paradox of the ancient republics’ as there could be a paradox of commercial society. As Smith observed sardonically, in the `ideal republick described in the laws of Plato’, the productivity of labour would have been so low that it would have required a ‘ territory of boundless extent and fertility’ simply to maintain those guardians of martial virtue, the `five thousand idle men (the number of warriors supposed necessary for its defence) together with their women and servants ‘.[123] Modern commercial society was unequal and unvirtuous but it was not unjust. It did not purchase civic virtue at the price of misery for its poorest members. However unequal men might be, in property and citizenship, they could be equal in access to the means to satisfy basic need. In this set of preferences, it is clear that Smith was choosing strict justice over civic virtue, passive liberty over active. These were the preferences of the natural jurisprudence tradition.
[1] WN (1).4. The Oxford English Dictionary defines one of the meanings of the word ‘paradox’ as a statement contrary to received opinion, belief or expectation.
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[2] LJ(A) vi.24.
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[3] “Early Draft” of Part of The Wealth of Nations’ in A. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, P. G. Stein (Oxford, 1978), 4; see also LJ(B) 213.
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[4] LJ(A) vi.28; ED 6.
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[5] WN II.iii.2.
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[6] WN (1).4.
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[7] ED 5; see also WN I.viii.5.
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[8] ED 5-6.
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[9] WN 11.11; see also LJ(A) vi.21, 23; LJ(B) 212; ED 3.
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[10] ED 11; see also LJ(A) vi.28; LJ(B) 213; WN I.i.1-11; on the relation between the division-of-labour analysis and the rhetoric of social inequality in Smith, see Andrew Skinner, A System of Social Science: Papers Relating to Adam Smith (London, 1980), p. 149n; also Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (London, 1978), pp. 88-9.
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[11] WN I.viii.42-4; on the reasons why real, and not merely money wages were increasing, in Smith’s view, see WN I.viii.35, 52; on luxury and its corrupting effect on the poor’s industry, see Ellen Ross, The Debate on Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France: A Study in the Language of Opposition to Change’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1975); S. M. Wade, Jr, The Idea of Luxury in Eighteenth-Century England’ (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1968); John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977).
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[12] On mercantilist’ wage policy, see T. E. Gregory, The Economics of Employment in England, 1660-1713′, Economica, 1 (1921), 37-51; E. S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (New York, 1920) ; M. T. Wermel, The Evolution of the Classical Wage Theory (New York, 1939) ; Peter Mathias, `Leisure and Wages in Theory and Practice’, in hisThe Transformation of England (London, 1979), pp. 148-62; on political economy and the wages of the labouring poor, see A. W. Coats, Changing Attitudes to Labour in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, in M. W. Flinn and T. C. Smout (eds.), Essays in Social History (Oxford, 1974), pp. 78-99; and The Classical Economists and the Labourer’, in A. W. Coats (ed.), The Classical Economists and Economic Policy (London, 1974), pp. 144-79; Richard C. Wiles, ‘The Theory of Wages in Later English Mercantilism’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 21 (1968), 113-26.
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[13] David Hume, Of Commerce’, Philosophical Works, iii, p. 267.
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[14] ED 13; LJ(A) vi.34-5; LJ(B) 215; WN
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[15] See William Petty, Political Arithmetick, in C. H. Hull (ed.), The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1899), i. p. 260; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.5.42-3; [Henry Martyn], Considerations on East India Trade (London, 1690) ; Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kay, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1924), ii, p. 284. See also W. Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought 1660-1776 (London, 1963) ; J. 0. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in 17th-Century England (Princeton, NJ., 1978).
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[16] LJ(A) iii.135; TMS IV .1.10.
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[17] WN IV.vii.b.3; WN v. 1 .b.2 ; WN 1.xi.9.
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[18] Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman : Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1961); F. Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London, 1964); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ., 1975); I. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).
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[19] WN 1.viii.36.
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[20] Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 145-72; ‘Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce and Liberty’, in A. Skinner and T. Wilson (eds.), Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford, 1976), pp. 179-202; ‘ The European, or Cosmopolitan, Dimension in Hume’s Science of Politics’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1 (1978), 57-60.
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[21] Andrew Fletcher, ‘ A Discourse of Government with Relation to Militias’, in Selected Political Writings and Speeches, ed. D. Daiches (Edinburgh, 1979). On the militia debate in England and Scotland, see L. G. Schwoerer, ‘No Standing Armies ! ‘ : The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1974) ; J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue (London, 1965); John Robertson, ‘ The Improving Citizen: Militia Debates and Political Thought in the Scottish Enlightenment’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1980), and also his essay in this volume, pp. 137-78 below; Nicholas Phillipson, ‘ The Scottish Enlightenment’, in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 19-40.
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[22] WN V .i.a.1-20; LJ(A) iv.79; Li(B) 335.
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[23] WN V .i.f.50-3; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 458,498.
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[24] WN II I.iv.13-16 on the conversion of feudal lords’ expenditure from hospitality’ to baubles and trinkets ‘ ; also WN II.ii.42.
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[25] WN I.ii.2; LJ(A) vi.46; LJ(B) 220.
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[26] TMS IV.1.6-10; WN III.iv .10.
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[27] The great scramble of human society’ is at LJ(A) iv.163. For the whole argument, see the whole of Part I, section III, chapter II of TMS, ‘Of the Origin of Ambition, and of the Distinction of Ranks’.
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[28] WN I.xi.c.7.
