Speaker
Description
Although the theme of the causes of poverty (and in particular begging and idleness) is not one that most directly mobilizes reflection on Smith's Wealth of Nations (Gilbert 2006), his comments on this theme appear to be key to the appropriation and interest of some of its first continental readers. The WN's treatment of issues such as "freedom of labor as a natural right" and the "free circulation of labor and wage inequalities" (I, x), or the relationship between "industry and idleness" (II, iii), and more broadly on the question of the division of labor and wages, will quickly become part of current debates on the question of poverty and begging, or on the question of guilds and corporations in different parts of the continent, and can provide us with particularly relevant aspects of how Smith was read, appropriated and articulated with other sets of ideas in the last decades of the eighteenth century. This topic is one of those that will be of most immediate interest to some of Smith’s first readers in the Iberian Peninsula, and will allow us to proceed with a reading of some writings by Spanish and Portuguese authors who were directly or indirectly involved in the practical affairs of state administration, in order to show how this reception necessarily took place in an eclectic way and amidst a series of perspectives typical of enlightened reformism.
The analysis focuses on two manuscripts and authors that are not usually considered together in historiography: the “Plan para desterrar la ociosidad” by Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, and the “Discurso sobre a Mendicidade” (1787 or 1788) by Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho. Both texts present interesting dialogues with Smith, mainly in relation to Book 1 of WN, and reveal important aspects of how the Scottish author was appropriated by individuals involved in the administration of state affairs at the end of the eighteenth century in Spain and Portugal. The “Informe sobre el libre ejercicio de las artes” (1784) by Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, which takes up the ideas of Campomanes and is usually analyzed in the literature as important in terms of the appropriation of Smith’s ideas in Spain, is also analyzed in the article. In addition to this Iberian connection, the article also explores an interesting and original additional connection, with the Italian peninsula, since Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho's text is also connected to the reflections of Giovanni Battista Vasco (himself a central name in the reception of Smith in Italy), with whom he had a close personal relationship during the years when he was the Portuguese diplomatic envoy to the court in Turin.
Based on a thorough analysis of these texts and a broad contextual apparatus, the article aims to advance the discussion of Smith's appropriation by highlighting the interesting eclectic combinations to which his ideas were subjected in enlightened reformism, which help us to better understand how his work was effectively read and debated in that context and, more broadly, the influences on the actual use of the language of political economy in those contexts.
| Organization | Cedeplar / Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais |
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