NOTES ON: Christopher J. Berry: The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment
Berry, Christopher J. 2013. The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. <http://library.lol/main/933D6D12A3CECBC8F290E8E20BBA47C0>.
Scottish thinkers viewed commercial society as a distinct and distinctive social formation that had profound implications for human progress, happiness, and freedom and posed challenges and dangers that commercial society posed for social cohesion, virtue, and stability. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers adopted a historical and comparative perspective, dividing human history into four stages: hunting, herding, farming, and commerce. Each stage represented a different mode of subsistence, social organization, and cultural development. The Scots argued that commercial society was the latest and most advanced stage of human history, which marked a significant improvement over the previous stages in terms of material prosperity, civil liberty, and intellectual refinement.
The Scots attributed the wealth and abundance of commercial society to the division of labor, which was a consequence of human propensity to exchange goods and services. The division of labor increased productivity, specialization, and innovation, as well as stimulated the expansion of markets, trade, and industry. These required institutions that supported and regulated commerce: property rights, contracts, money, banking, law, justice, and government. These institutions facilitated economic transactions, reduced transaction costs, protected economic agents from fraud and violence, and maintained social order and peace.
Commerce was both enabled by and a powerful support for liberty. Commercial society was conducive to civil liberty—security of person and property under a system of laws that applied equally to all citizens. They contrasted civil liberty with natural liberty, which was the freedom from external constraints in a state of nature. Natural liberty was insecure and precarious, with individuals exposed to constant threats from others. Civil liberty was preferable as it provided individuals with protection and recourse.
Contrasted with civil liberty was political liberty: participation in public affairs and self-government. They claimed that political liberty was not essential for civil liberty as long as the government was limited by law and accountable to the people.
Commercial society also brought changes in manners and morals, producing such more refined, polite, sociable, and cosmopolitan than those of previous stages or other societies. Commerce had powerful influences on human psychology and behavior. They claimed that commerce encouraged self-interest, prudence, competition, emulation, ambition, industry, frugality, and moderation among individuals who sought to improve their economic situation or social status. Commerce fostered sympathy, benevolence, tolerance, civility, and humanity among individuals who interacted with diverse people in various markets or public spaces. The Scots praised these manners for enhancing human happiness, cooperation, and communication in commercial society.
However, the Scots also recognized some negative effects. Commerce could also generate envy, corruption, luxury, dissipation, and degeneration among individuals who pursued wealth or pleasure at the expense of virtue or duty. Commerce could also weaken the bonds of family, community, religion, and patriotism. These effects could undermine the moral foundation and social cohesion of commercial society, exposing it to internal decay or external attack.
Adam Smith and David Hume were optimistic and confident about the ability of commercial society to sustain itself and overcome its challenges, as it had a self-regulating mechanism that balanced the interests and passions of individuals and groups, as well as a self-correcting mechanism that adjusted to the changes and shocks that it faced. Natural sentiments of sympathy, benevolence, and justice would supplement the artificial institutions of law, government, and religion in maintaining social order and harmony.
Adam Ferguson and Lord Kames were more pessimistic and cautious. They argued that commercial society needed stronger intervention from the state and more active cultivation of the virtues of courage, patriotism, public spirit, and civic duty to preserve or restore its vitality and stability.