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[29] Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, p. 203. See Eugene Rotwein’s Introduction’ to David Hume, Economic Writings, ed. E. Rotwein (Edinburgh, 1955), ch. 2, The Outlines of the Natural History: Hume’s Economic Psychology’, pp. xxxii—liii.
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[30] WN II.iii.12; also LJ(B) 207-9. On the influence of Scotland’s status as a province upon Scottish thought, see N. Phillipson, Culture and Society in the 18th Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in L. Stone (ed.), The University in Society, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ., 1974), ii, pp. 407-48; on Scottish economic backwardness and its periphery status in the metropolitan economy, see T. C. Smout, Centre and Periphery in History; with Some Thoughts on Scotland as a Case Study’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 18 (1980), 256-71; and also his ‘Scotland and England: Is Dependency a Symptom or a Cause of Underdevelopment?’, Review, 3 (1980), 601-30, and Immanuel Wallerstein’s answer, ‘One Man’s Meat: The Scottish Leap Forward’, Review, 3 (1980), 631-40; also E. J. Hobsbawm, `Scottish Reformers of the 18th Century and Capitalist Agriculture’, in E. J. Hobsbawm (ed.), Peasants in History: Essays in Honour of Daniel Thorner (Calcutta, 1980), pp. 3-29. On Highland backwardness, see A. T. Youngson, After the Forty-Five: The Economic Impact on the Scottish Highlands (Edinburgh, 1973).
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[31] TMS IV.1.8.
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[32] TMS VII.ii.1.20-1; on Stoicism in Smith, see A. L. Macfie, The Individual in Society: Papers on Adam Smith (London, 1967), pp. 72-81; J. Ralph Lindgren, The Social Philosophy of Adam Smith (The Hague, 1973), p. 35.
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[33] ‘Letters to the Editors of the Edinburgh Review’ (1755), in EPS 13.
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[34] The passage from Rousseau is from A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in J. J. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole, rev. J. H. Brumfitt and J. C. Hall (London, 1973), p. 105. All of the quotations from Smith are from the ‘invisible hand’ passage in TMS IV.1.10; see also WN IV.ii.9; on the Smith—Rousseau relationship, see E. G. West, ‘Adam Smith and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality: Inspiration or Provocation?’, Journal of Economic Issues, 5 (1971), 56-70.
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[35] . Mandeville, A Letter to Dion, Occasion’d by his Book call’ d Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (London, 1732), pp. 36-7. For a commentary, see Jacob Viner, ‘Introduction to Bernard Mandeville, “A Letter to Dion” (1732) ‘, in The Long View and the Short: Studies in Economic Theory and Policy (Glencoe, Illinois, 1958), pp. 332-42; and George Davie, ‘Berkeley, Hume, and the Central Problem of Scottish Philosophy’, in D. F. Norton, N. Capaldi and W. L. Robison (eds.), McGill Hume Studies (San Diego, Calif., 1979), pp. 43-62.
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[36] TMS VII.ii.4.6-13.
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[37] Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, p. 66n; Hume, Treatise, p. 365. For a discussion of similar ideas in Malebranche and their influence on Hume, see Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 8-10, and ‘Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in S. C. Brown (ed.), The Philosophers of the Enlightenment, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, xii (Hassocks, Sussex, 1979), pp. 99-101. For an interesting discussion of the origins of the amour de soi—amour propre dualism in French philosophical and moral thought, see Nannerl 0. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J., 1980).
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[38] WN II.iii.28; WN I.xi.c.7. Albert Hirschman argues that Smith collapses the distinction between self-love and self-esteem; see A. 0. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ., 1977), pp. 100-13.
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[39] T MS I.iii.3.5.
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[40] WN IV.iii.c.9; I.x.c.27; I.x.p.10.
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[41] David Hume, ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’, Philosophical Works, iii, p. 385. Speaking about domestic slavery, Hume remarked: Some passionate admirers of the ancients, and zealous partizans of civil liberty, (for these sentiments, as they are, both of them, in the main, extremely just, are found to be almost inseparable) cannot forbear regretting the loss of this institution; and whilst they brand all submission to the government of a single person with the harsh denomination of slavery, they would gladly reduce the greater part of mankind to real slavery and subjection.’ Compare this with Lj(A) vi.6.
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[42] Andrew Fletcher, The Second Discourse Concerning the Affairs of Scotland Written in the Year 1698′, in Selected Political Writings, ed. D. Daiches, pp. 46-58; Robert Wallace, A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Antient and Modern Times; in which the Superior Populousness of Antiquity is Maintained. With an Appendix, Containing Additional Observations on the Same Subject, and Some Remarks on Mr Hume’ s Political Discourse, Of the Populousness of Antient Nations (Edinburgh, 1753), pp. 22-4; James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, ed. A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1966), i, p. 51; John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks’, in W. C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow 17351801: His Life and Thought and his Contributions to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 300-4.
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[43] Karl Polanyi, ‘ The Economy as Instituted Process’, in K. Polanyi, C. M. Arensberg and H. W. Pearson (eds.), Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory (New York, 1957), p. 255.
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[44] See, for example, the critique by James Anderson, Observations on the Means of Exciting a Spirit of National Industry (Edinburgh, 1777), p. 355; also A Letter from Governor Pownall to Adam Smith [1776], in Smith, Correspondence, p. 340.
