Adam Smith on Witchcraft and Mercantilism
One very minor sub-plot of the reception of eighteenth-century feminism is that Mandeville and Toland, who often embrace quite feminist themes, get no love from the great women that followed them whereas Adam Smith is praised highly by Wollstonecraft, Grouchy, and Martineau. (And my regular readers know I often draw on this trio in my own interpretation of Smith.) Yet whenever feminist scholars write about Adam Smith qua feminist/feminism they (quite rightly) find plenty of grounds for criticism. This state of affairs has often baffled me.
Today’s post doesn’t solve this conundrum, but it does call attention to a passage that may help explain why these great women were willing to give Smith the benefit of the doubt. It’s actually a rather famous paragraph. But in the scholarly literature it gets discussed for its contribution to Smith’s argument for free trade, and the popular odium that grain-traders had in his time. (That’s no surprise because that’s the main topic of the argument.) The passage may seem familiar, because it often gets quoted in the context of recent debates about price gouging during a crisis/emergency/disaster.
The paragraph occurs in the great anti-Mercantilist polemic in Book IV of Wealth of Nations (hereafter WN). I quote:
The popular fear of engrossing and forestalling may be compared to the popular terrors and suspicions of witchcraft. The unfortunate wretches accused of this latter crime were not more innocent of the misfortunes imputed to them, than those who have been accused of the former. The law which put an end to all prosecutions against witchcraft, which put it out of any man's power to gratify his own malice by accusing his neighbour of that imaginary crime, seems effectually to have put an end to those fears and suspicions, by taking away the great cause which encouraged and supported them. The law which should restore entire freedom to the inland trade of corn, would probably prove as effectual to put an end to the popular fears of engrossing and forestalling.—WN 4.5.b.26, p. 534 (of the Glasgow edition.)
So, Smith’s underlying argument about the effects of the law on popular fears and superstition is actually quite important. The way I understand it is that if you give ordinary citizens, and say ambitious politicians looking for scapegoats, a tool to persecute a distinct group of others (X) and thereby enhance their powers over these others (X), they will help perpetuate damaging and even scary narratives about X that will be widely believed by ordinary citizens.
And for Smith the way to combat this problem is not to tackle fake news or to spread truth (although he certainly thinks a proper education will make people less prone to such popular terrors); rather it is to remove the underlying “great cause” namely a law that singles out a sub-group (X) and whose behavior actually harms nobody.
Smith, who was once a law professor, may well be thinking of the effects of the Witchcraft law of 1735 which, de facto assumed “that there were no real witches, no one had real magic power and those claiming such powers were cheaters extorting money from gullible people.” He seems to have alluded to this law according to the lecture notes we have on Wednesday. March 16t, I763 (LJ, V.80, p. 301)
As an aside, as regular readers know I think of American First as a species of mercantilism in which transactions with the world are zero-sum (and a source for graft for well-connected insiders). Controlling the border is essential to Mercantilism. As Jacob T. Levy has presciently diagnosed and warned, the criminalization and militarization of border control generates a more general inland lawlessness that undermine liberties. But American First also amplifies features of American law that feed into the dynamic that Smith is diagnosing. Americans of all kinds are invited to snitch on each other and to help generate waves of popular fears of some vulnerable group.
Be that as it may, it is notable that Smith uses witchcraft as his example. In fact, he gets (as regular readers may recall from a rather critical post on Silvia Federici’s (2004 [2021]) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body), the whole example from Hobbes, who, in the context of discussing fear of witchcraft in Leviathan 2, quite clearly targets the ambitious demagogue who plays on the fears of common people. And not unlike Hobbes, Smith takes it as obvious that witches are not dangerous at all. (Smith treats belief in witchcraft as “superstition” on par with polytheism in the History of Astronomy 3.2, p. 49.)
The main advance in Smith’s argument is to make explicit (which is entailed by Hobbes’ treatment) that badly structured law gives demagogues a mechanism to advance themselves at the expense of others. To be sure, by Smith’s time few intellectuals defended the reality of witchcraft, whereas when Hobbes was writing it was a subject of intense and dangerous controversy.*
Let me wrap up. I don’t think Smith’s stance on witchcraft ought to endear him to feminists. Smith’s views on them lag the effects of wider social changes. But I do think it’s significant that he uses witchcraft in this argument because free trade in grain is rather important to his overall argument and politically fraught because as he was going into press the (French) Administration of Turgot was coming undone due to a bad harvest and subsequent riots in 1774-5. (On my reading of WN, Smith is rather critical of Turgot’s way of enacting free trade.)
*I tend to think that Hobbes’ feminism is underappreciated, although he has received grudging respect from contemporary feminists.