Quotes
This book is an explication of Adam Smith’s remark in the early pages of the Wealth of Nations where he writes, ‘Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.’ I here argue that the judgment that a ‘society’ can be typified as ‘commercial’ is significant. It involves a twin conceptualisation. That is to say, it articulates a notion both of ‘society’ (rather than say regime-type) as an appropriate ‘unit’ for analysis and of ‘commercial’ as the encapsulation of a distinctive mode of organisation. To adopt this articulation is to subscribe to the ‘idea of commercial society’…
My temporal frame is from the publication of Hume’s Treatise (1739–40) to the sixth edition of Smith’s Moral Sentiments (1790)…
Smith followed by Hume, Millar, Ferguson, Kames and Robertson figure prominently and more than occasional reference is also made to Dunbar and Wallace…
The Scots are best known is their notion of the four stages (hunting, herding, farming, commerce)…
In the examination of this ‘history’, Stewart remarks that when ‘we cannot trace the process by which an event has been produced, it is often of importance to be able to show how it may have been produced by natural causes’ (Life II.47/293; Stewart’s emphases)…
The most contentious passage in Stewart’s discussion of natural/theoretical/conjectural history. He declares that in most cases, it is of more importance to ascertain the progress that is most simple, than the progress that is most agreeable to fact; for paradoxical as the proposition may appear, it is certainly true, that the real progress is not always the most natural. It may have been determined by particular accidents, which are not likely again to occur, and which cannot be considered as forming any part of that general provision which nature has made for the improvement of the race. (Life II.56/296)…. Natural history, as here summarised by Stewart, is best understood as an expression of the Scottish aspiration to scientific social theory…
To understand their own commercial era meant for the Scots placing it in a narrative that began with the destruction of the Roman Empire, but in which the pivotal ‘event’ is the collapse of feudalism…. The three stages of hunters, herders and farmers is common both in the Scots and in many other thinkers in the Enlightenment and earlier. It is the addition of commerce as a distinct fourth stage that is uncommon…
in a genuine or explicit four-stages account commerce is lined up on the same basis as the other three, that is as a distinct social state rather than a mode of political life, is significant because it provides the diachronic dimension to the idea of a commercial society. However, that provision is not the prerogative of a four-stages account. As we will see, the decisive shift is from a feudal agricultural society to a society based on commerce…
The importance of Montesquieu to the Scots was covered in Chapter 1 and the De l’Esprit was eagerly read upon its appearance in 1748.17 In one typically short chapter (Bk 8, Chap. 8), he remarks (I quote from the accurate translation in full), The laws are very closely related to the way that various peoples procure their subsistence. There must be a more extensive code of laws for a people attached to commerce and the sea than for a people satisfied to cultivate their lands. There must be a greater one for the latter than for a people who live by their herds. There must a greater one for these last than for a people who live by hunting. (1989: 289)…
The Scots’ employment of stadial theory in its four-stages guise is best viewed as a ‘theoretical’ natural history conforming to Dugald Stewart’s characterisation of it as an enquiry into how institutions may have developed by ‘natural causes’ (an enquiry that need not stand four-square with any particular ‘real’ progress). Property plays a prominent part, owing to its contextual origins in law lectures, in this enquiry but, following Stewart himself (see above), it is mistake to think it is the exclusive subject matter of natural history (Emerson 1984; Berry 2000). What stadial theory, as a species of natural history, enables the moral or social scientist to do is draw reasonable inferences, both positive and corrective…
How a commercial society emerged, both as a historical narrative and as an investigation of social causation, was one of the great themes in the writings of the Scots. It featured in Hume’s History, was a famous set-piece in the Wealth of Nations, was key factor in Millar’s Historical View and Robertson’s View of Progress as well as a recurrent feature of Gilbert Stuart’s work (if only as he disputed their arguments) and that of others. I do not intend here to provide a detailed exegesis of the various discussions. In part this abstention is motivated by the basic similarities they exhibit and in part because I want to adopt a more focused view. This focus is the interplay between liberty and commerce. To anticipate: I aim to show how liberty and commerce are both causes and effects but without the vicious circularity that such a characterisation might suggest…
The ‘change’ in question is the same – the erosion of the power base of feudal lords and emergence of commercial society. The ‘process’ is the same – the causally explanatory role played by property and manners. This context and this agency are replicated in the writings of Millar, Robertson and others…
This role is captured in a celebrated passage in the Wealth of Nations: “for a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they [the great proprietors] exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. The buckles, however, were to be all their own and no other human creature was to have any share of them [. . .] and thus for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered their whole power and authority.” (WN III.iv.10/418–19)…
