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[integer at www.god-emil.dk]

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.




Just right, amazing, I was about to post a similar statement. I was just  
reading a book called Capitalism's Achilles Heel, by Raymond Baker. At  first 
this seems off topic, but the book (not from a leftist) goes into issues  of 
globalization, and the hidden problems, then veers off into a discussion of  Ada
m 
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 
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. 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  readi
ng. 
 
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  bet
ter, 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'. Capitalist society can at no point satisfy that  criterion, and this 
contradiction is clearly on Kant's mind. 
Part of the problem is resolved by dropping the useless misconceptions of  
Adam 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. 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 faultl
ine 
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.  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. 
 


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