After Adam Smith: A Century of Transformation in Politics and Political Economy (review)

Thirty years ago the history of political economy played a central role in Victorian studies. The social concerns that had driven the rise of Victorian studies since the Second World War led to vigorous scholarly debates about population growth, industrialization, class, poor laws, factories, laissez faire, and state intervention. An understanding of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and J. S. Mill was crucial to an understanding of the terms in which the Victorians dealt with these questions. Looking forward, even the history of Victorian social criticism from Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin to the origins of the Labour party couldn't be understood except in the context of continuities with as well as reactions against classical political economy. Looking backward, a rediscovery of Smith's civic-republican and civic-moralist roots helped to explain his curious relevance to the left as much as to the right up to the present day. As late as the 1980s, the work of Donald Winch, Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, Boyd Hilton, and others added vigorously to our understanding of the complexities of the Scottish Enlightenment and the ways in which its thinking was embedded in Victorian social and political thought as well as social and political reform.

It is fair to say that all of these questions—and their answers—appear rather shopworn today. The social concerns of the postwar decades, revolving around class, have been substantially displaced by new concerns for nation, race, and gender. The hegemony of neoclassical economics since the 1980s has, oddly, put its critics off from examining its classical roots—it was more comfortable, perhaps, to look away. Postmodernism's interest in political economy stretched only so far as was necessary to explode its naive epistemology; exploring its inner workings seemed irrelevant at best, a trap that might draw you back into the system at worst. After Adam Smith, by Murray Milgate and Shannon C. Stimson, seeks to rectify this omission. Aimed explicitly at neoclassical economists' misunderstanding and misappropriation of Smith's legacy, it seeks both to restore Smith's concepts to the late-eighteenth-century context in which they developed and to show how subsequent generations revised those concepts for their own uses and their own contexts—particularly in the immediate, early-nineteenth-century aftermath of Smith's own time. Despite the title, more than a third of the book is devoted to Smith himself, to his ideas about economic growth, liberty, and civil society, and to the wide variety of possible relations between economics and politics. By the authors' own admission, the analysis here rests heavily on Winch's pioneering work. They then move on, in their most interesting chapter, to Dugald Stewart's representation of Smith, narrowing a loose and suggestive body of thought into a science of legislation—"and economic legislation at that" (109). Subsequent chapters remind us that Stewart did not have the last word. Malthus's introduction of the population question—a specific polemical animus against 1790s utopianism—was claimed both as an elaboration of and as a repudiation of Smith's legacy. James Mill's and Ricardo's applications of utilitarianism to political economy is shown to have ambiguous implications for the idea of democracy. At this point, Milgate and Stimson temporarily abandon the legacy of Smith as a focal point for the book—reasonably enough given the radical transformations in the political environment between the 1770s and the 1820s. They resume the Smithian theme in a discussion of how far the dynamic elements of Smith's thinking were affected by early-nineteenth-century utopianism and ideas about the stationary state. In an unusual deviation from the canonical figures, Milgate and Stimson then consider Ricardian socialism—or, rather, one particular Ricardian socialist, Thomas Hodgskin—and the relationship of radical political economy to Smith and Ricardo. Returning to the earlier discussion of utilitarianism, they consider J. S. Mill...