There is an agreed ‘initial condition’. The medieval barons expended their surplus on the maintenance of retainers or dependants, who in return for their keep could only offer obedience. With the advent of luxury goods the nobles retrenched on their hospitality and reduced the number of their retainers. Smith contrasts the sway of the feudal lord with the situation in the present state of Europe, where ‘a man of ten thousand a year’ can spend his whole revenue, and he generally does so, without directly maintaining twenty people, or being able to command more than ten footmen not worth the commanding. Indirectly, perhaps, he maintains as great or even a greater number of people than he could have done by the antient method of expence [. . .] He generally contributes, however, but a very small proportion to that of each, to very few perhaps a tenth, to many not a thousandth part of their whole annual maintenance. Though he contributes therefore to the maintenance of them all, they are all more or less independent of him, because generally they can all be maintained without him. (WN III.iv.11/419–20)…
What this identification of a trigger as an external peculiar cause means is that commerce begat commerce. By the same token, liberty begat liberty. As we have charted above, the industry and wealth initiated by ‘free towns’ bred a spirit of independence to form, in time…
Steuart’s ‘modern liberty’ or Robertson’s ‘regular government’. This recognition that there was a qualitative shift was made by Hume who, himself, refers to a ‘new plan of liberty’ (HE II, 602; III, 99). As with Robertson, for Hume this was (explicitly) caused by the growth of cities and development of ‘a middle rank of men’ (HE II, 602), who, he affirms elsewhere, are the ‘best and firmest basis of public liberty’ (E-RA 277). Smith, though his immediate context is different, openly declares that it is, for example, the presence of a choice of occupation, that makes individuals ‘free in our present sense of the word Freedom’ (WN III.iii.5/400). As a final illustration, we can cite Millar, who referring to the start of the seventeenth century, links the emergence of ‘a new order of things’ to ‘different arrangements of property’ (HV III, Introd/437). I will revisit these comments and this chain of argument in Chapter 5…
A commercial society does indeed have a distinctive property regime but that is only one aspect of the complex inter-related whole which defines that type of society. The following chapters examine that totality. A key distinguishing feature of a commercial society is that, compared to earlier ‘stages’, it is richer in the crucial sense that its inhabitants are better fed, clothed and housed. The institution at the heart of this amelioration is the division of labour. It is not just that the division of labour produces ‘opulence’ but that this is a ‘good thing’…
The third case is perhaps the most revealing because it is the most obviously loaded. The ancient republics differed from those of Renaissance Italy (let alone from contemporary Europe) because they relied on slavery (LJB 34/410). Even if the label ‘civilised’ was attached to Athens it was, as Hume, Smith, Millar and others recognised, underpinned by slavery. Although in the Scots’ writings there is no explicit definition or even delineation of what constitutes ‘civilisation’ (a new term),18 nevertheless there was a definitive difference between Athens and Edinburgh (the so-called ‘Athens of the North’). The latter was civilised and free. The Scots are clear that their own (and similar) society is civilised. Hume identifies ‘humanity’ as ‘the chief characteristic which distinguishes a civilized age from times of barbarity and ignorance’ (and in the next paragraph he describes the ‘old Romans as ‘uncivilized’ (E-RA 274–5). ‘Humanity’ however is linked with ‘industry’ and ‘knowledge’ as a component in an ‘indissoluble chain’ that is ‘peculiar to the more polished and [. . .] [luxurious] ages (E-RA 271) (see Chapters 4 and 5)…
What effectively (‘properly’) makes a society ‘commercial’ is, as Smith said, where ‘everyman is a merchant’ (WN I.iv.1/37). It is that inclusivity that is vital and it derives from the extent of the division of labour, of the market and of stock accumulation…
There is more to a commercial society than a better material standard of living, than simply the blessing of opulence (vitally important and significant though that is). This type of society also enjoys the blessing of liberty…
Markets deal in impersonal transactions (commercial life is seen as comprising a ‘society of strangers’) and the rule of law means that it is ‘no respecter of persons’. The second part investigates the complementary conceptual relation that pertains between commercial inter-dependence and legal/political independence from the authority of specified individuals. These connected relations explain why justice has such a central, if not in all respects convergent, place in the Scots’ writings…