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[45] E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 50 (1971), 76-136; also A. W. Coats, ‘ Contrary Moralities: Plebs, Paternalists and Political Economists’, Past and Present, no. 58 (1973), 130-3; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘ The Many Faces of Moral Economy: A Contribution to a Debate’, Past and Present, no. 58 (1973), 161-8; and P. S. Atiyah, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (Oxford, 1979), pp. 62-5. On the European context, see Charles Tilly, ‘Food Supply and Public Order in Modern Europe’, in C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1975), pp. 380-445.
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[46] WN I.x.c.62; W N IV .v .a.6.
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[47] Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV , 2 vols. (The Hague, 1976), i, pp. 90-101; on French police’ in general, see Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1974). For a description of the general European mercantilist’ provisioning policy, see Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, trans. M. Shapiro, 2 vols. (London, 1935), ii, pp. 80-112.
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[48] The cited material is from Quesnay’s Encyclopedie article, Corn’, and from the ‘General Maxims for the Economic Government of an Agricultural Kingdom’, as translated in Ronald L. Meek (ed.), The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Translation (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 84-6, 235, 255-9; for the original texts, see Francois Quesnay et la Physiocratie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1958); see also Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976) ; Georges Weulersse, Le Mouvement physiocratique en France (de 1756 a 1770), 2 vols. (Paris, 1910).
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[49] Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy, i, pp. 152-7, vol. 2, pp. 591-606; see also Keith M. Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, 1975); I. F. Knight, The Geometric Spirit : The Abbe de Condillac and the French Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn., 1968) ; Robert D. Harris, Necker: Reform Statesman of the Ancien Regime (Berkeley, Calif., 1979) ; James J. McLain, The Economic Writings of Du Pont de Nemours (New York, 1977); Darline Gay Levy, The Ideas and Careers of Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet (Chicago, 1980) ; Ira 0. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1977), particularly the chapter on ” Moeurs”, “Lois”, and Economics’, i, pp. 435-515.
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[50] For Diderot’s positions on the law of corporations, see W. H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labour from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 65-72; also A. Strugnell, Diderot’s Politics: A Study of the Evolution of Diderot’s Political Thought (The Hague, 1973); H. C. Payne, The Philosophes and the People (New Haven, Conn., 1976), p. 146.
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[51] Ferdinando Galiani, Dialogues sur le Commerce des Bleds (London, 1770), p. 2. On Galiani, see Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy, vol. 1, pp. 594-606; and his `Introduction’ in La Bagarre : Galiani’s ‘ Lost’ Parody, ed. S. L. Kaplan (The Hague, 1979) ; Franco Venturi, The Position of Galiani between the Encyclopedists and the Physiocrats’, in Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, trans. S. Corsi (London, 1972), pp. 180-97; M. Minerbi, Diderot, Galiani e la polemica sulla fisiocrazia (1767-1771) ‘, Studi Storici, 14 (1973), 148-63; Philip Koch, Introduction and Appendix B, The Dialogues after Publication’, in Fernando Galiani, Dialogues entre M. Marquis De Roquemaure, et Ms. Le Chevalier Zanobi : The Autograph Manuscript of the ‘ Dialogues sue le Commerce des Bleds’, ed. P. Koch (Frankfurt-on-Main, 1968), pp. 1-51,316-41.
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[52] Rene Girard, L’ Abbe Terray et la liberti du commerce des grains, 1769-1774 (Paris, 1924).
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[53] Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy, ii, p. 606; on Turgot, see Condorcet, The Life of M. Turgot (London, 1787) ; D. Dakin, Turgot and the Ancien Regime in France (London, 1939) ; R. L. Meek (ed.), Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics (Cambridge, 1973).
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[54] On Steuart’s sojourn in Germany, see Paul Chamley, Documents Relatifs a Sir James Steuart (Paris, 1965) ; Andrew Skinner’s `Introduction’ to his edition of Steuart’s Political Oeconomy, (Edinburgh, 1966) ; on Polizeiwissenschaft, see F. L. Knemeyer, Polizei’, Economy and Society, 9 (1980), 168-96; A. W. Small, The Cameralists (Chicago, 1909); M. Walker, ‘Rights and Functions: The Social Categories of Eighteenth-Century German Jurists and Cameralists’, Journal of Modern History, 50 (1978), 234-51.
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[55] Steuart, Political Oeconomy, ii, p. 238; also ibid., p. 254.
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[56] James Steuart, ‘A Dissertation on the Policy of Grain With a View to a Plan for preventing Scarcity of Exorbitant Prices in the Common Markets of England’ and ‘ Considerations on the Interests of the County of Lanark in Scotland’, in Works, Political, Metaphisical, and Chronological of the Late Sir James Steuart of Coltness, Bart., 6 vols. (London, 1805), v, pp. 347-77, 286-345. For similar plans in Scotland in the period, see the pamphlet The Causes of the Scarcity of Oat-Meal in the Public Market of Glasgow; with an easy Method proposed for preventing that Evil in Time coming, in a Letter to a Friend (Edinburgh, 1763). On Scottish grain prices, see Rosalind Mitchison, ‘ The Movements of Scottish Corn Prices in the 17th and 18th Centuries’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 18 (1965), 278-91; on the response amongst landowners, see Rosalind Mitchison, ‘ Scottish Landowners and Communal Responsibility in the 18th Century’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1 (1978), 41-5; and T. C. Smout, ‘Famine and Famine-relief in Scotland’, in L. M. Cullen and T. C. Smout (eds.), Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic and Social History 1600-1900 (Edinburgh, 1976), pp. 21-31.
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[57] 13 George III, c. 43 (1772).
