The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers (25 page)

Smith did approve of education. His stated purpose was not so much to improve workers’ lives as to provide a means to “socialize” workers and perhaps improve their productivity. However, Smith gave no hint that employers could offer a good quality of life by creating workplaces where employment could be an opportunity for fulfillment rather than an unbearable burden.

Smith never took account of the personal toll that grueling working conditions would take on the laborers in the large industrial plants that would soon become common. In the one passage where Smith did worry about the physical consequences of overwork, he attributed the problem to workers’ autonomy. According to Smith, where piece rates are high, people are likely to choose overwork:

Workmen … when they are liberally paid by the piece, are very apt to over-work themselves, and to ruin their health and constitution in a few
years. A carpenter in London, and in some other places, is not supposed to last in his utmost vigour above eight years. Something of the same kind happens in many other trades, in which the workmen are paid by the piece.
¹⁴

Presumably, such adverse outcomes would not occur if employers did not pay too much. Elsewhere, working conditions appear to be irrelevant to Smith, except to the extent that they somehow contributed to bad behavior.

Smith’s obsessive concern with working-class discipline is remarkable. The core of his doctrine was that the fourth stage of development would usher in a system of voluntary market relations. But although Smith framed his argument in terms of volunteerism, his voluntarism depended upon the acquiescence of people with little opportunity for choice. Such conditions would do little to encourage workers to identify with the market economy. No wonder the working class appeared so surly to Smith. How could he expect that people in such dire straits would embrace the behavior that he associated with small merchants and artisans?

In effect, then, Smith’s four stages theory was working in reverse. The transition from an agricultural to commercial society was supposed to elevate the masses. Instead it appeared to be causing degeneration within the ranks of the poor. This degeneration, however, was in large part a rational, class-oriented response to a system that both degraded and impoverished the urban workers whose behavior repulsed Smith.

Because the core of Smith’s doctrine was that the fourth stage of development would usher in a system of voluntary market relations, his obsessive concern with the need to impose working-class discipline is remarkable. But Smith’s voluntarism depended upon the acquiescence of people with little opportunity for choice. How could Smith expect that people in such dire straits would identify with the market economy and embrace the behavior that he associated with small merchants and artisans.

Instead, Smith pinned his hopes on extra-market coercion.

Military Discipline, Market Discipline

Smith addressed two kinds of controls to maintain social and economic order—controls over the market and controls over the people. Smith’s call for market controls are minimal compared to those that control people. This imbalance should not be surprising considering Smith’s interest in molding the human personality to fit the needs of a market society.

Smith’s suggested controls of personal behavior are more far-reaching than one might expect after reading the first part of the
Wealth of Nations
, where volunteerism promises a world of harmonious prosperity. People’s response to the grain trade suggested that markets were not changing personal behavior the way Smith preferred.

Molding personal behavior to fit the needs of the market was not the only thing Smith had in mind. It was also crucial in terms of national defense, which Smith considered more important than opulence.
¹⁵
On at least two occasions, Smith equated opulence with effeminacy—looking back favorably at a time of “rough, manly people who had no sort of domestic luxury or effeminacy.”
¹⁶
Like Ferguson, Smith was disturbed that the growing commercial society he welcomed was inhospitable to military virtue. The personal qualities that make for a strong military are different from those that are appropriate for a successful commercial society. To his credit, Smith sensed that working conditions were also part of the equation. Here Smith returned to the subject of division of labor, but his tone sounded more like Ferguson than himself, warning that “some attention of government is necessary in order to prevent the almost entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people.”
¹⁷

Smith did not mean that the government should change the way business treats its workers, but rather that it had the responsibility to find a way to maintain the workers’ manly vigor necessary for military service:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise
his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country, he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.
¹⁸

This passage is often cited as evidence of Smith’s humanitarian concerns, but the context of this critique of the division of labor throws a different light on the subject. Commercial society and national defense seem to be at odds. According to Smith’s four stages theory, the market should have been turning everybody into merchants. Certainly, the merchant class had many qualities that Smith considered desirable:

Regularity, order, and prompt obedience to command are qualities which, in modern armies, are of more importance towards determining the fate of battles than the dexterity and skill of the soldiers in the use of their arms.
¹⁹

To the extent that the market succeeded in that respect, national defense was sure to suffer. Even moderately successful people would consider their time too valuable to voluntarily devote themselves to soldiering. In Smith’s words:

Into other arts the division of labour is naturally introduced by the prudence of individuals, who find that they promote their private interest better by confining themselves to a particular trade than by exercising a great number. But it is the wisdom of the state only which can render the trade of a soldier a particular trade separate and distinct from all others. A private citizen who, in time of profound peace, and without any particular encouragement from the public, should spend the greater part of his time in military exercises, might, no doubt, both improve himself very much in them, and amuse himself very well; but he certainly would not promote his own interest.
²⁰

