Adam Smith: Left or Right?
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00985.x |
| Author | Craig Smith |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
bs_bs_banner
P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 1 3 VO L 6 1 , 7 8 4 – 7 9 8
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00985.x
Adam Smith: Left or Right?
Craig Smith
University of St Andrews
This article engages with some of the recent literature on Adam Smith which has sought to distance the ‘father of
economics’ from his contemporary free market admirers and to reclaim him as a hero and inspiration for the political
left.The article explores a problem for this attempted recovery of Smith by the contemporary social democrat which
arises from his strictly negative understanding of the virtue of justice. I argue that Smith’s distinctions between justice,
benevolence and ‘police’ should be taken seriously as an attempt at introducing conceptual clarity into the terminology
of political theory.The article makes the case for reading Smith as someone who quite explicitly rejects the notion of
regarding our obligations to the poor in terms of justice and whose distinctly sceptical view of politics makes him an
unlikely inspiration for contemporary philosophers concerned with developing normative notions of social justice
intended to justify the redistribution of wealth.
Keywords: Adam Smith; justice; beneficence; social justice
Adam Smith has become known in the public consciousness as the father of economics and
the champion of free markets.This perception has been reinforced through his adoption by
proponents of market-based policies as an emblem of their cause. My aim in this article is
to engage with the claims of a number of recent studies of Smith which have sought to
rescue him from his admirers on the free market ‘right’ and claim that he can act as an
inspiration for the political ‘left’. Putting aside concerns about the usefulness of the
left/right distinction, and the fact that it developed from the political divisions of the French
Revolution while Smith died in 1790, what seems to be at stake in this recent trend in
Smith studies is the extent to which Smith’s ideas can be distanced from the more
vociferous of his free market admirers (Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, F. A. Hayek) in
the field of political economy and instead associated with the contemporary left’s concerns
with fairness, equality and social justice.
A significant part of this recent debate hangs on the extent to which Smith can be
understood as a thinker interested in the idea of social justice. Amartya Sen (2009) has
drawn inspiration from Smith in developing his own theory of social justice and Samuel
Fleischacker (2004) has made the case for reading Smith as a precursor of modern notions
of social justice. Iain McLean (2006), on the other hand, makes the stronger claim that
Smith’s true legacy lies, not with the libertarian economists of the Adam Smith Institute,
but rather with the social democrats of the John Smith Institute. In all three cases the broad
claim is that there are grounds for associating Smith with the modern egalitarian idea of
social justice understood as the state-backed redistribution of wealth to ameliorate the
effects of poverty.1
Fleischacker offers perhaps the most detailed version of the argument under consider-
ation. He admits that Smith wrote in a period prior to the modern notion of distributive
justice and that this leads Smith to consider justice in the commutative sense favoured by
the natural law tradition, but he goes on to argue that Smith helped to point the way
© 2012 The Author. Political Studies © 2012 Political Studies Association
A D A M S M I T H : L E F T O R R I G H T ?
785
towards the notion of distributive justice that animates the contemporary left (Fleischacker,
2004, p. 213). Fleischacker accepts that there are both libertarian and egalitarian themes in
Smith’s work and that he can thus be read as providing a legacy for both contemporary
positions (Fleischacker, 2004, p. 19), but in his view Smith’s abiding concern for the poor
brings him closer in spirit to the contemporary left (Fleischacker, 2004, p. 265). Fleischack-
er’s argument is based on the idea that Smith does not operate with an absolute and
pre-social, moralised notion of property rights and that as a result of this Smith has no
principled reason to consider it unjust to use ‘redistributive taxation to help the poor’
(Fleischacker, 2004, p. 145). What replaces the principled objection in this reading is a
case-by-case assessment of the likely success of particular government attempts to alleviate
poverty with a presumption against the likely success of such activity drawn from Smith’s
distrust of the political process.2 This leads to a ‘Smithian’ state which, while unlikely to be
as extensive as the modern welfare state (Fleischacker, 2004, p. 236), is nonetheless open to
the use of politics to pursue the goals of egalitarian distributive justice. Fleischacker then
argues that the contemporary left has much to learn about the pursuit of its goals from
Smith’s criticism of state bureaucracies and his stress on competition.
