Paul Sagar’s richly rewarding, always intelligent new book identifies itself as a “reconsideration” and that aptly captures what distinctively characterizes his enterprise. His “aim” is polemical (p. 10); he sets out to “challenge” much received Smithian scholarship (p. 4). Accordingly his text abounds with characterizations of “misreadings,” “misinterpretations,” and “misunderstandings” (all employed in his opening pages [pp. 6–9] and repeated with synonyms such as “mistakes” throughout) and his engagement with contemporary scholars results in extensive footnoting. More substantively Sagar’s agenda is reactive in that the topics with which he engages are those where he thinks others are wrong. It is, of course, not simply reactive because he has selected issues that he judges need reconsideration. This gives the book its focus. We can identify three lines of [mis]intepretation he has chosen to reconsider.
The first is a ground-clearing critique of what Sagar calls the “standard model” (p. 14). This has three components—that Smith is a conjectural historian, that he adopts a four-stage approach to history, and that “commercial society” is only correctly understood as a “technical usage” (p. 13). While he somewhat overeggs the first of these, a common feature of the first two components is a commitment to reading Smith as writing “real history” (pp. 19, 29ff). This is well argued and instructive, especially in Sagar’s recognition of the importance of war and its contingencies within Smith’s account.
The third component in this ground-clearing exercise is, I think, more problematic. For example, Sagar’s discussion of technical usage derives solely from the opening paragraph in Wealth of Nations (WN I.4) (he quotes it three times [pp. 12, 107, 214]) but it is able to bear a different weight of reading; especially if the word “thoroughly” and the references to “everyman” and “far greater part” with respect to exchanging goods and services are heeded. Sagar imposes on Smith a strictness of terminology that is out of step with the way Smith writes. He is not a precise writer (something implicitly acknowledged by Sagar when he lists a variety of Smithian usages of “commercial” [p. 49]). Also problematic is Sagar’s wish to ascribe “commercial society” not merely to advanced societies but also to the Greek-Roman states and China. But Smith is clear that what enables “every man” to live by exchanging is that it occurs in a “well-governed society” (WN I, i.10), but neither Greece/Rome nor China fall under that description on Smith’s account. As Sagar recognizes, the former are societies dependent on slavery so a section of the population does not live by exchanging (as they should in the technical usage). And regarding China (on which Sagar says much that is genuinely insightful) the fact that Smith sees no rule of law operant there (cf. WN I.xi.15) is a point that Sagar rightly emphasizes as central to Smith’s own account, but that here Sagar underplays. The message Sagar draws from his analysis is that it matters what “kind of commercial society” is discussed (p. 50), particularly the distinctiveness of postfeudal Europe (p. 52 cf. pp. 104, 199).
This message is then a subtext within the other two lines of interpretation that Sagar’s argument reconsiders. In Chapter 2 he outlines and defends an interpretation of Smith as a “theorist of liberty as nondomination” (p. 60). He is explicit that this not the version espoused by Skinner and Pettit because he wants to insist that Smith is in no way a “republican” because he “severs the link between law, political participation and nondomination.” Here the crucial term is “law” because Sagar argues that Smith takes a “common law” approach to liberty and security. These are jointly the “cumulative” and “unintended consequences” of “complex legal and political processes” (p. 101). All this I find persuasive and certainly constitutes the best case yet for not reading Smith as an heir to classical or civic republicanism. If I have a quibble with Sagar’s interpretation here it is that in making his case for “free cities” as the original site of freedom in our present sense of the word (following the argument in WN III. iii), Sagar doesn’t pursue Smith’s point that the burghers for their own ends used their political power to further their economic interests. It is precisely that encroachment that signals corruption and that is a prominent theme in the third line of interpretation that Sagar seeks to reconsider.
It is here that Sagar is at his most fervently critical. The gravamen of his assault is the argumentative premise, adopted by many commentators, that societies that rely heavily on markets are presumptively normatively problematic (pp. 4, 181) and interpretations that regard Rousseau as a decisive benchmark against which to evaluate Smith’s analysis either implicitly or explicitly. In what is the strongest part of the book Sagar sets about thoroughly discrediting this argument. For Sagar, Smith did “not take Rousseau particularly seriously as an intellectual opponent” (p. 114), rather, as Sagar again correctly observes, Smith attaches far more weight to Hume’s impact (p. 150).
In an exercise of highly commendable meticulous textual analysis, focussing on the issues of deception and vanity he traces the roots of Smith’s argument back to his critique of Hume’s account of utility. He employs as a term of art the phrase “quirk of rationality” (pp. 140,172,184, etc.) by which he means the overvaluation of the means of utility rather than the utility itself (p. 178) and this quirk, not vanity, is the “motor of most economic consumption” (p. 177). While not entirely original, Sagar is here developing, more systematically and programmatically than is to be found elsewhere in the literature, Smith’s own claim that he is the first to notice what he calls the “principle” of the preference for aptness over utility (Theory of Moral Sentiments IV.i.4.6). This quirk would seem to exhibit what Sagar refers to in passing as the “human condition” (pp. 163 cf 4,186).
This attribution of universal (cf. p. 157), “underlying psychological processes” (p. 181) to Smith implicitly informs Sagar’s account of corruption. Aside from emphasizing that Smith’s preoccupation is with political rather than moral corruption, his account of the “conspiracy of merchants” (the title of Chapter 5) treads largely familiar territory. Indeed, given that he openly identifies his book as a revision of the “foundations and implications of Smith’s political thought” (p. 212), and attributes to Smith the possession of a “political project” (p. 217, cf. p. 211), then this surprisingly is not as prominent as might have been expected. Despite throwing out remarks like Smith having “enduring lessons for us today” (p. 211, cf. p. 219), what I think is more telling is Sagar’s recognition of Smith’s (implicitly universalist) observation that “the violence and injustice of mankind is an ancient evil” that “can scarce admit of a remedy” (WN IV.iii.c.9 [quoted at p. 193]); this, I hazard, lies at the heart of Smith’s deeply historically inflected, nonideological [cf. p. 210], “politics.”
Given that Sagar admits of one aspect of his discussion that it is “purposefully constrained” (p. 185), some will judge his book too narrow. However, he has deliberately set out not to provide an overview but to give a selective account of where, in his assessment, many commentators have gone wrong in their specific analyses. Within this self-chosen limited remit, he has executed his intent successfully. It will be a measure of that success the extent to which his “challenges” are taken up and responded to subsequently by others. Whatever their response it cannot be on the grounds that Sagar has failed to take Smith seriously. All students of Smith’s political, historical, and moral thought should read Sagar’s book, and in that spirit I heartily commend this volume to fellow Smithian scholars.
