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kevinbrieven银虫 (小有名气)
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[交流]
Adam Smith and the Pursuit of Perfect Liberty
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There can't be many economic theorists whose views have been embraced by both Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher. But then, like other writers who have been quoted far more often than they have been read, Adam Smith has found himself in mixed company since his death in 1790. It is not hard to mine his writings for arguments that can be deployed on both sides of a question. He was the champion of laissez-faire capitalism who never used the phrase in print, and assumed that "manufacture" meant "made by hand"; the Enlightenment rationalist who thought that half of Edinburgh's inhabitants were mad; the republican free-thinker who argued that men should "respect the established powers and privileges". Perhaps Smith, too, was divided - after all, this was a man who once devoted two full pages of a treatise on language to the word "but". However, James Buchan's short, sharp biography makes a powerful case for thinking that, for Smith, these divisions were creatively enabling rather than self-cancelling: they were what gave his writing its characteristic sense of balance and poise. Not much space is given to the everyday details of his life, but then Smith himself doesn't seem to have worried unduly about such things: for much of his adult life he lived with his mother, and seems to have spent most of his time shyly trying to conceal himself behind his reading, as if losing himself in a book was a long-term aim rather than a temporary refuge. Still, James Boswell, the inventor of modern biography, who attended Smith's lectures at Glasgow University, was captivated by Smith's remark that even the smallest detail is of interest in a great man - such as John Milton's choice of shoe laces over buckles - and Buchan provides enough glimpses of Smith's domestic routines to satisfy those readers for whom the life of the mind is not enough. An "infirm and sickly" child, as an adult he was a champion hypochondriac who collected medical tracts, and could be heard murmuring to himself, "a day in bed - a day in bed". Renowned in Scottish Enlightenment circles for being "alert, practical, cautious, urbane and businesslike", he also had a dreamy, distracted air, "moving his lips and talking to himself, and smiling". Fortunately, by this stage he was a university lecturer, where such behaviour tends to attract approving looks rather than men in white coats, although anyone who assumed that he was an unworldly innocent would have been surprised by his first major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which rooted itself firmly in a world of "pen-knives and snuff-boxes, tweezer-cases, ear-pickers, nail-cutters… bad roads and clumsy servants". It was a moral treatise dressed up as a sentimental novel. Not everyone was charmed by his combination of personal dreaminess and philosophical rigour: Dr Johnson told Boswell that Smith "was as dull a dog as he had ever met with", while Boswell, never one to let dull dogs lie, complained when Smith came to London in 1773 that he could not recognise his old tutor when faced with this "professed Infidel with a bag wig". Such personal slights seem to have glanced off Smith, and in any case he had more important things on his mind, with the appearance in 1776 of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The Victorian philosopher Henry Thomas Buckle once claimed that this was "probably the most important book that has ever been written", and with admirable clarity Buchan sets out its argument, assumptions and after-effects. Economic theory is not always easy to understand, let alone enjoy, but Buchan's thumbnail guide manages to stay true to Smith's ideas while also bringing them up to date with an occasional tweak - as when he summarises the increasing confusion of luxury and necessity in "the progress of opulence" with a nicely tart metaphor: "I'll die if I don't have those shoes." It is not an uncritical summary: Buchan is alert to the blind spots in Smith's argument, not to mention its contradictions, such as his denunciation of the "unjust and oppressive restraints" on foreign imports, printed at the same time that Smith was being paid £900 a year as a commissioner of customs. But it would be hard to think of a writer better attuned to the characteristic tone of Smith's writing: "modest, generous and urbane, with the occasional hint of wistfulness or acid". This is a short book, but it punches well above its weight: the perfect celebration of a man who did so much to alter modern economic thinking, and claimed towards the end of his life: "I meant to have done more." [ Last edited by kevinbrieven on 2007-1-22 at 16:08 ] |
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