Rethinking measures of cultural vitality, wellbeing and citizenship International Conference: 2 - 4 May 2012, Woodward Conference Centre, University of Melbourne
Adam Smith and the System of Happiness: Culture and Commerce in The Wealth of Nations
Harriet Parsons, Independent researcher
Abstract: Since the world fell into the so-called Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the meaning of money and value has come into question, but it is a debate as old as economics itself which began even as Adam Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations. The brutal response of his contemporary, Jeremy Bentham, to Coleridge and the Romantics’ defence of the human heart, that ‘quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry’, has never been satisfactorily answered and three centuries on, the nature of real value remains at the root of economic debate. The proposition that ‘real’ value could be measured tore a rift in the 18th century imagination between belief and the material world. But the political basis of this apparently aesthetic question was revealed in 1776 when the American revolutionaries established a republic of citizens that declared the value of the individual as the real measure of society. It is in this political conception, that realises the value of the citizen in the relationship between the individual and the State, that the debate on real value begins and it is how the citizen is conceived that ultimately determines the cultural measures for vitality and wellbeing.
Keywords: Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Aboriginal sovereignty, real value, economic language.
Real Value and the Measure of has never been satisfactorily Society answered and three centuries on, the nature of ‘real value’ remains at the Since the world fell into the so-called root of economic debate. Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the meaning of money and value has The Utilitarians adopted Smith as one come into question, but it is a debate of their own, an economist who in the as old as economics itself which words of the Romantic Thomas began even as Adam Smith was Carlyle, ‘comprehend[ed] the writing The Wealth of Nations. The infinitudes of man’s soul under i brutal response of his contemporary, formulas of Profit and Loss’ But Jeremy Bentham, to Coleridge and the Bentham’s commodification of poetry Romantics’ defence of the human is a gross distortion of Smith’s heart, that ‘quantity of pleasure being philosophy. The proposition that ‘real’ equal, push-pin is as good as poetry’, value could be measured tore a rift in Adam Smith and the System of Happiness: Culture and Commerce in The Wealth of Nations, Harriet Parsons the 18th century imagination between ‘traditional landowners’. When the belief and the material world. But in American Colonies declared their 1776 the political basis of this independence they wrested the right of apparently aesthetic question was government from the traditional revealed by the American landowners and vested it in ‘Natural revolutionaries when they established Man’, a citizen to whom all the world is a republic of citizens that declared the given in equal share. value of the individual as the real measure of society. Australian republicans are bemused by our own nation’s reluctance to Aboriginal Sovereignty and sever the ties with British monarchy, Natural Man however, it is not British sentimentality \ that inhibits the transition to It is in this political conception, that independence but the importance of realises the value of the citizen in the the principle of aboriginal sovereignty relationship between the individual and to the British parliamentary system the State, that the debate on real value that presents a problem for Australian begins. A society in which the citizens reconciliation that cannot be resolved are men applies a different measure in universal citizenship. Although we for real value from one in which they do not have the British political are comrades or landowners. Just as mechanism in our parliament of a inches and litres determine the kind as House of Lords that subjects well as quantity of the reality they government legislation to the review of measure, it is how the citizen is the traditional landowners, in the conceived that ultimately determines, practice of the ‘Welcome to Country’ as the theme for this conference and as the international face of the suggests, the cultural measures for national culture, Aboriginal elders now vitality and wellbeing. perform the duties of a sovereign on most Australian ceremonial occasions. It is a debate with particular resonance for Australians, because at the centre Cultural Neutrality and Rationale of its dispute is the concept of aboriginality. ‘Savage’, ‘native’, Bentham famously called the French ‘Aborigine’ and ‘indigenous’, the terms revolutionaries’ declaration of natural that have been successively adopted rights ‘nonsense upon stilts’.ii To him in the progress towards a more the distinction between law and ‘civilised’ colonial relationship, define morality was essential to justice the relationship between the individual because, if the law were derived from and the land that is essential to morals, then any radical reform to the colonial authority. The Latin root of law would constitute a departure from savage, ‘silvanus’, means ‘of the morality. To Bentham ‘the moral forest’: living in a state of nature or by sense’, ‘(if so loose and delusive a subsistence. The ability to ‘live off the term may on this occasion be land’ is the test of nationalism and it employed)’,iii was an ‘instrument of creates in the colonial imagination, deception’. In The Book of Fallacies, settlers and Aboriginal people as both he tried to provide a guide to rational ‘natives’, that is, ‘born of the country’. debate for the young legislative But Aborigine, ab origine, ‘from the assemblies of the revolutionary beginning’ is a legal claim of original republics of America and France that ownership; not indigenous, ‘natural to would eradicate error from reason by the region’, but by law; and you may distinguishing between reason and notice that Britain’s Peers sit in the cultural values. It was the House of Lords by their right as the associations between words and
