Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

adam smith, Nicholas Phillipson, spontaneous order

Here are reviews of Nicholas Phillipson’s book:

New Statesman

The Guardian

The Economist

The Telegraph (reviewed by none other than Noel Malcolm who is contributing a chapter on Hobbes to our Oakeshott Companion).

Beneficence (I paste in an advance copy I’ve been very kindly sent by Lenore Ealy, Executive Director of The Philanthropic Entrerprise).

Who was Adam Smith?

James R. Otteson Joint Professor of Philosophy and Economics, Yeshiva University

A review of Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Adam Smith is one of the most beloved, most hated, most cited, and least read figures in the pantheon of great Western thinkers. His ideas have helped transform political and economic policy throughout much of the world, and they are credited by many for the unprecedented growth in wealth and prosperity the West has seen in the over two centuries since his death. They are also blamed by many for inequalities in wealth that have arisen since Smith’s time. But consider that since 1800 the world’s population has increased six-fold, and yet, despite this enormous increase, real income per person has increased approximately sixteen-fold.1 That is a truly amazing achievement. Yet that increased prosperity would seem due principally to the complex of institutions we now call “capitalism.” For the only thing that changed between 200 years ago and the previous hundred thousand years of human history was the introduction and embrace of “capitalist” institutions—political, economic, and cultural. And Adam Smith stands as one of the founders of these institutions. Smith is thus a vitally important figure in human history. So who, then, is this Adam Smith? What were his momentous ideas? How could a socially awkward eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher have wrought such tremendous effect on the world? Nicholas Phillipson’s Adam Smith is an excellent place to start in answering these questions. Indeed, Phillipson’s engaging, even compelling, story manages to do what some might have thought impossible: telling an interesting story about an economist. Yet Adam Smith was much more than what we today think of as an economist. He was a “moral philosopher” who spent his scholarly life trying to understand the principles that animate all human behavior, including both human morality in his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments and economic in his 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith came to articulate a conception of human social institutions that was grounded on observation and on a plausible picture of human psychology, and in so doing he also delineated a methodology for research about human society that would set the agenda for new and future disciplines of the “social sciences.” Phillipson reconstructs Smith’s achievement by locating the key principles of human behavior and social science that Smith discovered in all his extant writings, including of course his two great books, and also by explaining both what Smith takes and how he departs from other important figures like Francis Hutcheson and David Hume. Phillipson’s Smith emerges as an empirically-oriented social scientist, a brilliant mind trying to understand what the institutions are that lead to human happiness and prosperity, who yet also has the generosity of soul to be sincerely committed to using his discoveries to help remove obstacles to the wellbeing of the common man. Smith’s development of a spontaneous-order conception of human social institutions derived from a method of investigation that came to be known as the Scottish Historical School, which involved taking human beings as they are and the world as it is, not as they might be in a fictionalized state, and looking for observable patterns in their behavior. Once these patterns have been observed, the moral philosopher can make rational recommendations about how to enhance the possibilities of prosperous life. That is, or should be, the goal of social science, and we can see from Phillipson that Smith is one of its great founding fathers. Phillipson’s book is therefore quite welcome. Yet perhaps one might raise a handful of gentle criticisms. One relates to the thorny issue of the so-called is/ought problem. That problem concerns the logical fallacy of deriving normative (“ought”) statements from descriptive (“is”) statements. It was Smith’s friend David Hume who articulated this common fallacy in his Treatise of Human Nature, remarking that he noticed the frequency with which moralists would go from describing this or that state of affairs in the world to immediately concluding that this or that ought to be done about it. Hume pointed out that such a transition constitutes a logical fallacy because no set of factual statements (even if true) by itself implies any moral injunction. One can describe all the factual details of a murder, for example, without thereby determining any specific moral conclusions to draw from it. Smith seems to have a foot in both the normative and the descriptive camps in both of his books. For example, in Phillipson’s account, Smith offers in The Theory of Moral Sentiments the “impartial spectator” both as a heuristic device that people in fact employ to help them guide and regulate their behavior, and as a representative of true morality that people ought to follow. This raises a question of how we should understand Smith’s project in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Is