ABSTRACT
Smith's often noted ambivalence about commercial society in part turns around claims about the virtues and pathologies of recognition in commercial society. On the one hand, for Smith commercial society is a sphere in which actors mutually recognise each other as independent agents, each acting towards the other neither as benefactor nor as dependent. On the other, he acknowledges particular pathologies of recognition in commercial society: the social invisibility of the poor, the divorce of recognition from its proper object; the absence of limits on the pursuit of goods desired for appearance. For all the ambivalence apparent in the acknowledgement of these pathologies, Smith in the end defends commercial society. He does so partly in response to the contemporary egalitarian criticisms of commercial society in the work of Rousseau. 1 Many of the themes in the debate between Smith and Rousseau reappear in later arguments between defenders of commercial society and their egalitarian critics. Hegel's discussion of civil society as a sphere of mutual recognition, along with his sensitivity to pathologies of misrecognition, echo Smithian themes. The pathologies of recognition are central to later critics of commercial society – in particular the early writings of Marx. So also is a less often noted theme in egalitarian thought – the claim that defenders of commercial society fail to acknowledge unavoidable dependence and the forms of non-commercial networks of social support that this requires.