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[58] WN IV.v.b.53. It was in connection with the free importation clauses of the Corn Bill for Scotland of 1777, an amendment to the 1772 British Corn Law, that James Steuart found that the ‘Glasgow Theorists’ had taken the advice of Smith, who in the Wealth of Nations had ‘ pointed in favour of free Importation’. See Steuart’s memorial on the corn laws, 14 October 1777, in Appendix B to A. Skinner’s edition of the Political Oeconomy, ii, pp. 737-8. For the arguments of the Glasgow manufacturers, see the following pamphlets : Memorial for the Merchants, Traders and Manufacturers of Glasgow (n.p.; n.d.) [Glasgow, 1777]; Corn-Bill Hints in Answer to the Memorial for the Merchants, Traders and Manufacturers of the City of Glasgow (Glasgow, n.d. [1777]); Thoughts Occasioned by Reading a Memorial for the Merchants, Traders and Manufacturers of Glasgow, dated 2d May 1777, respecting the Proposed New Corn Bill, presently depending in Parliament (Edinburgh, n.d. [1777]). In connection with the debate on the Corn Law Amendment, Thomas Reid, Smith’s successor as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, also wrote an interesting paper answering the Literary Society’s question: ‘ Whether the Storing and Warehousing of foreign Grain or Meal for Reexportation be highly prejudicial to the Interest of this Country, and whether it ought to be prevented if possible?’, Aberdeen University Library, Birkwood MSS., MS. 306113, fols. 1-13.
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[59] WN IV.v.b.39.
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[60] WN IV.v.b.39. The traditional theory of justice framing Smith’s discourse of free trade in subsistence goods during dearth and famines has been overlooked by both Salim Rashid, ‘The Policy of Laissez-faire during Scarcities’, Economic Journal, 90 (1980), 493-583, and Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford, 1981) ; Smith’s discourse was not about the conditions of actual famines, which belonged to the discourse on grave necessity which ‘ breaks all laws’.
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[61] David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd edn, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), p. 186; see also Li (A) iii.144: ‘But in time of necessity the people will break through all laws. In a famine it often happens that they will break open granaries and force the owners to sell at what they think a reasonable price.’
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[62] WN IV.v.b.3.
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[63] WN IV .ix.48-9 ; also WN III.iv.1-6 ; also WN I.xi.p.4.
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[64] WN IV.ix.4.
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[65] See for example Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, p. 56; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973) ; Robert Wallace, A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, pp. 22-3; Lord Kames, ‘A Great City’, in Sketches of the History of Man, 4 vols. (4th edn, Edinburgh, 1788), iii, pp. 126-34; Hume, `Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’, p. 432; also Of Public Credit’, pp. 364-5, for discussion of the impact of the public debt system in drawing a mighty confluence of people and riches to the capital, by the sums levied in the provinces to pay the interest’.
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[66] Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy, ii, p. 609.
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[67] On Linguet, see Levy, The Ideas and Careers of Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet, pp. 105, 106, 121; Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy, pp. 476, 479. The economiste Abbe Roubaud wrote in his Representations aux magistrate, contenant exposition raisonnee des faits relatifs a la liberte du commerce des graines (n.p.) in 1769 that ‘needs are not rights at all, and rights are before everything, and everything that violates rights is violence and tyranny…I will add that the right of a single person must prevail over the interests of all without rights, because justice is the supreme, universal and unique law’, pp. 395, 399-400. Linguet’s answer in his ‘Suite de la lettre de M. Linguet a M. L’Abbe Roubaud’ was that right was not in property, but in life: ‘The most vital of all properties is that in life. There are no longer any rights, there no longer can be any when it is compromised by hunger.’ (See Levy, Linguet, p. 121.)
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[68] Hume, Treatise, p. 494; Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, pp. 146-7; see also David Miller, Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought (Oxford, 1981) ; K. Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith(Cambridge, 1981); Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics; James Moore, ‘Hume’s Theory of Justice and Property’, Political Studies, 24 (1976), 103-19.
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[69] Hume, Treatise, pp. 492-3.
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[70] Ibid., p. 497.
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[71] Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 194.
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[72] LJ(A) i.14-16; also LYA) v.142; see also Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics, pp. 51-2.
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[73] TMS II.ii.1-10; also TMS II.ii.3.4. On natural’ virtues of pity and generosity, see Hume, Treatise, p. 482; Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, the whole of Section III, Part I, `Of Justice’ ; also ‘Of the Original Contract’, Philosophical Works, iii, pp. 454-5, and ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, p. 300.
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[74] TMS VII .ii.1 .10 : Smith’s discussion of the distinction in Grotius between strict justice or justitia expletrix, which consists in abstaining from what is another’s, and in doing voluntarily whatever we can with propriety be forced to do’, andjustitiaattributrix,’ which consists in proper beneficence, in the becoming use of what is our own, and in the applying it to these purposes either of charity or generosity, to which it is most suitable in our situation, that it should be applied’.
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[75] WN V .i.b.2.
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[76] TMSVI.ii.2.16-18; WN IV .ii.43 : `To 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.’ Hume’s own defence of the usefulness of theoretical models in politics is in The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, Philosophical Works, iii, p. 481; see also the introduction to Of Commerce’.
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[77] T MS VII.iv .37 ; LI(A) 1.1-4; Lj(B) 5, 203.