Proceedings: Making Culture Count International Conference, May 2012, Melbourne 2 http://conference2012.culturaldevelopment.com.au/ Adam Smith and the System of Happiness: Culture and Commerce in The Wealth of Nations, Harriet Parsons social values that had allowed kings What ACARA’s statement actually and paupers to be unequal before the means is: ‘Generating, realising and law: responding together’ - cultural practices - ‘comprise the knowing In every part of the field of aesthetically’ – teach children to thought and discourse,’ he appreciate – ‘which in turn is informed wrote, ‘the effect of language and enriched by individual and depends upon the principle of collective understanding of the association, – upon the contexts in which artworks and association formed between experiences have been formed, their words and those ideas of historical precedents and the which… they have become responses of others to them’ – their signs. iv cultural traditions. ‘Cultural practices teach children to appreciate their In the 1970s the potential for words cultural traditions’. and their signs to deceive was used to impose an obligation of ‘cultural The particular difficulty faced by neutrality’ on government that in fact ACARA and all cultural policy writers, was disabling of reason and debate. is not a problem of neutrality but In 2010 ACARA, the Australian rationale. In Bentham’s Book of Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Fallacies, ‘Cultural practices teach Authority, provided this advice to the children to appreciate their cultural Federal Government on the need for traditions’ as a policy argument, is an the arts in the proposed National example of ‘begging the question’, a Curriculum for schools: term generally used incorrectly today. This is what it really means: Generating, realising and responding together comprise Petitio principii, or begging the the knowing aesthetically, question, is a fallacy very well which in turn is informed and known even to those who are enriched by individual and not conversant with the collective understanding of the principles of logic. In answer to contexts in which artworks and a given question, the party who experiences have been employs the fallacy contents formed, their historical himself by simply affirming the precedents and the responses point in debate. Why does of others to them.v opium occasion sleep? – Because it is soporiferous.vi [It Bentham’s separation of law from makes you sleepy] moral sense was not a theory of ‘real value’ or ‘natural rights’ but a basis for Any cultural policy that seeks to ignore rational debate designed to leave the the colonial origins of Australian value of the citizen, the basic measure culture by simply asserting its values is of society, open to the reforms of begging the question. government while regulating its moral sense. The concept of ‘cultural neutrality’ adopted by Australian Adam Smith and the Imaginary bureaucracy, especially on the subject Machine of culture, accepts the possibility of an ultimate ‘neutral culture’: Natural Man, For Adam Smith, far from an Natural Rights and Natural Law. instrument of deception, culture was itself the organ of perception. He called theories ‘imaginary machines’:
Proceedings: Making Culture Count International Conference, May 2012, Melbourne 3 http://conference2012.culturaldevelopment.com.au/ Adam Smith and the System of Happiness: Culture and Commerce in The Wealth of Nations, Harriet Parsons systems designed by the creative theme in conversation from one imagination to explain the phenomena person to the next. Every of the world. He was a moral conversation contributes a new philosopher as well as a political variation for common use in the social economist and his research in both organ of perception that culture fields was contributing to a much provides. It is this practice of larger ambition for a complete improvisation in the public imagination ‘Science of Man’, an empirical basis that unifies us as a social organism for the study of civilisation. However, and creates what is understood by ‘the he did not regard his or any other human bond’. theory as ‘culturally neutral’ or true in an absolute sense. The Commerce of Sociability