In Smith’s account of the ‘revolution’ that brought about the age of commerce, discussed in Chapter 2, he observes that the feudal lords were ‘judges in peace’ as well as ‘leaders in war’. The eventual separation of these roles, which happened ‘by chance’ as the offspring of social growth and attendant multiplication of business, Smith judges to be ‘the great advantage’ of ‘modern times [. . .] and the foundation of that greater Security which we now enjoy’ (LRBL ii.203/176). Prior to this separation, the writ of the ‘great proprietors’ ran but only within their territory. Hence they levied, as they saw fit, taxes on travellers through their lands and any traders who remained within their demesnes were in an effectively ‘servile’ condition (WN III.iii.2/397–8). The corollary of this was that these proprietors had no authority or clout beyond their boundaries. One consequence of this localisation of power was that there could be no consistency of decision between localities or any ‘external’ guarantee of consistency within a ‘jurisdiction’. Steuart makes the point eloquently when he refers to ‘the ambulatory will of any man or set of men’, so that the ‘laws’ were liable to changed ‘through favour or prejudice to particular persons or particular classes’ (PPE I, 206). Lack of consistency meant lack of security. We know from the historical story told in Chapter 2 that the king was not an exception to this localism; he was too weak, outside his own personal lands, to be able to protect his subjects from the oppression of the great lords (WN III.iii.8/401)…
While the belief that the future will resemble the past is, for Hume, of universal application it is a particular application to an aspect of commerce that I here want to exploit. In a simplified version, and in line with the ‘logic of exchange’ outlined in Chapter 3 (p. 70), a manufacturer spends time now producing a particular product on the expectation that others will want it and that belief about their desire is itself premised on the belief that others are producing different products. That ‘belief’ is an experiential acquisition, which is extended to the qualitatively different level of probabilistic knowledge with the development of towns and trade wherein markets are formed and the participants act in expectation of future return. Hume captures this: The poorest artificer, who labours alone, expects at least the protection of the magistrate, to ensure him the enjoyment of the fruits of his labour. He also expects that when he carries his goods to market and offers them at a reasonable price, he shall find purchasers and shall be able, by the money he acquires, to engage others to supply him with those commodities which are requisite for his subsistence. In proportion as men extend their dealings and render their intercourse with others more complicated, they always comprehend in their schemes of life a greater variety of voluntary actions which they expect, from the proper motives, to co-operate with their own. In all these conclusions they take their measures from past experience. (U 8.17/SBNU 89 – my emphases)…
Hume identifies three laws of nature or rules of justice – stability of possession, its transfer by consent and promise-keeping (T 3.2.6.1/SBNT 526).These rules have two important characteristics – generality and inflexibility. To enable a commercial society to function the rule of law and the impartial regular administration of justice are necessary. From the foregoing we know this enablement is specifically a ‘fourth stage’ task. Earlier governments were marked by partiality, by acting in the interests of ‘the leaders’ (khans and landlords). In a well-known enumeration by Smith, government in a commercial society has three duties: protection from external foes, maintenance of public works and ‘an exact administration of justice’ (WN IV.ix.51/687)…
The order of those who ‘live in profit’ is disqualified because their interests and the general interest, as we have already seen, do not coincide… those who live by wages are ‘strictly connected with the interest of society’ but their circumstances mean they have no time to be informed thus making them ‘unfit’… country gentlemen who live off rent – are the traditional mainstay of the political order, because, as Smith acknowledges, their own interests will not run counter to those of the nation, but they are indolent and incapable of the requisite ‘application of mind [. . .] to foresee and understand the consequences of any publick regulation’…
When Smith refers to the twin blessings of liberty and opulence in the Lectures the context, in both versions, is slavery…
One explicit manifestation of this is Smith’s observation (quoted in Chapter 2) that it is the presence of a choice of occupation, along with the ability to have one’s children inherit and to dispose of one’s property by testament, that makes individuals ‘free in our present sense of the word Freedom’ (and its absence is a principal attribute of ‘villanage and slavery’) (WN III.iii. 5/400). This is almost an aside but its self-consciousness reveals an appreciation that there is something novel abroad. He is, of course, not alone. Hume on at least two occasions in his History referred to a ‘new plan of liberty’ that the ‘manners of the age’ had produced (HE II, 602; III, 99)…
The crux of this novelty is the idea of liberty under the rule of law, the procedural operation of general laws known previously to all, or strict administration of justice, that we discussed in Chapter 4. Ancient liberty is that characteristic of classical Greece and republican Rome. We can identify two strains. There is the pre-eminently Stoic view where liberty is a state of tranquillity, where bodily desires are firmly controlled by the rational will. There is also the ‘civic’ or republican view of Livy, Cicero and others where liberty consists of activity in the political world to realise the public good…
