Re-Politicizing Inferior Prudence in Adam Smith. On Hanley
These Digressions have received a lot of recent, new subscribers. Welcome! I suspect many have been drawn in by some of my series of reflections on the conflict in Israel/Palestine. While I expect to develop that series in light of unfolding events, be forewarned I usually don’t offer a lot of explicit commentary on contemporary affairs. Most posts are me nerding out about some scholarly material, and while they are often politically salient, I usually let my readers draw out their significance to the newspaper headlines. I do so, in part, for two reasons: first, the comparative advantage of people with my training is not punditry. Second, our public intellectual culture is so debased, that I am unsure how to contribute to it effectively. So my own approach is to try to develop different kinds of conversations. (About that second feature more some other time.)
This by way of introduction to the present post, which was triggered by disagreement over/with a lovely lecture on Adam Smith by Ryan Hanley (Boston College), a longtime friend and whose body of work has shaped my own scholarship on Smith. (A propos of the first paragraph above, I think of Ryan as somebody who tries to elevate public discussion.) The lecture is available online (in Spanish dubbing here; and in English here.) But what follows should be intelligible without prior knowledge of it (or Adam Smith).
While clearly responding to Aristotle (and, I would argue, Hobbes and Hume), Adam Smith famously divides prudence into an inferior and superior kind in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereafter TMS). As Hanley emphasizes, when it comes to inferior prudence, for Smith, this is directed at the “care of the health, of the [external] fortune, of the rank and reputation of the individual, [and] the objects upon which his comfort and happiness in this life are supposed principally to depend.” Or to simplify, “Security, therefore, is the first and the principal object of [inferior] prudence.”
As an aside, this emphasis on security in Smith has not been mined much by Foucauldian biopolitics students because Foucault himself does not attribute it to Smith. So this is an invitation for future work.
Ryan’s lecture nicely articulates how Smith’s account is reinterpreting Aristotelian prudence in light of the challenges and needs of commercial society. But in listening to Ryan, I also had an uneasy feeling that Ryan’s interpretation was de-politicizing Smith’s approach to inferior prudence. In Q&A it became clear that part of our disagreement on this point centers on the following passage:
The prudent man is not willing to subject himself to any responsibility which his duty does not impose upon him. He is not a bustler in business where he has no concern; is not a meddler in other people's affairs; is not a professed counsellor or adviser, who obtrudes his advice where nobody is asking it. He confines himself, as much as his duty will permit, to his own affairs, and has no taste for that foolish importance which many people wish to derive from appearing to have some influence in the management of those of other people. He is averse to enter into any party disputes, hates faction, and is not always very forward to listen to the voice even of noble and great ambition. When distinctly called upon, he will not decline the service of his country, but he will not cabal in order to force himself into it; and would be much better pleased that the public business were well managed by some other person, than that he himself should have the trouble, and incur the responsibility, of managing it. In the bottom of his heart he would prefer the undisturbed enjoyment of secure tranquillity, not only to all the vain splendour of successful ambition, but to the real and solid glory of performing the greatest and most magnanimous actions. [Emphasis added]
This is from the introduction to part VI of TMS. This part was inserted into the final (1790) edition of TMS and is a combination of new and re-writing of existing material in TMS. So, it also reflects, as Ryan notes, Smith’s final thoughts on the matter.
Notice, first, that here Smith arguably invents the idea for liberalism that within the advanced (cognitive) division of labor political life should be easy on the citizen. His implied ideal is much less demanding than what we commonly find among, say, republican theorists or contemporary democratic theorists. I myself view this as a feature not a bug of liberalism; it’s, in part, what makes liberalism an enduring attractive ideal.
Second, not unlike Hume and anticipating Madison, Smith has a real aversion to faction/cabal, which he associates with religious fanaticism, especially. (I have written on this here.) Even less than them, Smith sees very little functional use for parties and polarization. (I view this is a mistake on his part.) Rather, his ideas anticipate the great post-Hegelian corporatists; Smith thinks it’s on balance useful that the efforts of great interests to promote their own interests and powers indirectly help secure “the established balance among the different orders and societies” of a great society (TMS 6.2.2.7-10, p. 230-1). For Smith this is not without considerable political friction.
But, third, notice that for Smith political life is not self-regulating. (Even very astute theorists often claim this. Again see here my disagreement with Shklar.) Rather, on his view somebody needs to manage “the public business.” In fact, in the Wealth of Nations, the significance of governance is noted from the start: “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.” (WN 1.1.10, emphasis added) My regular readers will be familiar by now with my attention to how Smith is part of a much greater history of reflection on the art of government.
