There is much momentous happening today, and I’m sure I’ll be back here or in some other way with thoughts on that. But for now I’m posting about another project. A couple weeks ago I started the second year of re-reading my college notes again, on (more or less) the calendar date when I wrote them. So I am a sophomore now!
I am also officially a Social Studies concentrator. For those following my write-ups who aren’t in the lingo of Harvard. Social Studies is not a department but an interdisciplinary program rooted in modern social theory on the nature of modern society, out of which one can branch into almost any area within the social sciences. A sort-of throwback sociology approach. It appealed to me because I wanted to do more social theory, and also it was the concentration that allowed me to take the most courses that I wanted in psychology and political science, and who knows what else would catch my fancy. In my era the sophomore year seminar was the reading of seven theorists – Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud.
So, Adam Smith. We read The Wealth of Nations as well as The Theory of Moral Sentiments. From the first, it is just exciting to see two not at all intuitive ideas. One is that the wealth of society is basically a function of the totality of all the exchanges between people. It’s not a thing or even anything that you can point to at a moment, but a flow or the aggregation of processes. Smith tried to figure out how to work from that brilliant insight, which obviously “works”, to things like the value of labor or the return on exchanges to labor, capital, and rent (the parallel for land or land owners).
The other big idea is of course the “invisible hand”, Smith’s metaphor for the way in which a market economy takes the individual, uncoordinated actions of disparate individuals and yields an optimal outcome for society as a whole. And how in particular this framework creates more happiness than any designed plan would, based on some a priori conception of the good or virtue or the satisfaction of basic needs.
What interests me more I guess is what was termed the “Adam Smith Problem”, which has to do with the relationship of this analysis to the moral psychology in the other work, the Theory of Moral Sentiments. There Smith tries to explain how ethical principles become rooted in individuals, and he talks about “sympathy” – the innate ability and need to understand others’ emotions and reactions – and the “invisible spectator”, an internalized judge of oneself based largely on that sympathy. I hadn’t remembered that Smith did think that sympathy was an up-close thing, and he needed a better explanation of how a person makes judgements about farther away or larger matters. He posited that humans have a “love of system”, a joy in seeing the working of large enterprises or harmonious society.
All of this led him toward a picture of a well-functioning person as someone prudent – grounded in one’s own needs and desires, but taking account of the reactions one’s acquisitiveness and ambition might elicit in others, and conscious somehow of the joy others might take in one’s own contribution to social harmony.
The “Adam Smith Problem” is how to reconcile the individually-motivated economic actor of his economic theory, who does not and should not try to enact a wider social goal, with the prudent person in his moral psychology. One way to reconcile them, as I did in my paper on the question, is to say that the economic theory works with whatever human psychology is real, and the moral-psychological theory is an account of one such psychology. Another, which I think Professor Milgate posited, is that really the Moral Sentiments is its own kind of “invisible hand” explanation, of how the different parts of natural human psychology cause separate individuals to create for themselves the same ethical equilibrium, which happens to be the one society needs in order for the market to function peacefully and optimally.
I will never forgot at our 25th reunion Mike Gaw, fellow Social Studies concentrator and at the time a senior staff person at the Securities and Exchange Commission, speaking about his work on a panel and literally holding up a copy of Smith’s Moral Sentiments as he talked about bringing an ethical perspective to his work in the sophisticated echelons of modern capitalism.
I never hear other people cite Smith as a moral psychologist; I think among his contemporaries, David Hume whom I never studied in a systematic way is thought to be more important, and Hume has also an idea of sympathy and how it functions. Maybe we wouldn’t read Smith’s theory if he didn’t also have the pathfinding economic theory. Nonetheless, I think Smith is an important moral theorist and well as moral psychologist, for two reasons. One is that he did want to set capitalism on a moral foundation, and the other is that he did not want to extrapolate from the individual and family to society in a facile way. We continue in our time to wrestle with that question, whether and how sympathy plays a role in our wider moral compass and behavior. It’s parallel to the very pressing question of whether kindness and justice have much to do with each other. I hadn’t remembered that Smith had his own take.
Smith had his normative view, which was not at all grounded in traditional virtue or that tradition. (I saw in my notes a question from the lecture of whether Smith was missing something, which is that whatever prudence or lack of excess exists is actually left-over from prior ages, sort of a “capital stock”, my term not Smiths, that is unacknowledged and explains why individual-driven actions do not generally veer off into violence and larceny.) Tocqueville did absolutely begin with the civic republican tradition, and it enabled him to notice specific features of American society that buttressed his notion of “self-interest properly understood”, a parallel to Smith’s prudent man. (I don’t think I saw this parallel ever made specifically in the course, but who knows.) Tocqueville could take a step back from religion and talk about its function, as well as a free press – these were goods but instrumental to broader civic virtues. Also we think of Tocqueville as noticing the role of local government and civic associations as the outlets as well as the training grounds for civic virtue. He was somehow an anthropologist as well as deeply invested in whether a truly modern society could be virtuous and hold together. I think that’s something I have to ponder from where I sit, as a person committed to certain moral principles but also to having my eyes open about how people without those principles or a lifestyle superstructure around them actually experience life.
In his second book, Tocqueville has this big shift, to worrying about equality. I think, if I understand him right, that he saw a weakening of these virtue-teaching features of American life as people drifted more toward production activities that were detached from the local community, and became more dependent on a national literature rather than lived experienced. These social developments, coupled with an ideology of equality and a potential for social mobility that was new, would leave people with no way to understand themselves in society other than by comparison, which would lead to a fundamental individual instability and lifelong worry. On a political level it would open the way for an authoritarian figure to appeal to atomized people, to give them the fix of self-worth that was hard to have in the emerging America. Obviously this is a chilling and prescient account, initially about pockets of America and more about Germany, but really nowadays has a ton to say about the surging populism in this country.
All of this about Tocqueville seems old hat by now; nothing I’ve written about him is anything new. I would say the one thing that struck me in the notes this time around was just a piece of biography. Tocqueville in France was an aristocrat with power in the Restoration period, who insisted on trying to remain relevant even after 1830 when it seemed like the path of slow liberalization via the traditional nobles had run its course. He wanted to take responsibility even in more radical times, for seeing how a very new society could be both stable and progressive.
That’s what I’ll say about Social Studies 10 for now! I’ll be back with the first posts on my other courses.
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