11.18.05
More: Re: [Kant] Historical Materialism
Another exchange at Kant @ yahoogroups on Allen Wood’s statements about Kant’s (putative) ‘historical materialism’.
In a message dated 11/17/2005 1:46:29 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, merrillb@[] writes:
BTW, Smith only refers to the “invisible hand” twice in his entire oput, and in neither instance does the simile function as most everyone supposes it does! Nor is either instance found in the Wealth of Nations. This is one of the more remarkable errors of conventional wisdom.
Reply:
Just right, amazing, I was about to post a similar statement. I was just reading a new book called Capitalism’s Achilles Heel, by Raymond Baker. At first this seems off topic, but the book (not from a leftist, but an Adam Smith fan) goes into issues of globalization, and the hidden problems, then veers off into a discussion of Adam Smith and the abysmal way he has been misunderstood/misused.
The author reminds us that Smith wrote two books, one on ethics, and his other well known book. Smith has been sheared in half, his commitment to the less wealthy and the poor almost excised, as he is taken to justify something he was actually not in favor of. The question of the invisible hand is almost marginal.
The point is crucial, because Smith never made the mistake of thinking economic logic could be put on auto pilot under some invisible hand. The crucial social context was key, he never forgot that for a single moment.
The point in general is that we need to understand how a moralist could also speak about self-interest, and not feel a sense of contradiction. We have lost that ability, and the whole of Smith’s thinking by taking one part of his thinking in isolation. The main thrust of the book from there is to point out that it was Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism that won the day and actually swept away Adam Smith, who behind the peans of praise wasn’t quite the man capitalist society wanted. He was promptly turned into a propaganda version.
This effect of invoking Bentham’s utilitarian thinking and then ascribing that to Smith is rife in contemporary thinking on economic society, so the author claims. The book on capitalism’s Achilles heel is thus pointing to the way that purely pseudo-Smith and utilitarianism are producing what we see, which is the massive dishonesty going on in a system that has excised ethical action.
He shows, for example, how systematic dishonesty at all levels, legal and illegal, is ripping off one trillion dollars a year from undeveloped societies, even as everyone is wringing their hands wondering why globalization is leaving some people out. The material on how the swindle happens is worth reading.
In broad strokes then the point is that general principles that de-ethicize economic action are problematical, and certainly not from Smith.
Now cut to Kant. A similar problem arises there, although noone has forgotten that the man who might sound like an ‘historical materialist’, or better, a sort of Smithian, is also a moralist. He sees the question in terms of his ‘asocial sociability’ and its contradictions. We can’t quite reconcile that with the obvious issue that this situation could not constitute the ‘kingdom of ends’ in his ethics. Capitalist society can at no point satisfy that criterion, and this contradiction is clearly on Kant’s mind. You can, of course, accuse Kant of being a crypto-utopian behind his equally strong realism, but that misses the point.
Part of the problem is resolved by dropping the useless misconceptions of such asAdam Smith, then we can see that the generation of Kant, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, was actually quite radical, and didn’t expect the future to come, and I doubt they would have endorsed. The point is a little clearer with Thomas Paine, who embraced economic liberty, yet was in the thicket of the French Revolution, almost losing his head.
So I really doubt if Adam Smith would endorse the current system of economy that we see. Worth keeping mind.
In fact there is a good book on this, nearly unread, but in most Kant sections in University stack libraries: Van der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism. His leftism condemns him to oblivion now, but he follows this faultline between Kant on history and the conception of the ‘kingdom of ends’ in a very clear fashion. We can see Allen Wood’s point, that Kant ‘predicts’ Marx. That would go over too well with those other fans of Kant, the Hayekians.
Kant as a socialist doesn’t quite work (although there was a lot of thinking on that score in the Neo-Kantian period), but the point is the faultline Kant creates in his thinking on society in relation to his thinking on ethics. Kant’s depth is such that he embodies both, or many, perspectives in a kind of unstable equilibrium. That that equilibrium really was quite unstable is the history of the last two centuries.