Adam Smith belongs to the right, not the left

left-wing radicals, thinkers and educationalists were already at odds

over their collective attitude to the ideas and heritage of the great

Scottish economist or moral philosopher, Adam Smith.

In The Making of the English Working Class, where he summarises the

significance of the political thought of Tom Paine (1737-1809), the

English author of The Rights of Man, E. P. Thompson, says: ''The Rights

of Man (1791) and The Wealth of Nations (1776) should supplement and

nourish each other.'' But because Smith belonged to the right rather

than the left in politics, it is very doubtful if he would have

recognised any common sympathies in Paine's epoch-making contribution to

English political thought.

Unlike Tom Paine, Adam Smith did not identify with the political

aspirations of the commonalty. Indeed, in later chapters of The Making

of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson documents the early 19th

century plebeian radicals' detestation of ''Dr A. Smith's disciples''.

And yet because of Smith's revolutionary role in discovering the Labour

Theory of Value, 19th century European radicals paid homage to the great

Scottish moral philosopher.

As an historian and political activist, I have become increasingly

fascinated by the parallels and contrasts between ''the devil's decade''

of the 1930s and the ''terrible hell'' of the 1980s. Despite the

Bolshevik revolution and the advent of ''the socialist sixth of the

world'', the left suffered a series of traumatic political defeats in

the interwar period.

The long cumulative defeat of the European left began in Italy in the

early 1920s and gathered momentum in the 1930s with the decimation of

the Austrian and German socialist movements. And yet the left was

characterised by its intellectual resilience and incisive analysis.

In the 1930s the right possessed -- or in some countries seized --

political power, while the left developed brilliant and sophisticated

analyses and gained intellectual superiority. With the continu

ing disarray of the left throughout the world in the 1980s, the right

have gained political power and ''intellectual'' superiority.

Unlike the right, the left cannot gain political power without first

winning the hearts and minds of the majority of ordinary men and women.

The tragic disorientation of the left is seen in the oft-repeated claim

that Margaret Thatcher has hi-jacked Adam Smith. Indeed, a well-known

Glaswegian socialist once asked me to write an article to prove that

Adam Smith belonged to the left, not the Thatcherites.

But Adam Smith was a precursor -- a harbinger -- of Thatcherism. This

is not to belittle or down- play the progressive contribution that he

made to the growth of human knowledge in his own time and place. Though

they did not attempt to claim Adam Smith as a precursor of socialist

ideas, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels praised his contribution to

''political economy'' to the high heavens. As Marx put it: ''Engels was

right to call Adam Smith the (Martin) Luther of Political Economy.''

What impressed many left-wing scholars and thinkers in the 19th and

early 20th centuries was the in-depth analysis provided by Adam Smith in

the epoch-making book, The Wealth of Nations. Although much of Smith's

thought was stimulated by the enormous economic growth and urbanisation

he witnessed in and around Glasgow engendered by the expansion of the

tobacco trade after the Union of 1707, he had made observations of

enduring intellectual value about ''the division of labour''.

The Wealth of Nations marked the birth of classical political economy.

But contrary to what some contemporary left-wing thinkers suggest, Smith

did not say that labour was the source of all surplus value. Moreover,

Marx and Engels became increasingly critical of Smith's ideas about the

division of labour in capitalist society. As the distinguished American

scholar, Raya Dunayevskaya, argued: ''Marx wanted to show the falsity of

Adam Smith's view of the division of labour as if that which was true in

society -- competition, 'independence', 'equality' -- held in the

factory. Marx would show that it is not competition that rules the

division of labour in the factory, but the authority of the capitalist,

i.e., the hierarchic structure of capital itself.''

But although Adam Smith belonged to a time and a place when an

ascendant capitalism could play a progressive role in human affairs, he

did not belong to the left of the rising bourgeois-democratic revolution

in the Western world.

Despite the sometimes important differences in the economic theories

of Smith and Thatcher, he had much in common with the Thatcherites. He

most certainly supported the evolving British Empire; and he did not

think much of the egalitarian aspirations of the left of his own time.

Far from the right hi-jacking Adam Smith, the left is articulating its

present intellectual confusion by assuming that he ever had anything in

common with radicalism except intellectual curiosity and inquiry. In The

Wealth of Nations, Smith asserted that ''The rich, in particular, are

necessarily interested to support that order of things, which alone can

secure them in the possession of their advantages''.

Moreover, in a lecture delivered in Glasgow

on jurisprudence, Adam Smith argued that: ''Till there be property

there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth,

and to defend the rich from the poor.'' In common with the other radical

thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, he believed in what the late

George Lichtheim characterised as ''the naive doctrine of social harmo

ny arising spontaneously through the liberation of private

initiative''. He was a precursor of free enterprise capitalism, not

socialism.

Adam Smith believed, too, in a strong State; and he would not have

marched with the anti-Poll Tax demonstrators, whatever the Scottish

National Party assert to the contrary.

In anticipating Thatcher's passion for a strong State, he wrote as

follows in The Wealth of Nations: ''The affluence of the rich excites

the indignation of the poor, who are often driven by want, and prompted

by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of a

civil magistrate that the owner of that property which is acquired by

the labour of several generations can sleep a single night in

security.'' He shared the Thatcherites' ungenerous view of human nature;

and he believed in the virtues of a very un-free ''free enterprise''.

But Smith was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, not the English

one. Although he would most certainly not have agitated against the Poll

Tax in its modern guise, he would have attacked the Government's savage

destruction of our Scottish universities. In recognising the futility of

depending on brute force to keep down a disaffacted people, Smith wanted

to provide ''the inferior ranks of people'' with education and

instruction.

In breaking out of the circumscribed intellectual environment of his

own class, he recognised that: ''An instructed and intelligent people

are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one.'' He

would have been marching with the Association of University Teachers to

defend the Scottish universities.

Whatever his merits or faults as a major Scottish intellectual, Adam

Smith did not belong to the left.

* James D. Young, author and historian, teaches history at Stirling

University.