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[78] The Catholic origins of the debate were evident to Condorcet when he accused Necker of endorsing the Jesuit’ principle of endorsing theft in times of necessity. See Baker, Condorcet, p. 61. On the Jesuits, see J. Brodrick, The Economic Morals of the Jesuits (Oxford, 1934). In Galiani’s case, Raymond de Roover called attention to his schooling in scholastic jurisprudence and trade theory; see Raymond de Roover, Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. J. Kirshner (Chicago, 1974), pp. 327, 334. There was an important Jesuit—Jansenist debate on the obligation of charity, the memory of which was still alive in eighteenth-century France; see Robin Briggs, The Catholic Puritans : Jansenists and Rigorists in France’, in D. Pennington and K. Thomas (eds.), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978), pp. 333-54. On the impact of this debate in England, see Margaret Sampson, Property and Poverty in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England : An Intellectual History with Particular Reference to Doctrines Permitting Theft in Cases of Extreme Necessity’ (unpublished fellowship dissertation, Cambridge University, 1980).
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[79] St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 38, ed. M. Lefebure, general ed. T. Gilby (London, 1975), 2a.2ae.q.66.a.7, in answer to the question `Is theft justifiable in cases of necessity?’ The key texts on property in the Summa are 2a.2a.q.66 and la.2ae.q.105. The passages in Aristotle on which Aquinas had drawn are Politics, 1262b and 1265a. The radical statement of St Basil of Caesaraea discussed here was a paraphrase and interpretation of the Stoic example of the public theatre: “‘Rich people who regard common property as their own simply because they have been the first to occupy it are like those who prevent others from coming to the public games by arriving at the arena first and so appropriating what is meant for common use.” But it is not legitimate to preclude others from using common property.’ 2a.2ae.q.66.a.2. M. Lefebure, “` Private Property” According to St Thomas and Recent Papal Encyclicals’, in Aquinas, Summa, vol. 38, pp. 271-83. See also A. Parel, Aquinas’ Theory of Property’, in A. Parel and T. Flanagan (eds.), Theories of Property: Aristotle to the Present (Calgary, 1979); R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979), ch. 1. For a modern influence of Aquinas on the moral theory of famines, see Peter Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, in Peter Laslett and James Fishkin (eds.), Philosophy, Politics and Society, 5th ser. (Oxford, 1979), pp. 30-2.
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[80] Hugo Grotius, Of the Law of War and Peace, in Three Books, trans. F. W. Kelsey, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1927), Book 2, ch. 2, ‘Of Things Which Belong to Man in Common’, particularly 2.2.6.4; also Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, ch. 3, especially p. 80, and James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge, 1980), ch. 4, ‘ The Background to Chapter Five of the Second Treatise’. Our account of property theories in the natural jurisprudence tradition has relied heavily on the guidance provided by these two latter books. See also James Tully, Current Thinking About Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Political Theory’, Historical Journal, 24 (1981), 475-84. On Grotius, see Richard Schlatter, Private Property: The History of an Idea (London, 1952), ch. 6; Francis De Pauw, Grotius and the Law of the Sea (Brussels, 1965) ; Karl Olivecrona, Law as Fact (2nd edn, London, 1971).
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[81] R. L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 12-16, and in a broader sense Forbes, Hume’ s Philosophical Politics, ch. 1, The Experimental Method in Morals: The Natural Law Forerunners’.
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[82] Grotius, Of the Law of War and Peace, 2.2.2.1-5.
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[83] Hugo Grotius, Of the Law of Prize and Booty, trans. G. L. Williams (Oxford, 1950), ch. 12, Justness of the Case if the War were Private’. See also Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 60-1.
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[84] Grotius, Of the Law of War and Peace, 2.2.19.
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[85] Ibid., 1.1.2.5
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[86] R. Filmer, Observations Concerning the Originall of Government upon Mr Hobs ‘ Leviathan’ , Mr Milton against Salmasius’ , H. Grotius ‘ De jure Belli’, in Patriarcha, and other Political Works, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford, 1949), pp. 273-4. On Filmer, see James Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto, 1979), and John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge, 1969), ch. 6.
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[87] Samuel Pufendorf, On the Law of Nature and Nations, 2.6.6; also his earlier The Elements of Natural jurisprudence, trans. W. A. Oldfather (Oxford, 1931), Bk. II, Observation IV, section 2. Pufendorf was incensed by the Grotian idea that the case of necessity should be theorized only as an exception: `when the necessity has merely to do with the property of the other, or when our life can be saved only by the property of the other, there is scarcely any doubt but that, when no other means are available, this property can be appropriated by force, and against the will of the owner, who is not under pressure of the same necessity. And this is not on the basis of some exception, added or understood in the pact establishing private ownership in the first instance, namely, that, in the case of necessity, community of goods was to return.’ It is important to note that the most authoritative Scottish legal textbook of the time, Viscount Stair’s The Institutions of the Law of Scotland (first published in 1681, second, enlarged edition in 1693), contained an endorsement of the Grotian tradition of legitimate use of force in case of grave necessity in a way which was moving closer to Pufendorfs formulation and away from Grotius’s ‘ benign reservation’ theory: ‘ There is also in property implied an obligation of commerce, or exchange, in case of necessity; every man cannot have actually all necessaries without exchange, which being denied in cases of necessity, or where there is no common authority, it may be taken by force … yea, there is implied in property, an obligation to give, in cases of necessity, to these who have not wherewith to exchange, and cannot otherwise preserve their life, but the obligation of recompense when they are able . .. and this is the ground of the obligation, to aliment the poor, which though it also floweth from the obligation of charity, yet… that obligation hath no determinate bounds, but is left to the discretion of the giver, not of the demander, and so can be no warrant for taking by force, and without the proprietor’s consent’ (James Dalrymple, Viscount of Stair, The Institutions of the Law of Scotland (1693), ed. D. M. Walker (Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1981), 2.1.6).
