On Play, dialectic, and the liberalism of Condorcet and Smith

This is the last post before my traditional Summer break (see for house-keeping the bottom of this post). I expect to resume blogging by the end of July. Earlier in the week my friends at Liberal Currents republished a piece, “Liberal Skepticism and the Gender Identity Culture Wars,” that I had initially shared by with my paying subscribers only. It’s an excerpt of a little book that I hope to complete later this Summer.

Before I get started with my daily digression, I express my care for Katy Fulfer, her students, and the Waterloo philosophy and gender studies department(s) who have been subject to what seems to be a hate-crime. Gender studies (including my own direct colleagues), in particular, has been on the receiving end of ongoing invective by all kinds of authoritarians, and so we should not interpret this as an isolated incident.

By an odd sympathetic coincidence, Liam Kofi Bright recently posted a fascinating essay, “Progressive Liberalism's Dialectic,” that appealed to the very same passage in Wealth of Nations that I had invoked in my aforementioned recent essay (and that also informs last week’s post): “One of those boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of the valve which opened this communication to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his playfellows.”

The sentence involves the very first use of ‘liberty’ in Wealth of Nations. I like to use it to remind people that for Smith, and the liberal tradition he helped found, ‘liberty’ is neither here ‘freedom of contract’ nor (Republican) ‘'non-domination to the arbitrary will of others’ nor ‘self-government.' I like to gloss it as ‘freedom to make meaningful choices,’ (this freedom is secured by the rule of law) and rather than being a stern Scottish moralist, Smith points to play and comradery as his foundational exemplars of liberty. (I wish Huizinga had noticed!)

Bright’s gloss that “we each of us gain some intrinsic joy from being able to allocate our time as we see fit,” while analytically distinct from my own emphasis, strikes me as an apt way of conveying what makes a decision meaningful (even, perhaps, if the decision itself may involve painful existential options). That time is a scarce good is rather important to Smith not the least in his moral psychology (alas, the modal logician reminds us that all men are mortal, necessarily so); this has been one of the lesson that Sandra Peart and David M. Levy have been teaching (see here for example).

Only after emphasizing play (we’re back in Wealth of Nations), does the economist Smith note explicitly that such technological improvement springs from the desire “to save his own labour.” So, one may suspect that Smith is really using the boy — we’re in the realm of child-labor — as a tale of efficiency as a consequence of the division of labor (which is the theme of the chapter, after all). But if we modestly telescope out and reproduce the wider context of the play passage, we notice that while this is surely part of Smith’s claim, it’s not what’s emphasized:

But in consequence of the division of labour, [A] the whole of every man's attention comes naturally to be directed towards some one very simple object. It is naturally to be expected, therefore, that [B] some one or other of those who are employed in each particular branch of labour should soon find out easier and readier methods of performing their own particular work, wherever the nature of it admits of such improvement. [C] A great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures in which labour is most subdivided, [B] were originally the inventions of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it. Whoever has been much accustomed to visit such manufactures must frequently have been shown very pretty machines, [B] which were the inventions of such workmen in order to facilitate and quicken their particular part of the work. In the first fire-engines, a boy was constantly employed to open and shut alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder, according as the piston either ascended or descended. [C] One of those boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of the valve which opened this communication to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his playfellows. One of the greatest improvements that has been made upon this machine, since it was first invented, was in this manner [C] the discovery of a boy who wanted to save his own labour. [Letters added to facilitate dicsussion.]

Now, it is well known that according to Smith the narrowing of attention [A] that is the effect of the division of labor is a serious matter. In Book V of Wealth of Nations, he recognizes that this generates a kind of alienation that is both harmful to workers and has dangerous political implications. So, the quoted passage is not without a dark under-current.

However, the otherwise bad narrowing of attention has a salutary effect among a subset of workers subject to it [B]. For, this subset finds ways to improve their own productivity either (a) by organizing their own work more efficiently (“easier and readier methods”) or (b) by designing and developing labor-saving machines. Before we move on to the boy who wants to play it is worth pausing here, for three reasons.

First, Smith anticipates here an insight by Tom Kuhn that a certain kind of constrained activity, a puzzle, leads to the expression of certain kind of ingenuity. I don’t think this is a coincidence because, as is well known, Smith understood scientific theories as machines who undergo a process of development/refined, and then can undergo a revolutionary change. This is just one of many ways that Smith anticipates Kuhn’s philosophy of science.

