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Thread: Adam Smith and Edmund Burke

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    Adam Smith and Edmund Burke

    OK so I'm reading this scathing review by Christian Alejandro Gonzalez of Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind, a typical liberal's misrepresentation of conservatism, A Response to Corey Robin: Conservatism Isn’t about Preserving Privilege.

    "Through a series of essays in which Robin discusses figures from Burke to Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman to Ayn Rand, he seeks to prove a simple, if provocative, hypothesis: Since its inception, conservatism has devoted itself to producing theoretical justifications for power, privilege, and hierarchy." describes the book. The review goes on to show Robin had never takes those conservative thinkers at their word but instead regurgitated the usual liberal assumptions and prejudices.

    Here's some of it:

    Conservatives, naturally, would disagree with Robin’s rather uncharitable interpretation. They would insist that conservatism is about defending tradition, maintaining civil society, ensuring the smooth operation of the free market. Robin is not convinced. Against any conservative’s self-assessment of what the Right’s political project is, Robin writes that “conservatism . . . is not a commitment to limited government and liberty — or a wariness of change, a belief in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue.” No, he says, conservatism is about “opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere.” (This is the prevailing view among many a smug liberal.)....

    ...In theory, Robin’s view of history might not sound so bad. In practice it is appalling: In his book we learn that his examples of leftist “movements for emancipation” include the French Revolution, “the nineteenth century’s movements against slavery and on behalf of workers,” the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the leftist activism of the 1930s.

    Except for the case of abolition, which wasn’t a cause of the Left but of the religious Right (more on this in a moment), those are some rather peculiar examples of liberationist movements. Indeed, who today but the most recalcitrant Marxist can take seriously the description of the French and Bolshevik revolutions as emancipatory movements? It is true that Russia and France saw ghoulish monarchs overthrown by popular uprisings; it is also true that both countries descended into dictatorships far more barbaric than the ones they replaced. To call the French and Russian revolutions emancipatory is to ignore Jacobin terror and Leninist tyranny.

    And what is one to make of the suggestion that the Left was fighting for “emancipation” in the 1930s? One wonders which Left Robin is referencing. The 1930s were the peak of both Stalinist crimes and of all the leftist apologetics for them. As the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm chronicles in The Age of Extremes, leftist conduct in the 1930s and early ’40s could hardly have been more unprincipled. Against the fascist threat, European and American Communists switched from supporting capitalist countries (the U.S. and the U.K.) to supporting Nazi Germany when it allied itself with Stalin’s Russia in their joint mission to obliterate Poland. Then the Western Communists switched again, this time to oppose Germany . . . but only when and because it had invaded the Soviet Union!

    ...
    The reviewer goes on to explain what conservative thinkers actually wrote, and that's interesting.

    But now to my point there was this line in the review:

    And yet Robin puts conservatism and classical liberalism in dialogue only in his (convincing) argument that Edmund Burke and Adam Smith disagreed on the question of where market value originates.
    What?!?! Burke and Smith corresponded, were friends, and agreed on so much. So what is this disagreement? I'll let David J. Depew explain, (.pdf):

    Here is a puzzle I am far from the first to ponder. Although the Scots philosopher Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) found few insightful readers in England before the l790s, Smith himself noted that among what early readers he had the Anglo-Irish Whig Member of Parliament Edmund Burke stood out (Tribe 1984; Teichgraber, 1985). Smith informed a confidant that Burke “is the only man I ever knew who, without communication, thought on economic subjects exactly as I” (West 1969, 201; Himmelfarb, 1984, 66). They became correspondents and friends. But while Smith made it clear that government support should be extended in hard times to unemployed workers, who have a right to expect it, Burke flatly denied it. “Labor,” he wrote in l795, “is a commodity and as such an article of trade” (Burke, 1795, in Kramnick, 1999, 200). Trade, Burke declared, is none of government’s business under any circumstances. “Of all things,” he wrote, “an indiscreet tampering with the trade of provisions is the most dangerous and … always worst … in the time of scarcity” (Burke, 1795, in Kramnick, 1999, 195). If anyone deserves relief it is not those who are able to work but in hard times can’t find it. It is those, and only those, who are too sick, infirm, young, or old to work at all. They do indeed fall under our Christian duty to extend charity to the poor (Burke, 1795, in Kramnick 203). But the deserving poor, as they came to be called, are objects of our charity only insofar as we, and they, are private persons. Government, whose office to “regulate our tempers” by “timely coercion,” should stay out of it. “The people maintain [the government], not they the people” (Burke, 1795, in Kramnick, 195)
    Smith then, like Hayek later, accepted the government's role in welfare, Burke did not, but was a strict free marketer.

