The Great Lakes Zephyr - Wind Energy & Hydrogen Journal

Adam Smith : The Forgotten Agrarian
by John C. Médaille

[The Agricultural System]... is, perhaps, the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy, and is upon that account well worth the consideration of every man who wishes to examine with attention the principles of that very important science.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

The Smith Everyone "Knows"

Everyone knows Adam Smith. They know his great treatise, The Wealth of Nations. They know him to be the philosopher of "self-interest" who put avarice at the core of his values positing a mystical "invisible hand" which will take care of everybody so long as everybody takes care of themselves. They know him to be the philosophical mainstay of industrial capitalism in which the ever-greater "division of labour" reduces the worker to a mere "servo-mechanism" of the machine. They know him as the prophet of unrestricted free trade and the champion of a "laissez-faire", "get the government off the backs of business" polity. Indeed, the ideas of Smith are the very ground of the economic and political life that we lead; hence, we absorb Smith in the very air that we breath, and know him so well that it is hardly necessary to read him at all; indeed, there are few who take the trouble to do so.

The only problem with this view is that, like so many things that everybody "knows", what they know does not happen to be so. In fact, there is no possible reading of Smith that will support the "readings" that Smith is usually given. In nearly every area that Smith is commonly cited, he expresses strong opinions against what has become the "common view" of Smith: Instead of praising greed, he warns against its pernicious effects; instead of denigrating labour, he puts it at the heart of all economic values; instead of supporting "capitalism" (a term he never uses), he warns that the mercantile class has interests which oppose the good of society. So then, was he not a supporter of laissez-faire (another term he never uses)? Yes, but a laissez-faire that means the opposite of what the term has come to mean. Was he not a supporter of our great manufacturing enterprises? Not really; such things were in the future, and Smith places not manufacturing, but farming and the well-being of the farm at the heart of the Wealth of Nations. And with that in mind, he deserves a re-reading, especially on those very points for which he is most praised or blamed, but only rarely understood.

Adam Smith and Labour ...(Full column)