Book Report on "Wealth of Nations"

Book Report 13 pages (4050 words) Sources: 3

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, was the father of modern economics and capitalism. He argued that the free operation of market forces was the best recipe for a flourishing and growing economy. If everyone is as free as possible to pursue his or her own self-interest, he or she will be led by an "invisible hand" to promote the welfare of society as a whole.

There are many reasons why self-interest is the most effective technique of increasing wealth in society. Within a community/society/countries, there are two main assemblies, the government and the citizens. Both assemblies play an important role in the market place, the government is there to regulate any conflicts and minimize problems and bring social justice to society, other than that, they have no place in the market place. While on the other hand, the citizen's main role in society is to produce as many goods and meet society's needs and wants, in order to increase the wealth. As Smith once stated "Government should not repress self-interested people, for self-interest is a rich natural source." The individual knows what is best through their own self-view, and by being a productive individual, they are able to not only actualize, but to improve society as a whole. Individuals in society knows best what is good for them, and that under the influence of the profit, it will motive them to understand what society wants and needs and turn their self-interest into products society desired.

… in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. Every workman has a great quantity of his own work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for; and every other workman being exactly in the same situation, he is enabled to exchange a great quantity of his own goods for a great quantity, or, what comes to the same thing, for the price of a great quantity of theirs. He supplies them abundantly with what they have occasion for, and they accommodate him as amply with what he has occasion for, and a general plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of the society....(I:1).

A clear sign of succession of Smith's theory of capitalism can be compared with Karl Marx's theory about communism. A capitalist belief is that each individual is continually exerting himself to find the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. In Adam's opinion each person has the right to the pursuit of happiness, and that each person has to take it in his or her own hands to advance within society. Marx disagrees by saying that when a person betters himself, he does not improve but instead endangers society. In Smith's idea of society each person can do whatever they want to advance them and each person can pursue happiness in whatever fashion they believe to be the best. Technology creates new and better ways to do things, which allow society to grow and become more advanced, and the individual more self-actualized.

Smith as a Product of the Enlightenment - We must also put Adam Smith in the context of the enlightenment and the social debate that surrounding much of the work of Locke, Hobbes, and even Rousseau. To understand Smith's legacy and importance, we must then understand some of the prevailing issues in the Enlightenment. For instance, when Thomas Hobbes described the life of man in wartime as "nasty, brutish, and short," he was speaking more about the manner in which the majority of the population lived in 16th and 17th century Europe. Life was quite different during this time for 90% of the populace; there was a small merchant/middle class, an even smaller aristocratic class, and a large peasant and poor class. This, too, was the world of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, and one cannot but comment briefly on the contemporary world of the time and the way what they saw in society influenced their thinking and philosophical writings.

And what was urban life like? Cities were crowded, there was no sewer system or plumbing; night soil and trash was thrown out of windows onto the streets, horse offal was everywhere. Refrigeration did not exist, meat was fly ridden and often rotten by the time it was purchased, produce similarly so. There was no regular medical care, most people had few teeth left by age of 30, pox, disease, and deformity were rampant, and the stench of the cities has been described as worse than rot, worse than privy smells, the odor seemed to hang on the city like a cloud of filth (Cockayne, 2007). With birth being a chance, disease, lack of nutrition, and most of the population illiterate, life expectancy of most people in Hobbes' time was 35-40 years, with the major factors being hygiene, disease (drinking unpotable water), and lack of consistent good nutrition. In fact, the rural peasant fared far better -- they typically had fresher produce, cleaner water, and were not as plagued with the burdens of urbanity (Life Expectancy, 2010)

War, too, was a constant threat; and peasant men and boys were regularly "drafted" and used as chattel: the way of warfare was to line up regiments of men, fire bullets, what the bullets did not kill, the bayonet would. There was little strategy, it was a war of numbers, and most of the infantry were killed or maimed (Warfare in the 1700s, 2006). Thus, for Hobbes, the overall view of mankind was not pleasant. The state of humanity, that he saw, was one in which technology had not yet had the pleasant effects for the majority, and he saw the masses as being born with an instinct that needed to be controlled, ruled, and that the responsibility of the State was indeed to control the "animals of humanity," (Hobbes, 2003). This nasty and brutish and short way of life then, was his view of humanity -- and one he sought, through metaphysics and philosophy, to find a way for the State to control and help the "unwashed" masses move forward.

In contrast, however, Rousseau, looking at the same brutish and ugly urban life, found that instead of seeing humanity in need of control, there was a natural state of being, and this state or urbanity was not that state. Rousseau saw optimism and the theory of the social contract of the individual with the state- bringing more and more positive actualization to everyday life, and thus improving society as a whole (Gay, 1996).

John Locke was one of the most influential English philosophers of the Enlightenment Period. His views on liberty, the social contract, rights of the individual, and liberalism transcended time and geography and, in fact, became the very basis of thought for the framers of the United States Constitution and Declaration of Independence. His ideas also had tremendous influence on the Continental Philosophers of the time, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, and more. In many ways, his views were the very bridge between the Renaissance and the modern world, in that he viewed humans in a non-Cartesian and completely Biblical manner as blank slates, tabula rasa, born good without innate ideas but a predisposition towards self-actualization (Cassirer, 2009). In politics, Locke's view of the social contract and natural rights was central to the way he viewed the progress of mankind. The idea of natural rights is quite ancient, having ground in the Greek and Roman philosophers. These rights, also called moral rights, are essentially the thought that everyone is born with certain rights that should be expressed, regardless of the law or circumstances of their birth. Natural rights are universal, not limited to one time period or country, and are thus quite debatable and often contingent upon the interpretation of those who exercise the greatest power within that particular society -- even though this is against the basis of natural rights itself (Magee). Thus, as early as the Greek stoics, rights were being used to debate the idea of slavery, and as the philosophers of the Enlightenment began to reexamine the rights of kings, they found that humans clearly have certain needs and means to express their own actualization- natural rights, or as John Locke indicated, the right to, "life, liberty, and property" (Tuck, 1982).

For Hobbes, the controlling factor of society was just because society was incapable of regulating itself. Individuals were not born equal, some had greater innate gifts. A strong State is necessary to retain order among society (remember, Leviathan was written during the turmoil of the English Civil War), and forms a basic mechanistic view of the human condition. This Hobbesian view understands humanity in a sense of the "state of nature" being one of anarchy, constant conflict, and the inability for the individual to actually cooperate with one another to provide the best for all -- the "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" lives he sees as the unencumbered pre-State society (xiii). Instead,… READ MORE

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