https://d2ng68cf36kxsk.cloudfront.net/store/public/post/1392/post_images/Slide462.JPG">

At various times he was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, then a well-paid tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch, and finally Commissioner of Customs for Scotland.²⁵¹ Today he is best known as author of the seminal Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. With this book, he is considered founder of the discipline of economics.

Before The Wealth of Nations, Smith had achieved fame for his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments. Here he argued that although “our senses … never can carry us beyond our own person … By the imagination we place ourselves in [another’s] situation, … conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation … It is the impressions of our senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy.” This process he calls “sympathy or correspondence of sentiments.” Its trigger might be the “grief or joy” in the “look and gestures” of another. Or it may simply be a reading of the other’s situation as if it could be one’s own. It is this “imaginary change of situation upon which … sympathy is founded.”²⁵²

Moral sentiments, for Smith, are neither intrinsic to a human spirit, nor are they a spirit commandeered by God. They are grounded in the ordinary materiality of embodied feelings, and meanings made through sympathy.

Or to rephrase this in the terms of our grammar of transposition, the ideal is grounded in the experience of the material, but by transposition in the sentiment of sympathy, it necessarily exceeds the material.^§MS3.1 The second or third person becomes, in our imaginations, a virtual first person.^§MS2.2 And, in our counterpoint to a conventional theory of communication as meaning-transmission, there is a difference between the immediate, multimodal experiences of sympathizer and sympathized, a transposition of meaning that is connected by signs of sentiment and social meanings that can never be experienced in the same way.^§AS2.5b These are several of the transpositions of differential interest that Smith would have called “sympathy.”

In The Wealth of Nations, Smith adapts his moral philosophy to the market. “The word value … has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called ‘value in use’; the other, ‘value in exchange.’”²⁵³

As for sympathy, as for moral sentiments, use and exchange each prompts its own kinds of reflexive sociability in the meeting of differential interests. Use value: the butcher, baker, and brewer need each other’s commodities, for the eating and the drinking. Exchange value: these are reduced to the “common stock” of calculable monetary equivalence. These are the means by which, in a “sympathy” of sorts, it is possible to share qualitatively different things for the purposes of living together sociably, each able to enjoy the fruits of the other’s labor.

But now, famously, his theory of market sentiments becomes less sympathetic:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own self-interest … [M]an has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can influence their self-love in his favour … [G]enerally, indeed, [he] neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it … [B]y directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end that was no part of his intention … By promoting his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.²⁵⁴

Here, in the interplay of differential interests, we have some aspects that are immediate and obvious, others that are not so obvious and for this reason, not generally noticed. While focusing on the exchange of their wares – the multimodal meanings of meat, bread, and beer as use values – butchers, bakers, and brewers tend not to notice the social system in which they participate. Or to the extent that they venture into the realm of exchange, it is the “deal”²⁵⁵ around price rather than the value of labour. Bread and prices are explicitly communicated, but the social system they create, the patterns of human agency, the underlying structures of meaning, are not so obvious. We have been calling this process reification, a process of just noticing things in their immediate materiality and the superficiality of their sticker price, but not noticing larger patterns of social interest.

Interdependency based on differential interests becomes greater with the intensification of the division of labor integral to modern societies. Smith takes us into a pin factory to see this happening.

One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them onto the [packing] paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations … I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed … Those ten persons … could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.

Without such a division of labor, a single worker “could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty.”²⁵⁶

It was hard for Smith not to uncover here another vector of reification, one that might also, by way of sympathy, be judged to be a form of alienation.

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations … has no occasion to exert his understanding … He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes … stupid and ignorant … [T]he mind is … suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity which, in civilised society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people.²⁵⁷

Nor did Smith fail to notice that while the workers were being numbed into stupidity, the owners of the factories where getting richer and their tastes more refined. This brought imminent social dangers should the workers resist their benumbment or choose to rise above their induced stupidity:

Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. [The rich person] is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom … he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up to chastise it … Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.²⁵⁸

By this stage in the argument, Smith has accumulated this many layers of differential interest: genuine “sympathy,” complimentary use values, superficial prices, underlying labor values, social relations of inequality, and a state that manages interests in favor of property owners. Smith starts off nicely with sympathy and use values, but after that, his parsing of differential interests starts to look less than nice. In his travels, he has passed the invisible hand of the market, but now he has arrived at the visible hand of the state.

---

²⁵¹ Nicholas Phillipson, 2010, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

²⁵² Adam Smith, 1790 [1817], The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Boston, MA: Wells and Lilly, pp. 2, 14, 5, 4, 20.

²⁵³ Adam Smith, 1776 [1937], An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, New York: The Modern Library, p. 28.

²⁵⁴ Ibid., pp. 14, 423.

²⁵⁵ Donald J. Trump and Tony Schwartz, 1987, Trump: The Art of the Deal, New York: Random House.

²⁵⁶ Adam Smith, 1776 [1937], An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, New York: The Modern Library, pp. 4–5.

²⁵⁷ Ibid., pp. 734–35.

²⁵⁸ Ibid., pp. 670, 674.

---

Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 268–271. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Adam Smith’s “Hidden Hand” §AS2.3.2a