How can “the wisdom of the state” create a military if it is not in the self-interest of people to participate? Smith understood that the work demands of modern industry also required discipline, but not the healthy self-discipline Smith admired. Workers who had to submit to the harsh tedium of adapting to the unremitting rhythms of machines experienced an unnatural form of discipline—one that broke the spirit of some and made others angry and rebellious, such as when they practiced the values of the moral economy. Neither outcome was particularly favorable to the production of desirable cannon fodder. So, for Smith, almost nobody in the cities seemed suitable to provide for national defense.

The poor might seem to be likely candidates for military service, but the demands of modern industry left people with little free time.
²¹
The poor masses also presented an intellectual problem for Smith, who associated the degraded condition of the workers with cowardice. At the same time, Smith was fearful that these cowards might eventually rise up and threaten the wealth of the wealthy.

To remedy this situation, Smith called upon the state to transform the people, correcting their personal defects and making them into
upstanding citizens. Smith did call for educating the poor, while others at the time feared that widespread literacy could make them more dangerous. However, Smith, the reputed libertarian, suggested that education be mixed with compulsion:

The public can impose upon almost the whole body of the people the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education, by obliging every man to undergo an examination or probation in them before he can obtain the freedom in any corporation, or be allowed to set up any trade either in a village or town corporate.
²²

Coercion would force the poor to submit to education. The penalty would be that potential merchant-workers would be limited in the kind of merchandise (their work) that non-compliant people could bring to the market.

Smith was not advocating instructing students in the same classical literature that wealthy children studied. Instead, he advocated the creation of a martial spirit that he associated with these ancient imperial states of Greece and Rome:

It was in this manner, by facilitating the acquisition of their military and gymnastic exercises, by encouraging it, and even by imposing upon the whole body of the people the necessity of learning those exercises, that the Greek and Roman republics maintained the martial spirit of their respective citizens.
²³

Smith’s educational proposal was not intended so much to promote working people’s welfare as to improve their martial spirit. This education was designed, at least in part, to improve the capacity for human annihilation rather than human flourishing.

Smith’s defenders note that in his discussion of education two paragraphs earlier he discussed how familiarity with geometry and mechanics would make workers more productive, though that single mention of productivity weighs lightly compared to six references to “martial spirit.”

Smith was also an avid promoter of the militia. He was a founding member of the Poker Club, the purpose of which was to further the cause of a militia rather than a standing army. By the time
The Wealth of Nations
appeared, Smith advocated a standing army—at least “one in which citizens maintain the manly virtues, a community that praises courage, a country which sympathizes with the cardinal virtue of courage.”
²⁴

The Militia Act had authorized raising a militia, beginning in May 1757. The legislation also allowed for training on Sundays, but made no provision for paying the members. In August, a small group of village militiamen demanded a barrel of ale from an aged clergyman. Later, they demonstrated, asking for money. According to an article in
Scots Magazine
, participants said they would willingly sacrifice their lives for King and Country but “would not be obliged to quit home for sixpence a day to serve in the militia.”
²⁵

Although one might commend these reluctant militiamen for their merchant-like calculation, Smith’s reaction was harsh. He wrote to a friend, “The Lincolnshire mobs provoke our severest indignation for opposing the militia, and we hope to hear that the ringleaders are all to be hanged.”
²⁶

Smith’s military concerns reveal him as a strict disciplinarian, very much at odds with his image as a philosopher of freedom. His admirers tend to pay too much attention to the volunteerism of the first part of his book. This darker side of Smith’s vision of socialization deserves more attention.

Religious Discipline

One might argue in Smith’s defense that the military requires a high level of discipline. However, even in matters as personal as religion, Smith severely limited the amount of voluntarism he would tolerate. He worried about “the poison of enthusiasm and superstition; and where all the superior ranks of people were secured from it, the inferior ranks could not be much exposed to it.” He called upon the state
to “correct whatever was unsocial or disagreeably vigorous in the morals of all the little sects.” In particular, “before [anyone] was permitted to exercise any liberal profession or before he could be received as a candidate for any honourable office or trust or profit,” he should have to earn a license by proving his worthiness to the state.
²⁷
Smith also opposed a provision that would have allowed members of the Scottish Presbyterian church to choose their own clergymen for fear that the process might unleash dangerous emotions.
²⁸
In contrast, doctors, whose incompetence threatened only human health rather than public order, had no need for state supervision. Smith even questioned restrictions on the sale of medical degrees.