Speaker
Description
Recently there has been a revival of interest in the apparent inconsistency between Smith’s conjectural stadial model and the various historical cases of social stagnation, and even retrograde order, as presented in his works. Most scholars tend to adopt an ‘either-or’ approach, suggesting that we must either discard the stadial model or acknowledge Smith’s theoretical incongruence. This paper, however, argues that both the conjectural history and the counter-narratives are integral to his theory of economic growth. It's noteworthy that even though the historical data Smith provides often contradict his stadial model, the four stages are presented as a linear and sequential narrative, rather than a classification lacking a temporal dimension. Although the order can be inverted, the more advanced stage can only be achieved by progressing through the earlier, ‘ruder’ stages. Commerce, for instance, cannot be established without the foundation of agriculture, and agriculture itself cannot emerge where shepherding economy has not yet been invented. Moreover, the mutual reinforcement between urban and rural sectors is vital for a robust modern economy. Based on this linear conjectural model, Smith builds a normative benchmark for real-world scenarios. Significantly, he applies this model to diagnose economic stagnation and ‘unnatural order’, whose causes may stem from the limitations of natural conditions in primitive stages or from oppressive social institutions in more advanced economies, including systems of primogeniture, entail, and slavery. I will revisit Smith’s much debated concept of ‘unnatural and retrograde order’, aiming to demonstrate that its general principle is not in conflict with the stadial theory. In fact, for Smith, both the ‘unnatural and retrograde order’ and the case of the North American colonial economy should be assessed through the lens of the ‘natural progress of opulence’. Henceforth the former becomes much more precarious than the latter. So far as Smith had already tried to resolve the tension between the theoretical-progressive model and the ‘slow progress of opulence’ in ‘every nation’ in his Glasgow lectures on jurisprudence, I contend that he does not see the apparent inconsistency as a problem, but as an opportunity to critique social institutions.
| Organization | Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University |
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