In his essay ‘The History of Smith’s economics is a theory of Astronomy’, he argues that science commerce, in the 18th century sense of has always satisfied curiosity or the word. Commerce could mean ‘soothed the imagination’ according to sexual intercourse and conversation in the culture of its times and he uses the the 18th century as well as trade and example of astronomy to demonstrate his contemporary Captain Cook was the fatal attraction that seductive probably using it in all three senses theories can exert: when he wrote, ‘let [anyone] tell me what the Natives of the whole extent of Let us endeavour’, he begins, America have gained by the ‘to trace it from its first origin, commerce they have had with up to that summit of perfection Europeans.’viii It was a general term to which it is at present for human sociability which Smith supposed to have arrived, and considered to be the real driver of to which, indeed, it has equally civilisation. been supposed to have arrived in almost all former times.vii The mechanisms of self-interest, explored in The Wealth of Nations, are Ideas like the sun orbiting around the only one aspect of a science of Earth, or the strength of the American sociability in which the speech, dollar, that seemed indelible truths clothes, architecture, gestures, only yesterday, are today no more expressions and general manners than the naive imaginings of our adopted as appropriate in the conduct forebears. Smith does not dispute the of human encounter are governed by existence of a single, ultimate reality, the rules of sociability. The immediate just the possibility of human gratifications of self-interest that lend knowledge outside the social themselves to the commerce of imagination. finance are only a tiny proportion of the social transactions that contribute When we talk about the imagination to the success or failure of the human we tend to think of the fantasies of the social organism which Smith individual, but Smith’s imaginary designates ‘civilisation’. machines are formed in the communal spaces of the systems of language, Culture and perception are indivisible, science, aesthetics, religion and he argues, but the disadvantages of courtesy. No two perceptions are cultural partiality can be overcome if exactly the same but these shared the basis of perception in the creative value systems provide the rules by imagination is recognised. In the which common cultural concepts can conclusion to the essay on the history be improvised, passing like a musical of astronomy, he makes the same
Proceedings: Making Culture Count International Conference, May 2012, Melbourne 4 http://conference2012.culturaldevelopment.com.au/ Adam Smith and the System of Happiness: Culture and Commerce in The Wealth of Nations, Harriet Parsons observation as Bentham on the trust, how growth is influenced by susceptibility of language to cultural confidence and reconciliation relies on expectation, but cites Newton’s the integrity of the narrative of the physics as an example of the capacity historical record. In the system of of systems nevertheless to provide accounting, value is recorded in debits practical management of ‘the one and credits: the debit of material capital fact’: ‘the reality of which we things, balanced against the credit of have daily experience’: financial value. It is in this conjunction between belief and the material world His principles, it must be that the financial and social economies acknowledged,’ he writes, of the Western value system meet. ‘have a degree of firmness and solidity that we should in vain Money is a belief system because, as look for in any other system. Smith argues, if it ‘could be exchanged The most skeptical cannot for nothing, it would, like a bill upon a avoid feeling this… [But] even bankrupt, be of no more value than the we, while we have been most useless piece of paper.’x The endeavouring to represent all efficiency of money is a product of philosophical systems as mere cultural habituation to its belief system. inventions of the imagination… Habituation to cultural values, such as have insensibly been drawn in, monarchy, corporate culture or good to make use of language manners, ensures the transfer of expressing the connecting knowledge goes unchanged across principles of this one, as if they communities and generations. were the real chains which Nature makes to bind together But when an artist attacks a prosthetic her several operations.ix arm with a meat cleaver like Mike Parr or exhibits a urinal as a work of art like Systems are the means for managing Duchamp, they attack cultural the basis of ‘real value’, that is belief, complacency to initiate a paradigm or in the terminology of the shift because belief systems, as Adam economists, ‘credit’. Smith points out, supply both the theory and the perception. The most Credit and the Commerce in obvious people involved in either Belief preserving the traditions of the social economy or challenging its beliefs are Commerce – in the 18th century sense actors. They literally act out ‘real – is typical rather than unusual in the values’, demonstrating their strengths language of accounting in its ability to and where they reach their limit. straddle the financial and social ‘Greed is good’, perhaps the most economies. The words ‘accounting’ influential phrase of the turn of the last and ‘auditing’ come from the medieval century, was spoken by an actor. origins of bookkeeping when the accountant was literally someone who explained and the auditor someone Economic Growth and the who listened. Economic language Delivery of Real Value describes the movement of values: words like interest, risk, growth and Last year the Australian Federal depression, face value and Government released a discussion bankruptcy, reconciliation and paper for a proposed national cultural redemption, provide a vocabulary for policy in which the Minister, Simon both money and culture: how risk Crean, calls the arts an ‘intrinsic increases interest, how credit relies on value’, a value that requires no