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On Pufendorfs position, see Peter Stein, Legal Evolution (Cambridge, 1980) ; Hans Medick, Naturzustand und Naturgeschichte der burgerlichen Gesellschaft : Die Urspriinge der burgerlichen Sozialtheorie als Geschichtsphilosophie und Sozialwissenschaft bei Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke und Adam Smith (Gottingen, 1973) ; H. Welzel, Die Naturrechtslehre Samuel Pufendorfs (Berlin, 1958); Iring Fetscher, ‘ Der gesellschaftliche ” Naturzustand” und das Menschenbild bei Hobbes, Pufendorf, Cumberland, und Rousseau : ein Beitrag zur Standortbestimmung der politischen Theorie Rousseaus’, Schmollers j ahrbuchfiir Gesetzgebung, V erwaltung, und Volkswirtschaft, 80 (1960), 650-5; Horst Denzer, Moralphilosophie und Naturrecht bei Samuel Pufendorf, Eine geistes- and wissenschaftgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Geburt des Naturrechts aus der Praktischen Philosophie (Munich, 1972).
[88] Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 3.3.5; 3.3.15-17; 3.4.6.
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[89] Ibid., 3.5.3. A man—thing relationship thus could not be construed as a right, since `things are under no obligation to present themselves for man’s use’. A right thus presupposed a response by other men, i.e. their expressed or tacit consent. On the correlativity principle, see David Lyons, ‘ The Correlativity of Rights and Duties’, Nous, 4 (1970), 45-55; Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 159-60.
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[90] Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 4.4.14; 4.6.6. Pufendorf did not refer to Suarez openly, but simply remarked that the difficulty involved has long ago been met by learned men, who have drawn a distinction between a preceptive and a permissive law of nature, and pointed out a different meaning of the expression “law of nations ” ‘. For Suarez’s discussion of the different meanings of natural law, see Francisco Suarez, A Treatise on Laws and God the Lawgiver, trans. G. L. Williams, A. Brown and J. Waldron (Oxford, 1944), 2.14.2-16. See Filmer’s criticism of Suarez in Patriarcha, pp. 74-8, and of Grotius in Observations Concerning the Originall of Government, p. 266; Dunn, The Political Thought of Locke, p. 60 and pp. 60-1n. On Suarez, see Reijo Wilenius, The Social and Political Theory of Francisco Suarez (Helsinki, 1963) ; Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 54-6; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1978), ii, ch. 5, The Revival of Thomism’, pp. 151-4, 158-61, 176-7; also Tully, A Discourse of Property, pp. 66-8. For the problem of subjective rights, see M. Villey, La Formation de la Pens& juridique Moderne (Paris, 1968) and Tuck’s amendment of Villey’s position in Natural Rights Theories, ch. 1, The First Rights Theory’ ; especially on Aquinas, pp. 16-17.
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[91] Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 4.4.2; see 0. Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800, trans. E. Barker, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1934), i, p. 103, and note in ii, pp. 293-4.
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[92] Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 4.4.7. `I suppose’, remarked Pufendorf, that perfect men are more easily imagined than found’. Pufendorf depicted the state of nature as inhabited by men who were like miserable animals (2.1.8) and declared that the complaint of the masses about the burdens and drawbacks of civil states could be met in no better way than by picturing to their eyes the drawbacks of a state of nature’ (2.2.2).
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[93] Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 4.4.12-13; for a critique of the Grotian first division story, see 4.6.2.
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[94] Ibid., 4.r.13; 4.4.9.
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[95] Ibid., 4.4.6-7. Pufendorf’s account of the departure from negative community was drawing here on Aristotle’s critique of the Platonic positive community of property in Politics, 1263a.
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[96] Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 4.4.7-8.
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[97] Ibid., 5.1.14. Pufendorf cites Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1133a—b and Politics, 1257a; see Law of Nature, 5.1.12. On Pufendorf’s condemnation of luxury, see ibid., 2.4, ‘ The Duties of Man Towards Himself’, section 10: ‘ what has been secured should not be regarded as anything but helps for our need and means for deserving well of others. On no account should the mind be solely concerned or satisfied with the mere possession and care of property, and the infinite. concern of accumulating it.’
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[98] Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 4.5.9. But compare this with 4.4.6, where Pufendorf agrees that the initial abundance is at best a very short-lived phenomenon. See also 4.4.7. On the requirement of corporeal occupation by persons, see 4.4.5; 4.5.8; 4.6.8-9; 4.9.7.
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[99] Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 5.1.8-10.
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[100] Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 5.1.15. The products of land could have a stable price only, argued Pufendorf, if their price was ‘sufficiently fixed by a full year compensating for a lean one’.
