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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
The Free Market God10/22/2007 11:16:38I just started working through Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers, a 1950s (revised 1970s) history of economic thought. Last night was the Adam Smith chapter. I was struck by the metaphysical implications of what was circling. Many (including me) have talked about his "Invisible Hand" in religious terms, but by Heilbroner's account, I was more struck by his tendencies toward skepticism. First off, he was a close associate of David Hume, the high priest of skepticism, at Glasgow. As a professor there, too, he resisted the religious duties he was supposed to perform, including prayer at the beginning of class. Of course, he is casually described by everybody as "Deist," though I think many folks tend to emphasize the God-beliefs of Deism (like this article) rather than its rebellion against the much more pronounced God beliefs of others. The Wealth of Nations was a statement against the economic policy of mercantilism - the central control of trade by and for the royal sovereign. He argues that it is better for all - including the sovereign - to allow the economy to operate free of oppressive regulation, wherein each participant's self-interest works for the interest of all. In this sense, at least, in parallel to his religious leanings, Smith was a polemicist; he was acting against an establishment. In many ways, The Wealth of Nations is comparable to Darwin's The Origin of Species. Both draws on and fulfills ideas that were already common among the authors' colleagues. What was revolutionary about both works was their completeness. And the completeness of both spoke to the possibility of total immanence: just as the origin of species had no need for a creator, the wealth of nations has no need for a sovereign regulator. Both made the metaphysical claim that there is no need for metaphysics. It is interesting to note, then, that in today's United States, the most convinced metaphysicians, the conservative Christians, have become deeply committed to the free market idea. At Smith's time, at least aesthetically (so far as the divine King was figured and implicated in the worldly king), the free market stood for immanence rather than transcendence. The Invisible Hand was more anti-Christ than Christ, a principle that rebuked the need for dependence on a creator, just as on a monarch. |
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