Now, at this point somebody sympathetic to Ryan’s implied position may well suggest that it’s not the inferior prudent person who ends up being engaged in politics, but the much more public spirited person of superior prudence:
Wise and judicious conduct, when directed to greater and nobler purposes than the care of the health, the fortune, the rank and reputation of the individual, is frequently and very properly called prudence. We talk of the prudence of the great general, of the great statesman, of the great legislator. Prudence is, in all these cases, combined with many greater and more splendid virtues, with valour, with extensive and strong benevolence, with a sacred regard to the rules of justice, and all these supported by a proper degree of self-command. This superior prudence, when carried to the highest degree of perfection, necessarily supposes the art, the talent, and the habit or disposition of acting with the most perfect propriety in every possible circumstance and situation.
The problem is that this superior prudence is very demanding and, thus, much rarer. And if the inferior prudence is characteristic of citizens in a liberal society (and, in fact, a highly valued ideal in it), then it looks like the imprudent and ignoble will rise to the top without the ordinary prudent putting up sufficient resistance. The worry seems fair enough, especially when one grants that politics and governance cannot simply take care of themselves. One may well worry that even clever institutional design that channels unreasonable pluralism and vain ambition to their proper ends is insufficient for the challenge posed. This seems common ground between a partisan of Hanley and myself.
However, if we look back at the passage about inferior prudence, a lot hinges on how one interprets the phrase, “when distinctly called upon, he will not decline the service of his country.” This is not a rejection of political obligation or duty (and a good thing, too, in light of the third point). But in the spirit of Ryan’s position one may well say that this seems very thin: a passive duty at best.
But what it means to be ‘distinctly called upon’ is ambiguous between two options: one is the passive responsiveness to invitations from higher ups to serve the country in some role or another. While this is not ignoble it does seem to create a leadership or service deficit or externality in ordinary politics. For the inferior prudent person lacks “noble and great ambition.”
But the second reading of the passage is much more active. That reading emphasizes that when one “is not always very forward to listen to the voice…[of] ambition” implies that sometimes one is willing to so listen. And this interpretation suggests that being distinctly called up to provide service does not need to mean lacking initiative in acting on an inner calling. For, while the inferior prudent person is risk-averse, s/he is not lacking in ordinary initiative or is against duty as such. Re-read: “The prudent man is not willing to subject himself to any responsibility which his duty does not impose upon him.” Again, that’s compatible with accepting, even embracing duty.
This call of political duty need not come from without; it can also be a responsive to the advice and guidance of the impartial spectator within. Throughout TMS this is expressed in terms of a voice of “the judgment of the man within the breast” or a call to duty. So, the desire for approbation and being worthy of it, will often motivate one’s service.+
For in Wealth of Nations, prudence is often the source of agency and invention within economic activity. In fact, in the Wealth of Nations, prudence is itself a quality or virtue of good governance: “The very bad policy of one country may thus render it in some measure dangerous and imprudent to establish what would otherwise be the best policy in another.” (WN 4.4.b.39, p. 539; see also e.g., WN 2.3.32, p. 343 quoted in the footnote (*) to this post; WN 4.2.12, p. 457; WN 5.1.g.17, p. 797, 5.3.45, p. 923.)*
So, it seems fair to say that for Smith each of us ought to contribute to political life in the manner appropriate to our skillset without partisan ambition and without delusions of our supposed importance. It’s a sometimes troubling service to society. But Smith does not believe we can do without such service. Society and markets need good governance.
Okay, let me wrap up. Of course, one may well wonder whether, in practice, the prudent person will try to skirt her duty; or whether the unpleasantness and aggressiveness of political life will crowd out the more timid prudential types. As my hints above suggest, I think Smith places to much faith in mutual balancing of great orders of society and the capabilities and timeliness of the superior prudent during a crisis.
But this is all a matter of emphasis. Smith does not expect that the advancement of commercial society would generate an a-political, naturalized (as the Marxist would say) prudent man. For, rather, the real problem he diagnoses in his long argument against mercantilism is that it is often very prudent for a particular person or particular economic group to rent-seek and capture political life. How to tackle this is, in fact, the great drama of Wealth of Nations. But whatever Smith’s answer to this drama is, it’s not a depoliticized inferior prudence.
+I thank David M. Levy for this suggestion.
*When we compare, therefore, the state of a nation at two different periods, and find, that the annual produce of its land and labour is evidently greater at the latter than at the former, that its lands are better cultivated, its manufactures more numerous and more flourishing, and its trade more extensive, we may be assured that its capital must have increased during the interval between those two periods, and that more must have been added to it by the good conduct of some, than had been taken from it either by the private misconduct of others, or by the publick extravagance of government. But we shall find this to have been the case of almost all nations, in all tolerably quiet and peaceable times, even of those who have not enjoyed the most prudent and parsimonious governments.