he a moral psychologist describing his empirical findings about the phenomenon of human moral judgment making, or a moralist making recommendations about how people ought to behave? It seems he is arguably both: how, then, do the two go together? Similarly, in The Wealth of Nations, when Smith declares that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” that sounds like a descriptive statement (and, some have said, a rather cynical one at that)—to which one might retort, “Perhaps that is how we often do behave, but we should not!” One more example: Smith discovers and describes the mechanisms of a spontaneous-order model for understanding human social institutions, but he also seems to positively recommend the decentralized, spontaneously created orders as against centrally planned and designed orders. A discussion from Phillipson of how Smith got from the descriptive to the normative in cases like these would thus have been instructive. One might also wish Phillipson had given more than merely cursory attention to the question of how to reconcile Smith’s arguments for free trade—indeed, his, in Smith’s own words, “very violent attack” on “the whole commercial system of Great Britain” (247)— with Smith’s vigorous, exacting, and even punctilious fulfillment of his duties as the Commissioner of Customs for the last decade of his life. How can one square the fact that Smith argued for the abolition of tariffs, quotas, and other impediments to trade on the empirical grounds that doing so would increase human prosperity, with the fact that, when given the opportunity, he applied and exacted them with great enthusiasm? One also wonders how we should understand Smith’s endorsement of free trade and limited government, and indeed his, in Phillipson’s words, “pervasive” “doubts about the competence of modern governments” (232) in light of the rather long list of duties that Smith in various places suggested were the sovereign’s—including some public education and even entertaining “publick diversions” (234). In The Wealth of Nations Smith articulated three duties of government: protecting citizens from foreign invasion, protecting citizens from invasion from other citizens, and “certain publick works” (WN IV.9.51). These public works were those “which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expence to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society” (ibid.). How long a list is that, exactly? Smith suggests that it might include roads, canals, and the above-mentioned public grammar schools and “publick diversions,” but his criteria for selecting suitable public works might open the door far wider. If Phillipson is correct, however (as he surely is), that Smith has fundamental doubts about the competency of government, why would Smith allow even these few public works? Why would he not indeed have come to the opposite conclusion—that, because they are so important to the public, they must therefore not be left to the tender mercies of incompetent government? Phillipson rightly argues that Smith was not a utopian theorist, but was instead a realist who looked to history (even if sometimes “conjectural history”), to observation, and to what Smith somewhat fancifully called “experiment” to inform his positions. Phillipson claims that “Smith left utopian theorizing to the final pages” of The Wealth of Nations (235), where Smith described the problems associated with public debt, especially as Britain’s was increasing due to expenses associated with its attempt to maintain its empire in America. But what exactly is “utopian” about Smith’s concerns here? If anything, it would seem that, especially given the problems Western governments (American included) are facing with their huge and growing public debts right now, Smith’s discussion could not be more timely or germane to actual, on-the-ground reality. Let me close with an important and even enlightening lesson from Phillipson’s treatment. He writes near the end of his book that The Wealth of Nations “is the greatest and most enduring monument to the intellectual culture of the Scottish Enlightenment” (237). Phillipson shows that the story of the Scottish Enlightenment parallels and reflects the story of Smith himself; indeed, the story of the Scottish Enlightenment is, in a deep sense, the story of Smith. Given how profoundly our own world has, in turn, been shaped by ideas that came out of the Scottish Enlightenment, we can say that Smith’s story is also the story of us. Phillipson’s book provides a coherent picture of the complex life of Smith and his integration into the astonishing period of learning and advancement of human knowledge that marked the Scottish Enlightenment. But it is not only for the advancement of knowledge that we have to thank Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment. The tremendous increases in material well-being that Smithian institutions have enabled—and, one might add, the vast increase in philanthropic capacity and opportunity created by this increasing prosperity—has blessed millions of human beings with relief from the nasty, poor, brutish, and short status quo ante of human history. By reminding us of this important history and of Smith’s central place in it, Phillipson’s book not only provides us an illuminating and surprisingly timely window onto our own place in the world today but also an inspiration to protect and extend the fragile but precious Smithian institutions that have played no small role in the development of modern civilization.