Laying aside the obvious anachronism of talking about Smith in terms of a concept that
post-dates him, I will instead enter into the spirit of the exercise being undertaken by his
‘rescuers’ and argue, against them, that not only would Smith have been dubious about the
modern conception of social justice, but that he actually takes care to draw a conceptual
distinction between his notion of justice and the sort of redistributive and welfare pro-
grammes that we understand under the vague catch-all notion of social justice. My point
is not that Smith was unconcerned with the situation of the poor; it is rather that he makes
a quite clear philosophical distinction between this concern and the concept of justice. I
want to claim that we should not dismiss this distinction as merely a feature of the language
that Smith inherited from his predecessors. Instead I want to take his attempt at conceptual
clarity seriously and suggest that the normative distinctions Smith draws might prove to be
a further lesson for the contemporary left in addition to the empirical and social theoretical
points that Fleischacker concedes (Fleischacker, 2004, p. 226). Put another way, for the
purposes of this article it does not matter how much of a role Smith allowed for deliberate
attempts to ameliorate the effects of poverty; what matters is that he does not conduct this
discussion in terms of justice.
The Moral and the Political
A good place to begin our alternative account is with Smith’s consideration of the
relationship between the moral and the political. Smith’s desire to downgrade the impor-
tance of politics has been well rehearsed but it is worth reiterating some of the most
significant manifestations of this aspect of his thought.3 Perhaps the clearest example of this
is Smith’s identification of three distinct senses in which the term justice has been used in
the history of philosophy. Broadly speaking these are commutative justice, distributive
justice and a third, all-encompassing, Platonic sense that applies to moral perfection (Smith,
1976b [1759], pp. 269–70).4 In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), and more particularly
in the Lectures on Jurisprudence (LJ), Smith is very clear that he has a specific and limited
definition of justice in mind. In LJ he states that his topic is commutative justice and not
© 2012 The Author. Political Studies © 2012 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013, 61(4)
786
C R A I G S M I T H
distributive justice.5 He draws on the jurisprudential distinction between perfect (commu-
tative) and imperfect (distributive) rights and states quite plainly that he will ignore the
latter as ‘not properly belonging to Jurisprudence, but rather to a system of morals as they
do not fall under the jurisdiction of the laws’ (Smith, 1978, p. 9). So the subject matter of
distributive justice does not lie under the same set of institutions that apply the law, but is
rather to be understood as a part of a conceptually distinct realm of ‘morals’.This is Smith
at his clearest. There are distinct realms of human activity: the political, concerning
commutative justice and the law, and the moral, concerning, among other things, distribu-
tive justice.This strictly ‘negative’ (Smith, 1976b [1759], p. 82) understanding of the proper
use of the term justice is one that Smith shares with Hume (and other classical liberals).
In Smith’s view justice concerns the absence of injury, of deliberate interference with or
harm to the integrity of another’s person, rights or property.This ‘virtue’, such as it is, can
often be satisfied merely by refraining from inflicting injury. Smith illustrates this with two
stark examples. First, he notes that we can be perfectly just by ‘sitting still and doing nothing’
(Smith, 1976b [1759], p. 82).This behaviour might be subject to a negative moral assessment
by our peers (of which more later) but the inaction will not be accounted a breach of
justice. The second example refers to the case where Smith notes that in economic
competition with our peers we may engage in all activities within the rules of trade, but
when we ‘justle’ (Smith, 1976b [1759], p. 83) or deliberately injure the chances of our rivals
an impartial spectator will not approve of our actions.
In both of these cases we see that Smith is depending on a criterion of what Bentham
would later call ‘unmeetness’ for punishment (Bentham, 1948 [1789], p. 281). Certain
actions arouse indignation in an impartial spectator and thus warrant actual punishment,
while others raise a lesser degree of...
To continue reading
Request your trial