ABSTRACT
As Warren Montag (2005) notes, Smith’s vision of natural order “shapes our drams and destinies.” We are haunted by the assurances that all is well or at least as it must be, while many suffer, languishing in poverty – in squalid living conditions and with little prospects for the future. Even those seemingly better off sense the precariousness of their position. Smith’s theodicy sanctifies the workings of commercial order including its partial evils as embodying a providential plan. What might appear as a moral failing or social evil is revalued as a relative good or an element necessary to the natural order that, in the end, produces the social good of wealth and moral advance. But Smith is too acute an observer to ignore the detrimental consequences of the division of labor for common working people. He supplements the workings of the invisible hand with a visible hand of public action. He also, and to his discredit, averts his eyes and our attention from ill effects of a commercial society that his own technical account or historical narrative reveals, including that markets ration life and death and that commercial expansion goes hand in hand with colonization and slavery. Here, denial supplements theodicy when its ambiguities and incompleteness are revealed.