Two strains in ancient liberty could be identified. One discussed in that chapter dealt with liberty as a state of tranquillity, where unruly desires were under the control of reason, the other to be discussed here dealt with liberty as a civic or political activity. To be free on this latter understanding meant positively acting as a citizen, participating in the res publica, with the significant negative corollary that a commercial life was less ‘free’ and must be confined to an appropriately limited sphere. The roots of this twin-pronged argument lie in Aristotle. Man, he says famously, is by nature a creature of the polis.1 Since for Aristotle humans only realise themselves when they act according to their nature, then being political, that is to say doing politics, is a fulfilment of their end (telos). ‘Doing politics’ meant participating in the public realm of the polis. Those who participated were polites or, using the Roman vocabulary, citizens. Citizens are active. As actors they enjoy a moral equality one with another and possess an educated ethical disposition to maintain the public good. Implicit in this characterisation is that citizens are also free or independent – Aristotle indeed defined the polis as ‘a community of free men’ (Aristotle 1944: 1279a23). Within this community, a citizen was the head of a household. The household looked after the instrumental business of mere living – it was the unfree realm of women, slaves and animals. With his needs taken care of the male head of the household had ‘leisure’ (skole) to devote himself to the ‘good life’, to intrinsically worthwhile activity, of which doing politics was a central feature. This vision of active citizenship was rearticulated by Roman political moralists. For them the citizen was one who devoted his activity to the public affairs (rei publicae), whence the association of this vision with ‘republicanism’. Republican thought re-emerged in the independent city-states of Renaissance Italy (with Machiavelli a key figure) and from there it was transported into seventeenth-century English thought (with Harrington a major exponent) and then into the eighteenth century. This strain can be aptly called ‘republican’ liberty (Goldsmith 1994: 197)…
The intrinsically worthwhile public task of politics should not be confused with the instrumental private purpose of the household, and its governance (oikonomikê). Nor should that be confused with the task of money-making (chrêmatistikê)… a worthwhile human life is debased if it is spent slavishly pursuing private ends, which were defined essentially by seeking the satisfaction of appetite and desire (epithumia)…. One way to capture the debate over liberty in a commercial society is to typify this as a dispute over whether liberty is centrally or predominantly a matter of public engagement or centrally and predominantly a matter of private choice. This is a question of balance; neither argument denies that the other has merit…
One of the clearest intersections between the two strains of ancient liberty is their antipathy to luxury. We saw in the opening part of this chapter how it was invoked as a causal force in Roman history and in Chapter 5 how it was decried by the Stoics. Their conjunction stems from the identification of luxury with effeminacy; luxury emasculates (virilem effeminat) (Sallust 1921: par 11; Mackenzie 1711: 355). The gendered language is not coincidental. The root of ‘virtue’ is vir (man) and its governing meaning was courage (the same is true in Greek). Hence the significance (in part) of Smith’s linking humanity with the ‘virtue’ of women (see p. 142).
The gendered juxtaposition between soft feminine luxury and hard masculine virtue manifested itself most obviously in military matters…
The synchronic picture of a commercial society that emerges can be diachronically contrasted with the picture of a first-stage hunter-gatherer one. Hence summarily, a society of hunter gatherers will have little in the way of personal possessions, nothing to speak of in the form of governmental machinery, few status distinctions except the inferiority of women, and will live in a world populated with a multiplicity of gods whose actions make their feelings plain. These savages would also respond to these events in a speech abounding in vivid and animated imagery and would likely variously bedaub or scarify themselves and represent their gods in idols. In contrast, a commercial society will treat intangibles like promissory notes as property, its members will live under a rule of law administered impersonally by a government dedicated to that task, and in that regard enjoy an equality regardless of social status, the relations between the sexes will also approach some sort of equality, they will be monotheists, tasteful and measured in word and deed and will be scrupulous in business and generous in both private and public. This contrast conforms to the trajectory of natural history from concrete to abstract, from simple to complex and from rude to cultivated. This development to complexity can be seen as the Scots’ version of the various nineteenth-century schema of the move from status to contract (Maine), Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft (Tönnies); from mechanical to organic solidarity (Durkheim) or homoto heterogeneity (Spencer). Of course these are two ideal-types, yet so constructed they enable further questions to be raised. I want to pursue three: what might be said to be distinctively Scottish about their idea of a commercial society as a fourth stage; how, and with what assumptions, the Scots themselves view the superiority of this fourth stage over the preceding social formations; and what the implications are of this superiority and how it might be interpreted…
rough-and-ready coherence, this set of self-implicating institutions, establishes that there is such a thing as a ‘commercial society’. And although the word ‘society’ is not particularly selected for use (no more than ‘people’ or ‘nation’ for example)11 yet Millar declares indicatively (or so I claim) à propos ‘the revolutions [. . .] in the condition and manners of the sexes’ that these have ‘been derived from the progress of mankind in the common arts of life and therefore make a part in the general history of society’ (OR 228). Commercial society is to be situated in that history and its own ‘common arts of life’ are practised and pursued on the basis that everyman is a merchant…