It was the sound that tasted different

music, neurobiology, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, qualia, synesthesia, V.S. Ramachandran

Here’s an article from The Economist. More informative however is the work of V.S. Ramachandran and co. arguably the leading researcher in the field. See “The Phenomenology of Synaesthesia” and the recent “Survival of the Synesthesia Gene: Why Do People Hear Colors and Taste Words?“

Atheism and God: Review of de Botton and Scruton

atheism, religion

Here’s a review of Alain de Botton’s and Roger Scruton’s latest book, the most recent entries into what has become a thriving publishing niche. The reviewer is rather scathing of de Botton:

He is an aggregator of ideas rather than an original thinker, but his skill is to write simply about complex ideas and he gives his fans the sensation of reading something profound with little effort.

This has resonance with the entry for Scruton in  The Philosophical Lexicon:

scrutonize, v. “To conflate two disciplines at a superficial level so that dinner party conversations could continue in the spurious belief that matters of moment were being discussed while the port was passed.” – David Dunster, Architectural Design, December 1979, p. 327.

The latter is thoroughly unfair; the former (assuming it’s a fair assessment – I haven’t read de Botton) is hardly unique – there are many such “aggregators” around.

Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology

incommensurability, K. Brad Wray, paradigm, postmodern, relativism, sociology, sociology of science, Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Here’s a review of K. Brad Wray’s Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology. (Wray, by the way, has been a strong contributor to EPISTEME). It’s also worth checking out Alexander Bird’s entry on Kuhn for Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Kuhn is one of those thinkers whose work has been tarnished by academics who need an off-the-peg philosophical outlook to paper over the lack of a critical philosophical culture.

Thomas Kuhn’s work occupies a strange place in the history of philosophy. With over one million copies sold, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is probably the most popular academic philosophy book of the twentieth century. Yet, despite its intuitive appeal Kuhn’s work has been received very critically by philosophers themselves. Almost fifty years later, Brad Wray wants to move past the popular negative reading of Kuhn and searches for positive insights in his work.

Hayek, Popper, and the Causal Theory of the Mind

causal theory, edward feser, hayek, mind body, neurophilosophy, philosophical psychology, philosophy of mind, Popper, Putnam, qualia, the sensory order

Here is the introduction to Ed Feser’s paper from Hayek in Mind.

In late 1952, F. A. Hayek sent his friend Karl Popper a copy of his recently published book The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology. In a letter dated December 2, 1952, Popper acknowledged receipt of the book and responded as follows to what he had read in it:

I am not sure whether one could describe your theory as a causal theory of the sensory order. I think, indeed, that one can. But then, it would be also the sketch of a causal theory of the mind. But I think I can show that a causal theory of the mind cannot be true (although I cannot show this of the sensory order; more precisely, I think I can show the impossibility of a causal theory of the human language (although I cannot show the impossibility of a causal theory of perception). I am writing a paper on the impossibility of a causal theory of the human language, and its bearing upon the body-mind problem, which must be finished in ten days. I shall send you a copy as soon as it is & typed.

