ABSTRACT
It may seem ungrateful to offer a less than enthusiastic review of a book that has the good taste to quote at length from oft-neglected, albeit important, French sources in the study of Adam Smith, for example, Pascal, Le Rochefoucauld, Bayle, Montesquieu and, crucially, Rousseau (often in thencontemporary translations). Force’s book has admirable ambition and is wisely not afraid of anachronism by using history to engage with the rhetorical self-understanding of contemporary economics and its insistence on being a separate activity from ethics. (Anticipated by Young 1997.) Moreover, it offers a serious study of Smith’s response to Rousseau. If executed properly, it would have taken its place alongside Rothschild (2001) and force a reevaluation, untainted by once-pervasive Marx’s influence, of Smith’s complex relationship with French Enlightenment thought. (For more promising attempt, see Hont 2005.) Unfortunately, Force ignores much important scholarship that anticipates his claims, refuses to engage with opposing views or inconvenient evidence, and – most peculiar for ‘a literary scholar’ that claims to be ‘especially sensitive to issues of consistency and inconsistency in discourse . . . to withhold judgment about the meaning of a text until all of its aspects have been accounted for’ (p. 3) – offers readings that ignore crucial details and the rhetorical complexity of the texts under discussion. (On Smith’s rhetoric, see Brown 1994; Griswold 1999; Muller 1995: 65-8, 92-4; and Fleischacker: 2004, ch. 1.)
While much of the interest of Force’s analysis is in the particular and often highly suggestive details (see for a lovely example, the analysis of Governor Pownall’s concerns about Smith’s potentially subversive use of the division of labour, pp. 127-8), the main argument can be summarized as follows. Force identifies two competing traditions in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century thought: an Epicurean/Augustinian tradition, which uses self-interest as its sole explanatory principle in systematic analysis of human beings, and a competing, neo-Stoic tradition which uses self-interest as one among other principles (p. 5). What unites Epicureans and Augus-
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Within this over-arching framework, Force treats Smith as a subtle neoStoic response, aiming to reconcile ‘Hume’s [positive] views on the social and political benefits of commerce with Rousseau’s republican critique of commercial society’ (p. 3). Hume, who – bizarrely – is called the ‘founder of utilitarianism’ (pp. 105, 171; cf. the reference to Plato’s Protagoras in ‘General Remarks’ of the first few lines of Mill’s Utilitarianism), enters Force’s narrative only in its last two chapters, while much of the work on Smith and Rousseau is done through an analysis of their complex reactions to Mandeville. (For references, mostly ignored by Force, see the bibliography to Hurtado-Prieto 2006.) Thus, Force re-establishes that ‘Rousseau is an essential interlocutor for Smith’ (p. 3; cf. Schliesser 2006 for a competing analysis). This has not gone unnoticed by scholarship on Smith (Force, p. 20, cites Ignatieff 1984 and 1986, and Winch 1996, but ignores Berry 1989, 1992; Fleischacker 1999 and Pack 2000), but Force’s is the most sustained attempt thus far.