Second, in his little fable, Smith clearly valorizes work-place initiative here. I don’t think I had noticed this quite before reading Bright’s essay. Even Nathan Rosenberg, who wrote a banger of an essay (1965) on the material discussed here, doesn’t quite make this explicit. I have long suspected that pre-Marxist socialists were often Smithians in all kinds of ways. (I myself would like to see more research on this influence.) I return to this below.

Third, as should be well known by now, Smith’s underlying point is a kind of egalitarian intellectualism [B]. Smith repeats that it is ordinary working laborers who are the ingenious designers of beautiful machinery. This is not ad hoc in Smith and is part of his broader methodological analytic egalitarianism (MAE) that he inherits from Hobbes and Mandeville in which we are naturally fundamentally alike and our differences are often revealed in virtue of social contexts that shape us. Ingenuity is a common disposition that is, if not a context-sensitive property, at least triggered by constraints in our social environment.

In fact, [C] the boy who wants to play is himself working among machines designed by common laborers [B]; he performs relatively simple operations. So, the point of the passage is very much that even laboring boys can contribute their ingenuity to improving the — as it were second-order — productivity of the factory floor.

Smith’s narrative, thus, pushes back against the idea that what’s really needed in a modern political economy is to turn workers into machine-like, thoughtless and seamless parts of an assembly-line ruled by an elite. Rather, what’s needed is to let ingenuity bubble up from the work floor. (It is no surprise Smith is often treated as originating human capital theory.) This is missed a bit by those who only focus on the gains from specialization or sub-division of work in Smith’s pin-factory example. Rather for Smith, ingenious workers deliver a stream of productivity gains; sub-division without further ingenuity is mostly a one-off improvement.

Now, making room for worker ingenuity doesn’t come naturally to capitalists. In fact, much of Wealth of Nations is devoted to attacking the ways in which the owners of capital, who have a natural sympathy with each other, ‘conspire’ with each other against workers to keep wages low and to prevent workers from capturing gains from trade. So, in this very first chapter of the Wealth of Nations, Smith is also hinting at the fact that if individual capitalists reflected on their own interests, and didn’t care so much about the views of their peers, they would come to see their own self-interest in a different more enlarged orientation to their own workers.

I don’t want to suggest that Smith expects here an enlightened interest properly conceived to trump narrow sectorial interest. For, profit and wealth (and intellectual capital) will create opportunities to capture government in every age to further the interests of what (in Bright’s telling) Condorcet calls “despots, people enabled and actively pursuing the acquisition of ever more power and wealth. Then there are priests, people whose superior knowledge enables them to secure a position whereby they are believed.” In Bright’s account, Condorcet’s response to this dynamic is fundamentally built on spread of enlightenment. (And so from a Marxist perspective this is quite idealist.)

This is fair, although Bright understates Condorcet’s interest in designing new institutional mechanisms to secure liberty (see Urbinati (2004) or this neat Wikipedia page on the Girondin Constitutional project). For Condorcet such social technologies and mechanism design shape not just the form, but also the matter of society. (This is usually linked to Machiavelli, but I argue that Spinoza (who of course read his Machiavelli) is really the engine of Enlightenment thinking on this very point.)

Smith, too, inherited an interest in the development of such social technologies (including ambitious plans for federal parliamentary union) to mitigate the dangers of rent seeking despots and priests. But I doubt he thought these could take care of themselves. For, in the very passage that Smith diagnoses the conspiracy of capitalists to ‘raise prices,’ he also suggests that good government can do quite a bit to mitigate this recurring evil none the least to avoid facilitating cartels and trade/business groups and to deny them privileged access to the machinery of legislation and administration.

That good government plays some role even in facilitating workplace initiative for Smith may even be gleaned from the chapter on the division of labor that has shaped today’s post. For after a paragraph in which Smith describes the need for specialization within (what we would call) engineering and the sciences (including philosophy), Smith starts the next paragraph as follows: “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.” (emphasis added; ‘arts’ is really ‘technologies’). Smith is here foreshadowing two understandings of capitalism: on one side the mercantile (and the physiocratic-despotic) one, which allow the fruits of capitalism to be concentrated (this is the great story of Book IV of Wealth of Nations), and the liberal one in which, as Foucault emphasizes in his narrative of liberalism, the art of government (“well governed”) is endogenous to more general flourishing that, while ultimately built on the ingenuity and meaningful choices of ordinary people, requires skilled administration and political leadership that exhibits what he elsewhere calls “public spirit.” History has an inner dialectic, but we don’t forego agency to shape it.

While that surely raises it’s own questions, let me stop here and wish you a lovely start to Summer. I return to digresssing on Substack in a few weeks. Do consider signing up for a membership if you want to support me prioritizing blogging over other professional activities.