Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The year 1776 saw the publication of two of the Enlightenment's landmark texts: Edward Gibbon's multivolume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Adam Smith's multivolume Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.Each was the work of an erudite scholar deeply learned in ancient and modern history.Each reflected its author's intimate conversance with the 18th century's leading theories of political economy and moral philosophy.And each in time would launch an intellectual revolution in its particular branch of social science.Yet for all this, the two works also share a further, less well appreciated similarity: both are inquiries into the causes of the decline and demise of nations.Today we tend to associate this inquiry with Gibbon more than Smith.The Smith we have come to know is a theorist of growth and "the natural progress of opulence" and not a theorist of decline (WN 3.1). 1 Yet while his insights into growth undeniably constitute his most recognized contribution to the emergence of modern political economy, reading Smith exclusively as a theorist of growth can lead us to miss the sophistication of his inquiry into the causes of national decline.What follows thus reverses the causal arrow that has led other scholars to read Gibbon by way of Smith's influence (e.g., Pocock, 1999, pp.309-329, 2003, pp.372-399), and instead revisits Smith through the lens of Gibbon's key political problem in order to bring to the fore Smith's understudied inquiry into the causes of national decline and fall.The chief benefit of this reading lies in how it clarifies an underappreciated paradox at the core of Smith's project. 2 At the heart of this paradox lies Smith's understanding of the necessary tension between national opulence and national power.Put simply, Smith taught that national opulence is ultimately inimical to national power; the paradox, in short, is that the very growth that political economy seeks to promote ultimately proves counter to the nation's political interests.3 Thus even as "the great object of the political economy of every country, is to increase the riches and power of that country" (WN 2.5.31),Smith repeatedly would argue that the discrete project of increasing a country's riches subverts the discrete project of increasing a country's power.Smith furthermore believed that this paradox was both natural and necessary.This is especially clear in the way he frames the paradox in his lectures on jurisprudence:
Source: Constellations
Author: Ryan Patrick Hanley
Institution: Boston College
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,760
OpenAlex ID: W4402558145