Abstract
The name of Adam Smith is most commonly associated with the notion of a natural ‘harmony of interests’ between individuals in the market, whereby the ‘invisible hand’ of competition turns self-regarding behaviour into aggregate social benefits. Joseph Cropsey echoes this view in suggesting that ‘Smith is of interest for his share in the deflection of political philosophy towards economics and for his famous elaboration of the principles of free enterprise liberal capitalism.’2 Smith is often seen as standing in a long line of British political philosophers stretching back to Hobbes and Locke and on to Bentham to culminate in John Stuart Mill, his principal contribution to the liberal tradition being his role as the great spokesman of laissez-faire and the minimalist state.3
I would like to thank Ian Clark, Iver Neumann, Adam Roberts, Tim Dunne, Byron Auguste, Holly Wyatt-Walter and Mark Zacher for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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Notes
Joseph Cropsey, ‘Adam Smith and Political Philosophy’, in Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson (eds), Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford, 1975), p. 132.
See also E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis 1919–1939 (London, 1946), pp. 43–5.
Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York, 1959), pp. 86, 90.
Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester and London, 1991), p. 263.
Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, 1987), p. 27.
For a discussion, see Mark W. Zacher and Richard A. Matthew, ‘Liberal International Theory: Common Threads, Divergent Strands’, in Charles W. Kegley (ed.), Controversies in International Relations Theory: Realism and the Neoliberal Challenge (New York, 1995).
James Shotwell, War as an Instrument of National Policy (New York, 1921), quoted in Waltz, Man, the State and War, p. 98.
Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (Oxford, 1981), pp. 25, 29.
Michael J. Shapiro, Reading ‘Adam Smith’: Desire, History and Value (London, 1993), also departs from the conventional view in claiming Smith as ‘a quintessential critical theorist’, a different line of enquiry to that taken in this essay.
The full title of Smith’s work is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776], ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford, 1976).
See Jerry Z. Muller, Adam Smith in his Time and Ours: Designing the Decent Society (New York, 1993), ch. 3,
and more generally, Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983).
Jacob Viner, ‘Adam Smith and Laissez Faire’, Journal of Political Economy, 35, April 1927, pp. 198–232,
reprinted in Viner, The Long View and the Short: Studies in Economic Theory and Policy (Glencoe, 1958), p. 227.
WN, IV.ix.51. For a discussion of the role of benevolence and sympathy in the moral order of TMS, see Viner, ‘Smith and Laissez Faire’, and Thomas Wilson, ‘Sympathy and Self-Interest’, in Thomas Wilson and Andrew S. Skinner (eds), The Market and the State: Essays in Honour of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1976).
Gunnar Myrdal, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (London, 1953), p. 107.
For an assessment of the role of rhetoric in economics and the social sciences in general, see Donald N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison, 1986).
For a similar argument, see Jacob Viner, ‘Power versus Plenty as Objectives in Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Viner, Long View, and Edward Meale Earle, ‘Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List: The Economic Foundations of Military Power’, in Earle (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (Princeton, 1971).
Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), p. 79.
WN, V.iii.37. For an equally cynical and remarkably similar view of the relationship between democracy and war, see John Kenneth Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (London, 1993), ch. 9.
See Michael W. Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12 (3&4), Summer and Fall 1983 (parts 1 and 2).
Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois [1748], XXI, 20, quoted in Hirschman, Passions and Interests, p. 73.
See J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, Historical Journal, 25(2), June 1982, pp. 331–49.
For the classic account of the ‘financial revolution’ of the seventeenth century which enhanced the war-making capabilities of the British state, see P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967).
See Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 133–4, and TMS, III.3.42.
Martin Wight, ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’ in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations (London, 1967).
Michael Joseph Smith, ‘Liberalism and International Reform’, in Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel (eds), Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge, 1992), p. 202.
For an account of the apoliticism of much liberal thought, see Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (London, 1961), pp. 299ff.
Quoted by Albert O. Hirschman, ‘Interests’, in The New Palgrave: The World of Economics, ed. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman (London, 1991), p. 355.
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Walter, A.W. (1996). Adam Smith and the Liberal Tradition in International Relations. In: Clark, I., Neumann, I.B. (eds) Classical Theories of International Relations. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27509-0_7
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