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Smith does not conceive of a “state of nature” as such, which societies exit in the course of development. Rather, as Michel Foucault noted, society, for Smith and his Scottish contemporaries, is a “historical-natural constant”. In Smith’s descriptive account of societies, much emphasis, too, is placed on the naturalness of certain kinds of institutions – institutions of government, for example, given certain relations of subsistence and property. Smith’s account of societies and their development is thus, as many have noted, naturalistic. Yet, at the same time, Smith does sometimes refer to a nature beyond or outside the realm of the social, whilst societies themselves can develop in “unnatural” ways. In light of today’s ecological crisis, critical environmental thought has emphasized the need to reassess dominant assumptions about the relationship between nature and society, frequently seeking to locate the origins of supposedly problematic dualisms in Enlightenment thought. Against the background of these debates, this paper reassesses the way Smith conceives of the relationship between the natural and the social, exploring both the descriptive and the normative work done by the concept of nature.
| Organization | University of Glasgow |
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