ABSTRACT
This chapter about Smith’s conception of labour submits that he discussed labour within two different conceptual frameworks, first normative, and then descriptive/analytical. Interpreters failing to distinguish the different characters of the two, mix up very different arguments. Smith’s cultural and subjective attitude to labourers is often mistaken for his scientific approach to the working of the system. Thus, a crucial point disappears from different readings of the Wealth of nations. The point is how difficult it was for Smith, while remaining within his economic analysis, to support the promising prospects for the general bettering of labourers’ conditions he sketched in his normative arguments. This chapter also shows that this difficulty was the outcome of a specific theoretic choice by Smith among alternatives available in his time. Within the limits of this argument, this chapter focuses on Smith’s accounts of wageworkers’ situations, and the room he left for their peculiar freedoms, which was not large.