In a later letter dated January 19, 1953, Popper added, As to my comments on your book, they are, as far as criticism is concerned, implicit in my paper. I think you have made a splendid effort towards a theory of the sub-linguistic (¼ sub-human ((¼descriptive)) language) level of mind; but I believe that no physiological approach (although most important) can be sufficient to explain the descriptive and argumentative functions of language. Or in other words, there can be no causal or physiological theory of reason. The paper Popper was referring to is his short article ‘‘Language and the body-mind problem.’’ Hayek began a draft of a paper entitled ‘‘Within systems and about systems: A statement of some problems of a theory of communication,’’ which, as Jack Birner has suggested, appears to have been intended at least in part as a response to Popper’s criticisms. But it was never completed, and Hayek never addressed Popper’s arguments in any of his published work. The Sensory Order has, however unjustly, largely been forgotten outside the circles of Hayek specialists. Popper’s brief paper is perhaps even less well known. Neither Popper’s letters to Hayek nor Hayek’s unfinished draft have yet been published. So, this episode might seem rather insignificant in the history of thought and indeed of little significance even to our understanding of either Hayek’s thought or Popper’s. But, as I hope to show in what follows, nothing could be further from the truth. With respect both to its general themes and to some of the specific philosophical moves made by each side, the brief, private dispute between Hayek and Popper foreshadowed a more prominent debate within twentieth-century analytic philosophy that began in the 1970s and continues to this day. Moreover, both the dispute between Hayek and Popper and the later debate reflect a deep tension that has lain at the heart of Western thought since the time of the scientific revolution. On the one hand, there is the ‘‘mechanical world picture’’5 according to which all natural phenomena can be explained entirely in terms of the mathematically describable behavior of matter in motion. On the other hand, there are rational human thought processes, including the philosophical and scientific theorizing that led to the mechanical world picture itself. It is far from obvious that the latter can be fitted comfortably into the former – that human rationality can be explained in terms of purely material processes – and from the time of Descartes until relatively recently, the dominant view was that it could not be. Hayek and Popper were writing at a time when this view began to give way to a new materialist orthodoxy. Hayek, though arguably more sensitive to the tension in question than most contemporary materialists, nevertheless thought it could be resolved in a way favorable to a broadly materialist or ‘‘naturalistic’’ understanding of the mind. Popper disagreed and believed the older, dualistic conception of the mind to be essentially correct, and as we will see, his reasons for doing so have in more recent years been regarded even by some non-dualist philosophers as posing a serious difficulty for materialism. In the next section, I will set the stage for the discussion of Hayek and Popper with a brief account of the nature and origins of the mind-body problem (or ‘‘body-mind problem,’’ as Popper preferred to call it). We will see that there are really at least three mind-body problems, and that while Hayek and most contemporary philosophers focus on the first of these, Popper was more concerned with the other two and believed that they pose a more serious difficulty for materialism than the former does. The third section will explain what a ‘‘causal theory of the mind’’ is and the respects in which Hayek’s account can be regarded as a causal theory. The fourth section will examine Popper’s main criticism of causal theories, which will be elucidated by comparison with the views of contemporary philosopher Hilary Putnam, who (apparently independently) developed a line of argument that parallels and extends the one presented by Popper. Finally, in the fifth section, I will consider the possible response to Popper suggested both by Hayek’s unpublished draft and by things Hayek had to say in some of his published work, relating it to the responses contemporary philosophers have given to arguments like those presented by Popper and Putnam. I will argue that none of these replies succeeds and that the Popperian critique remains a powerful and as yet unanswered challenge not only to dogmatic materialism but even to the more modest and critical form of materialism or naturalism defended by Hayek.

Hegel and the extended mind

Andy Clark, david chalmers, extended mind, externalism, hegel, parity principle, Shaun Gallagher, situated cognition, social cognition

Anthony Crisafi and Shaun Gallagher in AI & Society (Volume 25, Number 1, 123-129):

We examine the theory of the extended mind, and especially the concept of the ‘‘parity principle’’ (Clark and Chalmers in Analysis 58.1:7–19, 1998), in light of Hegel’s notion of objective spirit. This unusual combination of theories raises the question of how far one can extend the notion of extended mind and whether cognitive processing can supervene on the operations of social practices and institutions. We raise some questions about putting this research to critical use.

Experience and its Modes: A Reappraisal

epistemology, experience and its modes, metaphysics, oakeshott, philosophy of history

Here is a recent (2009) review of one of my favourite books. The review is infinitely warmer than the snippy Stebbing review I mentioned in a post some two years ago.

Culture wars revisited

culture wars, episteme, epistemology, James Robert Brown, social constructivism, social epistemology, sokal hoax, SUSAN HAACK

Michael Lynch and Alan Sokal enagage in a most civil dialogue: Defending Science: An Exchange. Readers might also be interested in Susan Haack’s Defending Science-Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism and James Robert Brown’s Who Rules in Science?: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars – two cracking reads – and both past contributors to EPISTEME.