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[101] On the interpretation of the meaning of property ‘ in Locke, see Tully, A Discourse on Property, pp. 11-12, 61, 111-16 and 122. Tully claims that the very first lines of chapter 5, `Men, being once born, have a right to their Preservation, and consequently to Meat and Drink, and such other things, as Nature affords for their subsistence’, make mankind who are collectively in receipt of the world as God’s gift a positive community (A Discourse on Property, p. 130). He argues that this interpretation was needed by Locke as a consistency requirement for Locke’s theory of revolution (ibid.), that Locke was a radical, and it is only with a natural standard of property to appeal to that a radical can criticise and justify opposition to prevailing forms of property’ (ibid., p. 89), and that Locke in fact differed from Aquinas in using doctrine of the positive community for radical purposes, since Aquinas’s natural standard mirrored the existing property relations in order to justify them (ibid., pp. 120-1). Locke would have accepted the negative-community interpretation had he wished to justify unlimited accumulation’ as Macpherson suggested he did (ibid., pp. 152-3). Locke’s natural standard for the distribution of property rights had to be a positive community and cover more than grave necessity and dire need, because his commitment that happiness required plenty and security would have led him to a conservative theory if the inference is made that only some can, or do, have the requisite plenty’ (ibid., p. 101). It is not clear, however, that even if we could accept Tully’s claim that Locke was an unambiguously radical thinker who systematically made these contentions, we should designate this normative package a positive community theory. One should not forget that the negative community theory was still meant to be a new interpretation of community theory (`mankind in common’) against Adamite private property theories.
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[102] Among modern commentators Locke’s theory of property in the state of nature was understood as a negative-community theory by Schlatter, Private Property, p. 153; Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke, pp. 67-8n.: In place of the crude antithesis between everything belonging to everybody (with its logical incoherences so doggedly mocked by Filmer) or everything belonging to Adam or his heir, the world is presented as belonging to nobody but available for the appropriation of all.’ See also Patrick Kelly, Locke and Filmer: Was Laslett So Wrong After All?’, Locke Newsletter, no. 8 (1977), pp. 84 and 90n. Richard Tuck, who sees Locke’s theory as Grotian in shape, seems strongly to support a negative-community reading of Locke via his insistence that Locke and James Tyrell were aware of each other’s work on property theory and that Tyrell’s Patriarcha non Monarcha of 1681 in fact incorporated some of Locke’s ideas on property; see Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 154-5, 169-72, 169-70n. As for Barbeyrac, he did not use the scholastic language of communities, but he did not object to Pufendorf’s formulation in any of his notes, despite its conspicuous place in the Pufendorfian text. See Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 4.4.3.n.2 and also 4.6.2.n.1 ; 4.4.9.n.2.
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[103] Locke, Two Treatises, 2.5.33: Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of Land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other Man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use.’ John Dunn has suggested that the abundance hypothesis in Locke might have originated in an aside in Filmer’s critique of Hobbes: Filmer, Observations concerning the Originall of Government, p. 242; Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke, p. 71n.
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[104] Locke, Two Treatises, 2.5.49. For Locke, as for Grotius and Pufendorf, it was the Ocean, that great and still remaining Common of Mankind’, which represented the uncorrupted survival of negative community: ibid., 2.5.30.9-10.
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[105] Locke, Two Treatises, 2.5.4.6; also 2.5.3.1.
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[106] Ibid., 2.5.36.
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[107] Ibid., 1.4.42; 2.6; 3.132; Tully, A Discourse on Property, pp. 131-2.
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[108] Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford, 1954), Essay 7, `Is the Binding Force of the Law of Nature Perpetual and Universal?’, p. 195. On Locke’s personal attitude to the poor, see Lady Masham’s testimony in M. Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London, 1957), p. 426; ‘ Poor Law Reform Proposal’ [1697], in H. R. Fox-Bourne, The Life of John Locke, 2 vols. (London, 1876), ii, pp. 376-93.
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[109] John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke, p. 217. See also Locke’s statement in his note on ‘ Moralists’ : Justice the greatest and difficultest duty being thus established the rest will not be hard. The next sort of virtues are those which relate to society and so border on Justice but yet are not comprised under direct articles of contract such as are Civility, Charity, Liberality.’ T. Sargentich (ed.), ‘ Locke and Ethical Theory: Two MS. Pieces’, Locke Newsletter, no. 5 (1974), p. 28. C. B. Macpherson’s claim in his The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford, 1972), p. 221, that in Locke the `traditional view that property involved social obligations’ was undermined seems to be misplaced. For a critique of Macpherson’s ahistorical and now technically dated analysis, see Alan Ryan, ‘ Locke and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie’, Political Studies, 13 (1965), 219-30; Edward J. Hundert, ‘ The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke Between Ideology and History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 33 (1972), 33-44; Richard Ashcraft, ‘ The Two Treatises and the Exclusion Crisis : The Problem of Lockean Political Theory as Bourgeois Ideology’, in J. G. A. Pocock and R. Ashcraft, John Locke: Papers read at a Clark Library Seminar, 10 December 1977 (Los Angeles, 1980), pp. 25-114.
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[110] The Venditio’ (1695) is reprinted in Dunn, ‘ Justice and the Interpretation of Locke’s Political Theory’, Political Studies, 16 (1968), 84-7. Locke was paraphrasing the classical parable of the Alexandrian grain merchant who sails to the famine-ridden but rich island of Rhodes and who has to choose whether or not he should tell the Rhodians that other ships are also on their way. See Cicero, De Officiis, 3.1.2, and Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 5.3.4, and also Jean Barbeyrac’s note on Pufendorf’s passage.
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[111] Locke, Two Treatises, 2.5.50; 2.5.37; 2.5.46. Note that the consent of mankind establishing money did not, in practice, extend its validity to cases of necessity: ‘in a siege silver may not be of equal value to gunpowder and in a famine gold may not he worth its weight in Bran’, Locke’s Early Manuscript on Interest’ [1688], in William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought, 1660-1776 (London, 1963), p. 279.
