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Adam Smith and Modern Sociology A Study in the Methodology of the Social Sciences Albion W. Small [1907] Kitchener 2001 First Edition 1907 (Chicago) This Edition 2001 Batoche Books 52 Eby Street South Kitchener, Ontario N2G 3L1 Canada email: [email protected] Table of Contents Preface............................................................... 5 I. Introduction.......................................................... 6 II. The Sources. ....................................................... 15 III The Economics and Sociology of Labor ................................. 37 IV: The Economics and Sociology of Capital................................. 66 V. Economic vs. Sociological Interpretation of History. ........................ 76 VI: The Problems of Economic and of Sociological Science..................... 79 VII: The Relation of Economic Technology to Other Social Technologies, and to Sociology............................................... 86 VIII Conclusion ....................................................... 96 Notes ............................................................... 97 bb Albion Small, Adam Smith and Modern Sociology, 5 Preface This book is a fragment which I hope will some time find its place in a more complete study of the relations between nineteenth-century social sciences and sociology. The larger investigation is in progress in my seminar, and results are already in sight which justify belief that the work will not be without value. On the purely methodological side, this investigation was stimulated, if not originally suggested, by experiences in connection with the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science. In all departments of progressive knowledge, the second half of the nineteenth century was unique in its intensive development of scientific analysis. It is not probable that scholars will ever permanently appraise the importance of analysis below their present estimates, but it is certain that we are entering an era of relatively higher appreciation of synthesis. The most distinctive trait of present scholarship is its striving for correlation with all other scholarship. Segregated sciences are becoming discredited sciences. The sociologists are aware that sterility must be the fate of every celibate social science. Cross fertilization of the social sciences occurs in spite of the most obstinate programs of non-intercourse. Commerce of the social sciences with one another should be deliberate, and it should make the policy of isolation disreputable. An objective science of economics without an objective sociology is as impossible as grammar without language. The present essay attempts to enforce this axiom by using Adam Smith as a concrete illustration. On the purely human side, unintelligence or misintelligence about the part that falls respectively to economic and to sociological theory in the conduct of life is a moral misfortune. However quixotic it might be to hope that either of these forms of theory might be popularized to any great extent in the near future, ambition to make economists and sociologists understand each other a little better is not altogether indefensible. Incidentally this book does what it can to offset the harm, more costly to the misled than to the misrepresented, that ill-report has done to economics and economists. The economists who have been written down as procurers to men’s most sordid lusts have been, as a rule, high-minded lovers of their kind. The most abused of them) Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Mill) devoted themselves to economics partly because they were genuine philanthropists. They set themselves the task of blazing out the path that leads to material prosperity, and of warning as fully as possible against side-tracks that would end in a fool’s paradise. If economic theory has at times tended to take on the character of a shopkeeper’s catechism, and at other times to become a mere calculus of hypothetical conditions, the general fact is not changed, that intelligent conduct of life must always presuppose an adequate science of economics. The economists and the sociologists are studying the real conditions of life from different angles of approach. They are already learning to make use of each other’s methods and results. The investigation of which this book is a partial report is in the interest of a more Albion Small, Adam Smith and Modern Sociology, 6 conscious and systematic partnership. The study in which the book is an initial step starts out with the perception that nineteenth-century economic theory was at bottom an attempt to discover the principles of honorable prudence, not to codify a policy of predatory greed. Economic theory became socially sterile through paresis of its conviction that morality is more than prudence. When we shall have learned to reckon with the accredited results of economic analysis, in genuine correlation with equally reputable results of psychological and sociological analysis, we shall have advanced a stadium of intelligence similar to that which was covered in assimilating the discovery that physical science is not atheism. If we can begin to interpret the progress of the social sciences since Adam Smith as, on the whole, an enlargement and enrichment of the entire area of moral philosophy, in which the preserve of economic theory was the most intensively cultivated field, we shall have done a service for the next generation. We have been seeing these things out of their relations. It is possible to furnish our successors with more accurate clues. A comment upon the table of contents will partially explain the task which the book undertakes as a portion of a larger task to be reported upon in later volumes. Titles III–VII, inclusive, must not be understood as promises of systematic treatment of the material actually within their scope. On the contrary, they are merely formulas for classifying those materials in the parallel portions of The Wealth of Nations, in which the problems of economics and sociology are intertwined. The titles indicate in a general way the large problems of methodology which the corresponding portions of Smith’s treatise implicitly, but not explicitly, raise. The very fact that the discussion under those titles, on the basis of Smith’s own analysis, contains hardly more than a hint of the whole range of problems which the titles now suggest, serves to carry the argument that economic technology, abstracted from the rest of social science, leaves yawning hiatuses in our knowledge. A. W. S. June 10, 1907 I. Introduction. If one were to come upon The Wealth of Nations for the first time, with a knowledge of the general sociological way of looking at society, but with no knowledge of economic literature, there would be not the slightest difficulty nor hesitation about classifying the book as an inquiry in a special field of sociology. Under those circumstances there would be no doubt that the author of the book had a fairly well-defined view, though not in detail the modern view, of the general relations of human society, and of the subordinate place occupied objectively, if not in conventional theory, by the economic section of activities to which the book was devoted. On its first page the reader would get hints of the outlook in the mind of the author, and it would not be hard to construct from those hints a perspective which would contrast very directly with certain points in the view that afterward stole into vogue among classical Albion Small, Adam Smith and Modern Sociology, 7 economists and working capitalists. Sombart1 has made a very strong statement of the fact that the era of modern capitalism differs from earlier industrial epochs in something far deeper than mere methods of doing business. He points out that the dominant motive for doing business has changed. The controlling purpose of modern business is to increase the volume and enlarge the power of capital. Capital for its own sake, and for the social power it confers, is the standard of modern economic life. On the other hand, capital has never been to any great degree an end in itself until the last three centuries, and particularly since the industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Previous to that time the idea of wealth, in the minds of rich and poor alike, was that it was worth having only to spend. Men wanted wealth because they wanted to consume it, not because they wanted to capitalize it. In other words, their whole philosophy of life, whether it was expressed in their economic actions or in abstract theory, was to the effect that the life was more than the things; that people and their needs were the end-end, while wealth was merely a means-end. Whatever the influence of Adam Smith’s work may have been, one cannot study his philosophy as a whole, even in the fragment of it that has come down to us, without being certain that his basic positions were clearly and positively the human rather than the capitalistic principles. The author of The Wealth of Nations did not assume that the service of capital was the goal of economic activity. On the contrary, he assumed that all economic activity was, as a matter of course, a means of putting people in possession of the means of life.2 Furthermore, to state the same fact in a little different way, Smith assumed that the whole value of economic activities was to be decided by their effects on consumption. That is, instead of putting the production of wealth in the forefront, as the most significant measure of economic processes, he evidently, at least in his fundamental theory, regarded the production of wealth as merely incidental to the consumption of wealth. His whole moral philosophy — or, as we should say today, his sociology — was the ultimate evaluator of all production and consumption; that is, the human process, as it was analyzed and synthesized by moral philosophy, was judged to be the tribunal of last resort for verdict upon the economic process. This has most certainly not been the perspective of nineteenth-century political economy as a whole, so far as England is concerned.

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