Michael Perelman wrote:
All this revolves around Smith's four stages -- hunting and
gathering, herding,
agriculture, and then commerce. In the earlier stages, passions
play a big role.
Even in agriculture, the role of passions is diminished.
The aristocracy personify passions, but they don't really fit into
his four-stage
set up. They're presumably superfluous. In the commercial stage,
Smith suggests
that all social relations could be like those among merchants.
"Passions" understood as irrational motives with positive
consequences unintended by those motivated by them play an essential
role in Smith's account of capitalism.
"Our imagination, which in pain and sorrow seems to be confined and
cooped up within our own persons, in times of ease and prosperity
expands itself to every thing around us. We are then charmed with the
beauty of that accommodation which reigns in the palaces and oeconomy
of the great; and admire how every thing is adapted to promote their
ease, to prevent their wants, to gratify their wishes, and to amuse
and entertain their most frivolous desires. If we consider the real
satisfaction which all these things are capable of affording, by
itself and separated from the beauty of that arrangement which is
fitted to promote it, it will always appear in the highest degree
contemptible and trifling. But we rarely view it in this abstract and
philosophical light. We naturally confound it in our imagination with
the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the
machine or oeconomy by means of which it is produced. The pleasures
of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike
the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which
the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so
apt to bestow upon it.
"And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is
this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the
industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to
cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and
commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts,
which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed
the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature
into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren
ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of
communication to the different nations of the earth. The earth by
these labours of mankind has been obliged to redouble her natural
fertility, and to maintain a greater multitude of inhabitants. It is
to no purpose, that the proud and unfeeling landlord views his
extensive fields, and without a thought for the wants of his
brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest that
grows upon them. The homely and vulgar proverb, that the eye is
larger than the belly, never was more fully verified than with regard
to him. The capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the
immensity of his desires, and will receive no more than that of the
meanest peasant. The rest he is obliged to distribute among those,
who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes
use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little is to
be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the
different baubles and trinkets, which are employed in the oeconomy of
greatness; all of whom thus derive from his luxury and caprice, that
share of the necessaries of life, which they would in vain have
expected from his humanity or his justice. The produce of the soil
maintains at all times nearly that number of inhabitants which it is
capable of maintaining. The rich only select from the heap what is
most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor,
and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they
mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they
propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be
the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they
divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are
led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the
necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been
divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus
without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the
society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When
Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither
forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the
partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces.
In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no
respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease
of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly
upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the
highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for."
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part IV, Chap. 1 (<http://
www.econlib.org/Library/Smith/smMS.html>)
Marx's sublation of this idea of the "passions" makes it part of a
philosophy of history that constitutes history as a set of internally
related "stages" in a process of "education," i.e. as "stages in the
development of the human mind." Like differences in religion, the
differences in "passions" express different stages in this process.
This is very different from Smith's conception of "stages." It
sublates Hegel (who also sublated Smith).
The role assigned to class relations embodies this philosophy of
history. The class relation is conceived as an internal
developmental relation, i.e. as an internal relation developmental of
the human mind.
Ted