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[112] Locke, Two Treatises, 2.5.48.
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[113] Ibid., 2.5.34.
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[114] Ibid., 2.5.34.
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[115] See Barbeyrac’s footnotes to Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 4.4.3.n.4; 4.4.4.n.2; 4.4.9.n.2; 4.6.2.n. 1. See also Gershom Carmichael, De Officio Hominis et Civis et juxta Legem Naturalem, Libri Duo. Supplementis et Observationibus in Academicae Juventutis usum auxit et illustravit Gerschomus Carmichael (Edinburgh, 1724), Note 1 to 1.12. Carmichael understood the original community of mankind in receipt of God’s gift as a negative community and criticized Pufendorf for hesitating in the matter. He accepted Locke’s labour theory of the basis of private ownership. Barbeyrac sharply criticized this move despite his general admiration for Locke’s theory of property; see Barbeyrac’s censures on Carmichael’s n. 6 to Pufendorf, De Officio, 1.2.6 in his own n. 2 to Pufendorf, Law of Nature, 4.6.2. On Carmichael, see the essay of James Moore and Michael Silverthorne in this volume, pp. 73-87 below.
See also George Turnbull’s note to J. C. Heineccius, A Methodical System of Universal Law: or, The Laws of Nature and Nations deduced from Certain Principles, and applied to Proper Cases, trans. G. Turnbull, 2 vols. (London, 1743), 1.9.235-6 and notes. Smith used H. Coccejus, Hugonis Grotii de jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres, cum Annotatis Auctoris, nec non 5. F. Gronovii Notis, et 5. Barbeyracii Animadversionibus, Commentariis in super locupletissimus Henr. L. B. Cocceii, published as Grotium Illustratum by his son, Samuel L. B. De Coccejus, together with his own Duodecimo Dissertatio exhibet Auctoris Novum Systema Institutiae Naturalis et Romanae in quo Universum Ins Romanum Nova Methodo ad artem Redigitur, 5 vols. (Lausanne, 1751), which directed the reader to those of Barbeyrac’s notes on Pufendorf’s Law of Nature which included the famous references to Locke. The comments of the elder Coccejus on Grotius’s 2.2.1-6 discuss the problem of negative community in an interesting way, with reference to Pufendorf’s 4.4.13 and the exclusion from property in land (Coccejus, vol. ii, pp. 72-97).
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[116] John Locke, ‘ Note on Labour’ (1693), Bodleian Library, Lovelace Collection, MS. Film 77, fols. 310 11, as reproduced almost in entirety in Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, pp. 231 n, 235-6n. Note Locke’s contrast between ‘ the arts and instruments of Luxury and Vanity’ and honest and useful industry’, pp. 235- 6n.
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[117] Locke, Two Treatises, 2.5.40. In contrast to Rousseau, Locke celebrated the invention of iron-melting and labour-saving machines. See the entry in his diary for 8 Feb. 1677 in Lord King, The Life of John Locke with Extracts from his Correspondence, Journals and Commonplace Books, 2 vols. (London, 1830), pp. 162-3. Compare this with Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, pp. 83-5, and the fragments on machines and needs in Fragments Politiques’ in Oeuvres Completes, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond, iii (Paris, 1964), pp. 525-6. Locke’s later statements on the productivity of human labour constitute an amendment of his earlier zero-sum game’ image of the world in Essay 8, ‘ Is Every Man’s Own Interest the Basis of the Law of Nature?’, in Essays on the Law of Nature, p. 211.
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[118] 118 Locke, Two Treatises, 2.5.40.
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[119] [Henry Martyn], Considerations upon East India Trade (London, 1701), in Select Collection of Early English Tracts of Commerce, ed. J. R. McCulloch (London, 1856), pp. 593-4.
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[120] WN 1.viii.5. On Smith’s position on the conjectural history of property in a Lockean perspective, see James Moore, ‘ Locke and the Scottish Jurists’, unpublished paper presented to the ‘ John Locke and the Political Thought of the 1680s’ symposium of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought and the Folger Institute for Renaissance and Eighteenth-Century Studies, Washington, D.C., 21-23 March 1980.
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[121] John Millar, ‘Political Consequences of the Revolution’, in An Historical View of English Government, 4 vols. (London, 1812), iv, p. 94.
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[122] The active and passive distinction in respect of liberty is brought out well in J. H. Hexter, Republic, Virtue, Liberty, and the Political Universe of J. G. A. Pocock’, in On Historians (London, 1979), pp. 255-303; see also J. G. A. Pocock’s reflections on the relation between jurisprudential and civic humanist discourse in the introduction to the Italian edition of the Machiavellian Moment, published in English as The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology’, Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981), 49-72; and the same author’s `Reconstructing the Traditions: Quentin Skinner’s Historians’ Theory of Political Thought’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 3 (1979), 95-114; ‘Virtues, Rights and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought’, Political Theory, 9 (1981), 353-68; and `Authority and Property: The Question of Liberal Origins’, in Barbara C. Malamont (ed.), After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of 3. H. Hexter (Manchester, 1980), pp. 331-54. See also Pocock’s essay in this volume, pp. 235-52 below.
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[123] WNIII.ii.9; compare with Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, p. 290. The general question Can a Body Politick be virtuous as a Collective body?’ had been discussed by the Select Society in Edinburgh. See the Minutes of the Select Society’, National Library of Scotland, Adv. MS. 23.1.1.
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