Cosmos and Taxis

complex adaptive systems, complexity, constructivism, cosmos, hayek, rationalism, social connectionism, social epistemology, social ontology, spontaneous order, stigmergic, stigmergy, taxis

I chanced upon this painting entitled “Cosmos and Taxis“. The inspiration is, of course, as the artist states:

One effect of our habitually identifying order with a made order or taxis is indeed that we tend to ascribe to all order certain properties which deliberate arrangements regularly, and with respect to some of these properties necessarily, possess. Such orders are relatively simple or at least necessarily confined to such moderate degrees of complexity as the maker can still survey; they are usually concrete in the sense just mentioned that their existence can be intuitively perceived by inspection; and, finally, having been made deliberately, they invariably do (or at one time did) serve a purpose of the maker. None of these characteristics necessarily belong to a spontaneous order or cosmos. Its degree of complexity is not limited to what a human mind can master. Its existence need not manifest itself to our senses but may be based on purely abstract relations which we can only mentally reconstruct. And not having been made it cannot legitimately be said to have a particular purpose, although our awareness of its existence may be extremely important for of successful pursuit of a great variety of different purposes.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig, The Royal Game

H/T to Paul Raymont’s wonderfully eclectic Philosophy, lit, etc. for bringing my attention to this review in the Literary Review. I paste in the text just in case it becomes available by subscription only. Another, though unrelated article on Zweig, can be found in Intelligent Life: 

Stefan Zweig is a writer readers either love or barely know. As fresh work is published, Julie Kavanagh pinpoints his appeal …

By contrast here is a rather snippy assessment of Zweig in The Guardian. For what its worth I still think that Schachnovelle stands as one of the greatest psychological novels written and Die Welt von Gestern one of the most subtle of autobiographies. I realise that this is somewhat disturbing but here is a shot of Zweig and his wife after their double suicide.

 

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Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig
By Oliver Matuschek
(Translated by Allan Blunden)
(Pushkin Press 215pp £20)
Friderike & Stefan

Among the treasures in the British Library, one of the most unexpected is a collection of autographed manuscript scores that includes Mozart’s thematic catalogue of his own works. Donated in 1986, these formed part of the incredible hoard accumulated by Stefan Zweig throughout his life.

The collecting habit began early. By the age of fifteen, Zweig, the indulged second son of a wealthy family of Viennese industrialists, had decided to become a writer. Praised by Hermann Hesse for his first collection of stories, Zweig decided to broaden his literary connections by inviting the celebrated writers of the day to correspond with him. His success rate increased after he took the kindly advice of one great author and began enclosing return postage; several agreed, not only to sign letters, but to sell their manuscripts to an enterprising youth who, by the age of twenty, was leading the life of a sixty-year-old, nestled among a gathering of framed photos, poems and autographs that included – his greatest jewel – a handwritten Goethe poem.

Protected from that familiar iron rod to a young writer’s back – a lack of money – Zweig chose to broaden the cosy horizons of home life and the Viennese coffee-shops with travel. Aged twenty-five, and already equipped with a reputation as one of Vienna’s most interesting authors, he visited London and acquired, during long hours in the great circular reading room of the old British Library, a passion for William Blake. Advised by the writer and future politician Walter Rathenau, he visited India and America, where he astonished the porter at his New York hotel by eagerly requesting to be led to the New Jersey grave of Walt Whitman.

Oliver Matuschek’s authoritative and magnificently researched biography does full justice to the combination of intelligence, industry and adept networking that helped Zweig in his rise to become a figure of international reputation, with a vast popular following. At the same time, he slyly portrays a faintly comical figure, possessed by a gnawing and unslakable desire to be on handshaking terms with the great of past and present. Few men, as Matuschek observes, would have been so thrilled as Zweig to find that he lived in the same building as the daughter of Goethe’s doctor; few, returning home from America on the same boat as the dying Mahler, would have attempted – as Zweig did – to scramble over the wall of suitcases that provided the great composer with a small area of privacy. (Mahler, although weak, turned his head away from view; later, as Zweig tried to ingratiate himself with Alma’s small daughter, Mahler faintly asked for him to be sent away.)

