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Tierney on Smith and the Sith
Today's column is certainly more interesting than your usual rightwing effort. Still, I can't help but think it strange that not only The Wealth of Nations (which, NB, I haven't read and thus hesitate to comment on) but also Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments are listed at the end as "further reading" on the theme. Tierney seems to be pushing an Ayn Rand-style "greed is good" line here that is very much not what Smith's other book, at least, says. Generally speaking, it's almost never a good idea to bring up something that's fundamentally about meta-ethics when trying to make a political point, since the odds that it's actually relevant are exceedingly low.
May 21, 2005 | Permalink
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Matthew Yglesias reads John Tierney so that we don't have to. Today he comes across John Tierney's claim that the ethics of Darth Vader are those of Adam Smith: Darth Vader's Family Values - New York Times: [Darth Vader] says he could never betray the... [Read More]
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"Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."
Posted by: foo | May 21, 2005 2:26:09 PM
If you actually read Smith's work, his position is nowhere near the Gordon Gecko uses that paragraph have been put to. Tierney probably hasn't, it's common.
Posted by: Jason McCullough | May 21, 2005 3:02:01 PM
Man, I can't wait for that pay to read wall goes up so we can all stop reading and talking about these idiots and get on with our lives.
Posted by: djw | May 21, 2005 3:14:50 PM
You've read Marx, but not The Wealth of Nations? That's like reading Lysenko, but not Darwin. Just crazy.
Posted by: Brett Bellmore | May 21, 2005 3:18:25 PM
"You've read Marx, but not The Wealth of Nations? That's like reading Lysenko, but not Darwin."
Sorry, but Smith:Marx is NOT Darwin:Lysenko.
Posted by: ot | May 21, 2005 3:24:52 PM
One might reasonably argue, however, that Darwin:Gore IS like Lysenko:Bush II
Posted by: ot | May 21, 2005 3:34:36 PM
I liked this quote:
Republicans used to rail helplessly at Democrats for taxing them for destructive social programs and curtailing their economic liberties; now Democrats complain about the money squandered on the Iraq war and the threat to civil liberties from the Patriot Act.
Destructive social programs like, oh, I don't know...Social Security? The Civil Rights Act of 1965? Healthcare?
I like how food stamps = Iraq war.
Posted by: Delicious Pundit | May 21, 2005 3:55:53 PM
The result is an enduring political paradox: we no longer live in clans small enough for altruism to be practical
He doesn't really believe this does he?
Isn't the standard libertarian argument that private charity will deal with the poor?
Posted by: WillieStyle | May 21, 2005 4:17:57 PM
"Sorry, but Smith:Marx is NOT Darwin:Lysenko."
Yup, denial ain't just a river in Egypt. LOL
Look, even Marx would have been aghast at Matt having not read Smith.
Posted by: Brett Bellmore | May 21, 2005 4:58:16 PM
"For further reading"! What a flatulent jackass! At least Safire could write.
Posted by: ahab | May 21, 2005 5:20:53 PM
even Marx would have been aghast at Matt having not read Smith.
If you actually read the post, it's clear that Matthew has read the Theory of Moral Sentiments. And those who have read ToMS and not TWoN tend to have a better sense of what Smith's about than vice versa; although reading both is, of course, preferable.
Why? Because if one has read the Theory of Moral Sentiments, it is likely to have been in the context of other eighteenth-century moral philosophy which properly clarifies the 'enlightened self-love' position.
(Both are online, or available through inexpensive and obviously subsidized editions from the Liberty Fund, a Hayekian educational foundation. The irony of this arrangement was not lost on me as I accumulated a large set of their volumes -- Burke, Hutcheson, Kames, et al. -- knowing that my purchases to some extent took money from the pockets of wealthy conservatives.)
Posted by: ahem | May 21, 2005 5:34:08 PM
*chortle* Thank you, ahem. I have some of Liberty's well-produced volumes (Coke, Burke, Smith) and plan to acquire their Grotius. Now I know I'm truly acting out of self-interest, which, in this case, happens to contribute to the common weal. I take Smith's enthusiasm for what we now call "the market economy" in Wealth to be wholly utilitarian; given the undesirable consequences that inevitably attend laisseiz-faire, we have come to regulate the economy and adjust the scope of the public sphere on much the same utilitarian grounds.
