For a first serious post here, I thought it would be interesting to revisit one of my first real bits of thinking about connections between the literary and the economic. The first economist I ever read was Hayek. Right after Hayek, I read Smith's
Wealth of Nations. While I gather this is a somewhat...non-traditional economic education, it's served me reasonably well. And in reading Smith I found someone whose brain was as filled with literary allusions, references, and quotations, as any writer I'd ever loved and admired. This paper--and I've put the introduction here, with a link to the whole megillah at the end of the post--came from the moment when I realized I'd spotted an allusion that, so far as I could discover, had gone unnoticed for ages.
So, here's Smith and Shakespeare, together again, in "Monarchs and Mongrels."
Adam Smith’s respect for literature
as art and as example infuses all his work. Whether it is
The Theory of
Moral Sentiments and its use of the characters of Iago and Othello to
discuss issues of human sympathy and fellow-feeling, the quotations from
Milton and Dryden which begin his essay on “The History of Astronomy,”
his references to
Phaedra, the
Aeneid, and the
Illiad in
his examination of the legal history of marriage in the
Lectures of
Jurisprudence, or
the
Lectures in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, the notes from his most
extended considerations of literature, Smith’s use of literature throughout his
body of work is constant.
Charles Griswold’s
Adam Smith
and the Virtues of Enlightenment points to the strong appeal that literature
had for Smith as a way to speak about important contemporary moral concerns:
“Not only plays, novels, and poems but tragedies, in particular, intrigue
Smith. Together they completely overwhelm his relatively rare references to
properly philosophical texts. …The notion that we are to understand literature
and drama as sources for moral theory and moral education is clearly and
strikingly evident in
The Wealth of Nations as well. (59).”
This attraction towards the literary as source material for moral arguments is
easily seen simply by leafing through the footnotes to any of Smith’s works.
His references to literature are myriad and most have been well-documented. In
addition, however, Smith’s writing--steeped in poetry, novels, and drama as it is--often
draws from the storehouse of his memory to allude to literature without giving
a specific reference to the work of which he is thinking. Discovery and
examination of such an uncited reference can give careful readers the sense of
Smith as a writer who instinctively turns to literature as a tool for his
thought.
Very early in Adam Smith’s
Wealth
of Nations the reader encounters one such reference, previously unnoted in
Smith scholarship, during Smith’s meditations on human nature as demonstrated in
comparison with the nature of dogs. The section is a justly famous one. It is elegant
in both its content and its diction as well as in its explication of the social
advantages and “conveniency” that arise from the human ability to “truck,
barter, and exchange,” with skills that dogs are able only to use to help
themselves. Smith writes:
By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition
half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a
greyhound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd’s dog. Those different
tribes of animals, however, though all of the same species, are of scarce any
use to one another. The strength of the mastiff is not, in the least, supported
either by the swiftness of the greyhound, or by the sagacity of the spaniel, or
by the docility of the shepherd’s dog. The effects of those different geniuses
and talents, for want of the power or disposition to barter and exchange,
cannot be brought into a common stock, and do not in the least contribute to the
better accommodations and conveniency of the species. Each animal is still
obliged to support and defend itself, separately and independently, and derives
no sort of advantage from that variety of talents with which nature has
distinguished its fellows. Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilar
geniuses are of use to one another; the different produces of their respective
talents, by the general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, being
brought, as it were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever
part of the produce of other men’s talents he has occasion for. (1.ii.30)
The
passage has been analyzed often. What has gone unnoticed, however, is that Smith’s
passage alludes to an equally well-known passage from Shakespeare’s
Macbeth.
(The play may have been suggested to Smith by his use of the word “porter”
early on in the passage reminding him of
Macbeth’s famous Act II “porter
scene.”) Suborning Banquo’s murder in Act III, Macbeth discusses human nature
with the murderers for hire in almost precisely the same terms that Smith uses
in the above passage.
First Murderer: We are men, my Liege.
Macbeth: Ay, in the catalogue ye go for
men;
As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels,
spaniels, curs,
Shoughs,
water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept
All by the name of dogs: the valu’d
file
Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the
subtle,
The housekeeper, the hunter, every one
According to the gift which bounteous
Nature
Hath in him clos’d; whereby he does
receive
Particular addition, from the bill
That writes them all alike: and so of
men.
(Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3.1.90-100)
The similarity of wording, of subject matter, even of the
dog breeds mentioned make it clear that as Smith wrote his passage on dogs and
human nature, Shakespeare’s lines were in his mind.
The
previously unnoted allusion is interesting for more than just its help in
building a more thorough record of Smith’s use of literature throughout his
works, however. Smith’s allusion to
Macbeth at this early and crucial point
in the argument of
Wealth of Nations is far more than a rhetorical
flourish. It is topical, carefully considered, and significant. Smith’s
allusion to
Macbeth serves to
forewarn the alert reader of Smith’s awareness of the market’s complexities and
problems as well as its strengths.
Smith’s awareness of the corruptions to which
a free market can be vulnerable are not reservations about the effectiveness of
such a market. Rather, they are reservations about the damage that can be done
to the market’s effectiveness by human action and imperfection. It is not the
free market that is risky. What is risky is a free market that, like the monarchy of Macbeth's Scotland, has fallen
victim to corruption, collusion, and misdirected self-interest that erodes
human sympathy.
A much longer version of this argument is available
here, with footnotes and everything.