Proceedings: Making Culture Count International Conference, May 2012, Melbourne 5 http://conference2012.culturaldevelopment.com.au/ Adam Smith and the System of Happiness: Culture and Commerce in The Wealth of Nations, Harriet Parsons justification – while at the same time In the sonnets Vivaldi wrote to conceding that Government spending accompany the Four Seasons the requires a ‘rationale’. The argument shepherd’s worst fears are realised in he offers for the financial support of Summer, the season of growth, when the arts is a variation on Bentham’s a sudden hail storm ‘cuts down the Utilitarian thinking, that links artistic proud grain’, whereas in Winter, practice to technological innovation and long-term economic growth. But We tread the icy path slowly the task of the politician is not to and cautiously… tripping and deliver ‘growth’ but the real value it falling… rising to hasten on represents to the electorate. Growth, across the ice before it like the economy itself, is a metaphor cracks… the chill north wind for something else. courses through locked and bolted doors… This is winter, In 1974 growth was a central concept but what joy it brings!’xii in Friedrich August von Hayek’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize It may be disagreeable to the for Economics, which he entitled ‘The economists, but societies ‘grow’ Pretence of Knowledge’. Hayek was through the experience of adversity; it Milton Friedman’s teacher and mentor is the basis of narrative and the and is credited as the father of ‘Neo- material of political history. Adversity Classical’ economics. He argued that exercises the social economy, which is social value was impervious to why Gallipoli is celebrated as a empirical measurement and therefore ‘coming of age’, the moment of beyond the reach of government. The ‘growth’ into maturity. But Australia economy was like a garden, he told his was never at risk from the Kaiser and audience, and the economist ‘will the soldiers who fought, fought to therefore have to use what knowledge defend the British Empire, the bonds he can achieve, not to shape the of our British aboriginality and the first results as the craftsman shapes his Act of a Federated Australian handiwork, but rather to cultivate a Parliament for a White Australia. growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which Economics has become both the most the gardener does this for his plants.’xi alienating and familiar of languages in It was a demand to government to everyday use. Used by the media, allow inches to demonstrate that the business and government, it is the world is long and litres that it is wet touchstone of social commentary. and Natural Man that governments are Since the 1970s economic democratic. globalisation has changed the value of the citizen, by changing the basic In the nearly 40 years of laissez faire measure of the social relationship economics since Hayek’s speech, between the individual and the State growth has become the most into one in which Smith’s two main intransigent of terms with infinite protagonists, the self-interested growth its impossible goal because, as individual and the social organism of we all know, ‘recession’ is the cultural perception have become precursor to ‘depression’. But in the closed books to each other. But the arts, the social economy is more language of economics provides the amenable to seasons of growth and means to bring them back into recession and managing the risks of conversation, to describe the real depression. values the financial economy aspires to reflect.
Proceedings: Making Culture Count International Conference, May 2012, Melbourne 6 http://conference2012.culturaldevelopment.com.au/ Adam Smith and the System of Happiness: Culture and Commerce in The Wealth of Nations, Harriet Parsons
Author biography: Harriet Parsons completed her Masters degree in Fine Art (research) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011. She has been exhibiting since 1996, including Gallery 4A in Sydney, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in Melbourne, the National Gallery of Victoria and Eastlink Gallery in Shanghai. She has received a number of State and Federal Government Grants. Her research is an investigation into how social values are created in artistic practice and how they can be expressed as a language of cultural values. [email protected]
Notes: i. Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times (originally published in 1829) quoted in Bronk, Richard, The Romantic Economist: imagination in economics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 95. ii Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies; being an examination of the Declarations of Rights issued during the French Revolution in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 2, Edinburgh, 1843, www.libraryofliberty.org retrieved 7 May 2012 iii Jeremy Bentham, The Book of Fallacies: from unfinished papers of Jeremy Bentham, by a Friend, London, John and H.L. Hunt, 1824, p. 215, www.lib.unimelb.edu.au retrieved 15 October 2011 iv Ibid, p. 219. v ACARA quoted in Justine Fellari, ‘Emphasis on Art for Young Students’, Australian, Sydney, May 4, 2010, ‘Nation’, p. 2. vi Jeremy Bentham, The Book of Fallacies, op. cit. p. 213. vii Adam Smith, ‘The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy’ in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, WPD Wightman, J.C. Bryce, I.S. Ross (eds), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980, p. 46. viii James Cook, quoted in A. Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas, Camberwell, Victoria, Penguin, 2004, p.188. ix Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, p.105. x Ibid, p. 177. xi Friedrich August von Hayek, ‘The Pretence of Knowledge’, Prize Lecture, 1974, Retrieved 8 November, 2010 from Nobel Prize Web site, available from
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