    Further interesting in this essay, if ypu've read much about the transition from the premodern organic view to the modern individualistic view, like in Polanyi's The Great Transformation or Dumont's From Mandeville to Marx, is the folowing bit on Burke's self-contradictory views:

    The looming contradiction is between Burke’s “organic position on political authority and his supposedly ‘liberal’ or individualistic conception of economic life” (Winch, 1985, 231) or, put otherwise, between his “bourgeois conception of civil society and his aristocratic conception of the state” (Freeman, 1980, 216). As Gertrude Himmelfarb correctly points out, the essence of Burke’s brand of Whiggery was his ideal of organic national solidarity (Himmelfarb, 1984, 70). It led him to reject Locke’s contract theory of government and to criticize the executive usurpations of the Hanoverian monarchy nearly as strenuously as the American colonists. In fact, Burke was quite sympathetic to the Americans (Burke, 1774). But can national solidarity, on which Burke waxed most eloquently precisely when he was most vociferously expressing his categorical opposition to interfering with the free market, survive when the government allows its population to starve in the streets and die in their hovels?
    So now back to Burke's differences with Smith:

    I can’t say for sure whether Burke saw pure laissez-faire in Smith from the outset or whether he read Smith correctly at first but later re-read him in a colder light or whether by the later Burke had more or less given up on Smith. Burke is silent on the subject. Whatever the answer, my point in this essay will be that differences in their economic views are not in any case the root cause of Smith’s and Burke’s split on the issue of public assistance. They do not disagree about how government is ideally to be related to economics. We find at the very center of the work of each man a shared and persistent desire to keep economics radically and fully out the clutches of government, and to do for the sake of good government itself. No, their differences spring from divergent conceptions of what a good government is and might be. The difference between Smith’s sober, incipiently republican view of government, I will argue, and Burke’s inability to free himself from the sublime display of official violence that, as Michel Foucault has argued, characterizes the ancien regime explains most of what needs to be explained about their diverging views on the subject of unemployment assistance (Foucault, 1975)
    And for those with any interest in Malthus, the essay goes on to compare Burke and Malthus:

    This hypothesis yields, I think, an additional insight. The felt injustice of Burke’s and Malthus’s cold-heartedness played no small role in setting up the rhetorical situation in which politicians and economists have been immersed ever since. In the course of reducing the cognitive dissonance between the strenuous demands of the free market and the elementary claims of distributive justice, we can easily observe how Malthus’s principle that population pushes against food was transformed in the first three decades of the 19th century from its first expression as a dismal fact about all societies into, next, a counter-factual statement about what would happen if markets weren’t left free—an interpretation in which Malthus himself took a hand—and, finally, into a very cheery claim about all the good things that are bound to happen for everyone when the market has been left alone....
    And then on to the utilitarian reactions to that, Bentham, Mill and others.

    And that's just the first page or so.

    And all that "brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to" the review the OP began with.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Mister D (05-21-2018),Peter1469 (05-20-2018)

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    So who did Ben agree with?

    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    I thought this was interesting and wanted to make a comment about Foucault but got distracted by the kratom thread. Will chime in tomorrow.
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


    ~Alain de Benoist


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    I love these threads although I have to work through them. I don't have the education that demands this reading. I mostly see what has worked and favor it. Sometimes i get something wrong through a lack od treading these thins but i made it well in life. I think I understood some of it without knowing it.
    Liberals are a clear and present danger to our nation
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    Quote Originally Posted by Captdon View Post
    I love these threads although I have to work through them. I don't have the education that demands this reading. I mostly see what has worked and favor it. Sometimes i get something wrong through a lack od treading these thins but i made it well in life. I think I understood some of it without knowing it.
    Oh, I don't pretend to understand it all, but do have my reading of it. Posting it forces me to think it out and try to capture the essential bits and pieces.

    Lately, I've been interested in the change from premodern to modern times, how did people see the world before and after the Enlightenment. It was very different for a long tidme, from Plato to then, and you see the change in Burke's contradictory views, his economics is modern, his politics premodern.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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