Brett Bellmore, I think your analogy needs Mendel in place of Darwin.
Posted by: Dabodius | May 21, 2005 6:04:19 PM
I don't see why you have to read Smith. The main point of reading Marx, IMHO, is to see all the interesting mistakes he made. Marx presented an interesting, fairly coherent, and wrong model of economics. Smith, in The Wealth of Nations went into encyclopaedic detail more than he really modeled how the economy works. He didn't make as many mistakes as Marx.
Generally, I think that when you read the originals in the field, it's because they've screwed up in such a way as to prevent them from being incorporated into the mainstream. For someone who didn't screw up too much, like Smith, there's little need to read the original -- people would rather just read Varian or Barro.
I don't think that there are too many biologists who read Darwin's Origin, for that matter.
Posted by: Julian Elson | May 21, 2005 6:06:28 PM
"The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations."
Yup, the guy's as idiotic as Lysenko. chortle.
Posted by: neruda boy | May 21, 2005 6:24:58 PM
The correct analogy here is clearly Matt:Wealth of Nations::Brett:Matt's post. Matt has read Theory of Moral Sentiments, something that Brett would know if he had read Matt's post.
Posted by: Walt Pohl | May 21, 2005 6:33:10 PM
Reference Index
Both Smith works are also available at Marxist Internet Archive, for those who do not want to increase the hitcounts of capitalist overlords
Darwin:Banco::Storia di un Minuto:PFM
Posted by: bob mcmanus | May 21, 2005 6:46:35 PM
What John Tierney gets wrong in today’s op-ed piece on how Revenge of the Sith illuminates our innate political impulses is not the meta-ethics, as Matthew Yglesias claims, but the psychology and politics. Confusing Daniel Klein’s “sentiment coordination” with altruism Tierney labors to convince us that the genes that generate altruism are the same as those that underlie our instinct to band together for protection when threatened. The desire to organize armies to attack our enemies may involve self-sacrifice and common sentiment, but it is hardly altruism. Altruism, as Tierney points out, involves a selfless love of humanity, not hurting others to benefit your own family or clan. Gang members (a clan) may risk their own lives in a common effort to banish another gang from a disputed drug territory resulting in more money flowing to their own community, but few would call this altruism.
But Tierney’s political point isn’t made until the end of the piece when he enters the fray of what he calls the “usual dreary red-blue squabble.” He brazenly asserts that the fear and anger that sent America into Iraq comes from the same instinct for altruistic comity as our desire to have our government spend our taxes feeding the poor:
Republicans used to rail helplessly at Democrats for taxing them for destructive social programs and curtailing their economic liberties; now Democrats complain about the money squandered on the Iraq war and the threat to civil liberties from the Patriot Act.
If the State restricts my monopolistic behavior, is economic liberty diminished? No. What results in a more fruitful nation will be called economic liberty by the people, whatever the arguments of economists. In the end, the phrase “economic liberties” means nothing more than wealth. With more wealth, I have more possibilities open to me. But was the economy worse under Clinton than Bush? No. Did the nation spend more taxes on social programs under Clinton than Bush? No.
As deplorable as the taxation with overrepresentation that today’s Republicans must endure may be, loss of civil liberties, even to a conservative, must be more galling than loss of economic liberty, or they value money over freedom. And that is what the current Republican regime has brought us: fewer civil liberties, more government power. From the Patriot Act, to Guantanamo, to the outsourcing of torture to Syria and Uzbekistan, to strip searching us at the airport, to the internal passports that are in the offing. This is how liberty dies, not with the Democrats’ spending on health care, but Republicans’ spending on the security state.
Posted by: epistemology | May 21, 2005 8:34:14 PM
Brett Bellmore's lame Lysenko analogy has been more than adequately discredited, but I can't help piling on one more comment, because I hate Lysenkoism even as much as I hate the distortion of science that's been perpetrated on my country by Lysenko's intellectual foster-child, GWB.
