Adam Smith: Desire, History and Value

Abstract

The fragment, reproduced from my Reading ‘Adam Smith’ (Shapiro 1993), which begins ‘Smith and the Problem of Value,’ is predicated on the central argument of the book: Smith’s Wealth of Nations is best read as a spatio-temporal story. And insofar as the Wealth’s narrativity shapes its perspective, what I refer to as Smith’s ‘theory of value’ is located more in the way he develops a historical plot than in his explicit economic concepts. In Smith’s writing, value emerges in the interface between his larger historical plot and his smaller, epistemological one. The former (elaborated in Smith’s Wealth) treats his narrative of expanding exchange, while the latter (developed in many of his other writings) comprises his sensationalist account of how the world becomes intelligible to individual, perceiving subjects, as bodies encounter objects. Ultimately, after analyzing the failure of Smith’s theory to account for how things become valued, I suggest, that an appreciation of the way value is deployed in the dynamics of political economy cannot be derived from an inspection of the way an object’s materiality satisfies a need or want, even when, à la Smith, one focuses on the productive processes that make that object available. Rather, it is necessary to locate a drive towards satisfaction — this is, desire — within a complex set of evolving cultural codes. Among the implications of this argument is a shift in the intellectual terrain within which political economy is to be thought.