Adam Smith as a Critic of Commercial Society

Abstract

Popular contemporary views of Adam Smith paint the eighteenth-century intellectual as a staunch proponent of commercial society. However, an examination of Smith’s lesser-known works, and his cultural and intellectual influences, reveals a more complex picture of his attitude with respect to these concepts. This paper explores how Smith’s critique of commercial society was rooted in assumptions about the deleterious effects of the luxuries that proliferated within it. This paper will also take a look at how Smith’s assumptions about luxury were in line with eighteenth-century understandings of its harmful effects. Moreover, this paper interrogates Smith’s understanding of the concept of commercial society and traces a history of conceptualizations of luxury in Europe from the classical era to the eighteenth century. It will be argued that Smith grappled with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critique of this social form and conceded many of Rousseau’s points about its harmful effects, without fully adhering to Rousseau’s primitivist idealism. Ultimately, this thesis argues that Smith’s moral philosophy was inseparable from his political economy and that his thinking concerning commercial society was deeply impacted by David Hume, Bernard Mandeville, and Rousseau. It will be seen that although Smith was in many ways critical of commercial society, he came to see this social form as ‘better’ than previous forms of social organization, at the last. His perspective with respect to this social form was, therefore, rather nuanced