Posted by: ot | May 21, 2005 8:48:35 PM
“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 condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” — Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Posted by: Roger Bigod | May 21, 2005 11:06:21 PM
"You've read Marx, but not The Wealth of Nations? That's like reading Lysenko, but not Darwin."
Lysenko was a fraud. Marx was a flawed thinker (arent we all) but had a genunine scientific contribution to make. The appropriate analogy to Smith:Marx is Darwin:Lamarck
Posted by: Jack Strocchi | May 22, 2005 12:14:42 AM
While Smith was very good at going into detail about why mercantilism was a bad idea, I think that the most devestating blow to the mercantilist idea that national wealth could be increased by accumulating gold was delivered by David Hume in five characters:
MV = PY.
Posted by: Julian Elson | May 22, 2005 12:58:06 AM
No - I disagree with even the Lamarck analogy. Marx was right about a lot of things - he understood many of the implications of capitalism before many, many others. I think conceptualization of the base/superstructure relationship, his analysis of religion, his insights into the function of ideology, the relationship between capitalism and work ("alientation") his prediction of what we would term today "globalization" are always huge contributions to social scientific thought.
Of course, he made a series of major errors, most importantly his belief that he had "discovered" the science path that human history was "destined" to follow. But his ideas are absolutely seminal to the functioning of most social scientific discplines today.
To compare Marx and Smith, one has to first recognize that Smith analyzed capitalism as a market mechanism(and his insights in this regard are largely right). Whereas Marx analyzed the effect of capitalism on the production process. Marx would have granted Smith that throught comparative advantage, production grows exponentially. Of course, Marx also argued that the increase in material abundance was more than outweighed by the deterioration of working conditions and the alienation of labor from its fruits. In the industrialized world, Marx's cost/benefit analysis today seems miserably wrong. But one should also remember Marx's ideas were largely drawn from his experience (or his and Engels experience) in places like Manchester in the 1840s.
In general, Marx is underrated as a thinker today because his ideas and predictions about how society should work were actually applied to society. This, of course, was a tragic mistake. But the fact that Marx's ideas were powerful enough to be even be tried in such a manner says a lot for him as a thinker.
Posted by: Ben P | May 22, 2005 3:44:15 AM
As to Smith and Tierney, T. seems to make the mistake of many half-baked center-right modern American libertarians who view people like Smith through the lens of cranks like Ayn Rand, rather than in their proper historical context.
Smith's thinking - as Matt suggests in his post - was very much a part of (an early precursor of) 19th century English utilitarianism and liberalism. Classical liberalism is not the same thing as libertarianism. Libertarianism - or at least Randism, which in large measure, libertarianism is - assumes that we are all essentially asocial atoms and that society doesn't exist. Smith, Bentham, both Mill sr. and jr., et al. would have vigorously disputed this idea. Smith very much saw free markets as a means to societal ends rather than ends in and of themselves.
Posted by: Ben P | May 22, 2005 3:49:25 AM
The "benevolence of the butcher" line has nothing to do with Smith's "moral" beliefs, but with his understanding of the economic system: it explains the driving force behind the division of labor, not the be-all, end-all of human nature.
The chapter title (V.1,Ch.II) is "of the principle which gives occasion to the division of labour." He begins by explaining that humans have a propensity to trade. He then notes that all animals incur favor in others at some point in order to get something in return. His point is this is inefficient. "He has not time, however, to do this upon every occasion."[I.ii.2] Self-interest ,then, is the most efficient motive to increase production, growth, and the division of labor. Not a way of life.
As Matthew notes, the Theory of Moral Sentiments offers Smith's view of Human Nature, and it is not purely self-interested or based on self-love, as Tierney hackishly suggests. The first paragraph of the work pretty much sums it up: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner...The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it."
[thank you Social Studies 10...]
Posted by: alex | May 22, 2005 4:26:59 AM
Speaking of Darwin, anyone else notice the distinctive scent of Social Darwinism starting to eminate from the libertarians? It is good when they get back to their roots.
Posted by: Kimmitt | May 22, 2005 6:47:01 AM