Asked to comment on his brother’s long-deferred marriage to the stoical and admirably loyal Friderike, Alfred Zweig commented that it had never worked. This was harsh. True, Stefan Zweig had no sympathy with his two unliterary step-daughters; true, Friderike was rapidly taught that the most she could hope for in a promiscuous man’s life was the role of ‘top bunny’. (‘I don’t begrudge him others,’ Friderike gallantly announced, before adding, less sweetly: ‘nor others him.’) Invited to disclose, late in life, whether the marriage had been happy, Friderike declined to answer. Asked why they had no children together, she answered, with customary opacity: ‘He was no Don Juan.’ You can say that again. On his wedding night, Zweig left town, but not before instructing Friderike to sort out and file his drawers of old love-letters.

Obsessive, depressive and secretive in his private life, Zweig hid behind the persona of a cherished performer. Throughout the economically volatile 1920s, his works never lost their popularity. Revered for the biographical triads in which he specialised (but which did not find an English readership), Zweig moved from platform to platform, reading from his work to audiences who never failed to buy. Occasionally, one of his chosen subjects registered a protest (Freud was infuriated to be teamed with Mesmer and Mrs Baker Eddy); but Zweig’s ascent never faltered. ‘Onwards and upwards,’ he noted in his fiftieth year. Significantly, he added a hope that the progress would not endure for long.

In 1932, despite the steady rise of Hitler and occasional published allusions to ‘the Jew Zweig’, the prolific author’s life of Marie Antoinette sold 50,000 copies. In 1934 an order for the withdrawal of no fewer than fifteen Zweig titles from sale was hastily rescinded, for fear of public displeasure. Nevertheless, following a random search of his home for weapons and incriminating materials, Zweig went into exile. Richard Strauss, courageously insisting that the name of his new librettist should appear on posters and programmes in 1935, was delighted by the rapturous reception at Dresden of his latest opera. Three nights later, performance of Die schweigsame Frau was banned. The composer was compelled to find himself, at speed, an Aryan substitute for Zweig.

England was Zweig’s first refuge and one of Matuschek’s many gems is an early BBC interview, proof that English was one language in which the multilingual author was ill at ease. Beware of Pity, his surprisingly late first full-length novel, won Zweig, at last, an English audience, while Friderike’s helpful discovery, at the refugee centre in Woburn Place, of a diligent German typist named Lotte led to divorce and a second, happier marriage. (Friderike, ever loyal, remained a faithful correspondent and facilitator.)

Married in 1939, the newly weds settled at Rosemount, a terraced home in Bath, where they lived among Zweig’s most treasured amulets: Beethoven’s desk, a Mozart song, and – a new acquisition – the score of An die Musik. A lecture in Paris (arranged by the indefatigable Friderike) about his lost Vienna led Zweig to begin work on his wonderful, if somewhat imaginative, autobiography: The World of Yesterday.

Zweig had fallen in love with the glittering beauty of Rio de Janeiro on his first visit in 1936. In 1941, following a nervous breakdown while in New York, the decision was taken that he and Lotte would settle in Brazil. Before departure, a little ominously, he made a gift to a visiting friend of the typewriter on which he had just completed his life story.

The final decision, taken in February 1942, was possibly triggered by news of the fall of Singapore to Japan. More certainly, as Matuschek strongly indicates, Zweig was ready to complete a long-held plan to end his life. Opening the door of the couple’s bedroom at the hillside villa in secluded Petrópolis, the housemaid found Zweig and Lotte dead and fully clothed. The cause of death – a joint suicide by poison – was not questioned. In a last letter to Friderike, Zweig told her that the lack of books and solitude had become oppressive, but that he was now peaceful. ‘Cheer up,’ he concluded, ‘knowing me quiet and happy.’

Oliver Matuschek has ranged widely to provide this thoughtful, balanced and sometimes pleasingly ironic account of a writer whose name was once among the most celebrated in the world. I wish that he had found space to discuss the quality of the work, as well as the life; but his intention, to provide a detailed personal portrait of Zweig and his family, has been admirably and fully achieved.