Reviews for Colour booklet and data book

The average rating for Colour booklet and data book based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-01 00:00:00 Serena Sweet Some authors come to praise Adam Smith. Others come to bury him. Whether Susan Gallagher intended to praise Smith, bury him, or play a round of chess with him is no more clear at the end of her brief and curious book than it is at the beginning. And a brief and curious book it is; brief because it is only 105 pages long, curious because after reaching page 105 the reader is unsure which is the correct impression: that Gallagher has misread Smith, or has not read him at all. Gallagher is influenced by the Cambridge School associated with J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner and now so throughly entrenched that it finds itself confronted by challengers as it once challenged the established canons of historical scholarship and interpretation. Gallagher's premise is that what binds Bernard Mandeville, Henry Bolingbroke, David Hume, and Adam Smith most closely together "is that all four lived in an aristocratic society, that is, a society shaped by the notion that the propertied minority" is morally superior to the populace as a whole and that this moral superiority should be realized in political superiority (1). This context, she argues, has been inadequately addressed by those interpretations which see Smith and co. as participants in the debate between the Court and Country factions, that is, between the supporters of the Whig regime and its modernizing, commercial tendencies, and its opponents who were inspired by the vocabulary of civic humanism. Gallagher asserts that the republican critique of commerce was intended not only to defend civic virtue, "but, more comprehensively, as a means to preserve a moral basis for aristocratic rule." Her analysis "identifies aristocratic anxiety about the strength of social hierarchy as the heart and soul of the republican critique of commercial progress" (8). Within this framework, all four figures are presented as responding to the erosion wrought by commercialization of the aristocracy's moral and political authority. The rise of commerce and luxury revealed the aristocracy's moral bankruptcy, as its members proved themselves capable only of wasting their money on trifles. Without any moral basis to justify their elevated rank over their supposed inferiors, the grounds for their political superiority collapsed as well. Yet their commercial activities, while destroying their political status, helped rather than harmed the country by increasing prosperity. Resolving this paradox is what motivated all four authors. As she puts it, "Smith's insight into the unintended benefits of economic competition developed in response to the seemingly depraved proclivities fo the propertied elite in eighteenth-century Britain" (5). With Smith, this took the form of an argument against political power itself. Instead of answering the republican condemnation of commerce, Smith's did not try to "rescue politics from corruption," but advised "all combatants to withdraw from the field" (71). Gallagher's thesis is a provocative one, and it perhaps could have been a compelling alternative to the interpretations she criticizes. We will never know, however, because her account is so riven by distortions, exaggerations, and basic errors of interpretation as to be utterly unreliable. Her thesis that Smith's rejection of politics was a response to the political failure of the aristocracy is fatally flawed from the outset because the conclusion does not flow from the premise, and the premise itself is unfounded. She reiterates that Smith's position in an aristocratic society is key to understanding his thought. Smith operated "[w]ithin the context of eighteenth-century aristocratic society" (85) and even though "he rejected the concept of aristocratic government, he never stopped thinking like an aristocrat" (72). (How a commoner who was in reality "a writer on the outskirts of British society" (78) could think like an aristocrat is left to the reader's imagination.) Framed in such terms, Smith's defense of every individual's pursuit of private gain does not entail expanding the political sphere to include the people, but shows rather that "political elites . . . are, broadly speaking, extraneous to the natural scheme of things, however much they might try to alter the laws of human behavior or pretend to control the wealth of nations" (85). Smith cannot advocate "the redistribution of political authority" when he believes in "the ultimate insignifance of political power" (97). If the best men of society, that is, the aristocrats, cannot rule, no one can. Society will not suffer because the pursuit of private gain benefits society, albeit unintentionally. But offered from within the precincts of "eighteenth-century aristocartic society, this was, of course, not a plea for a more democratic system; it was a repudiation of politics" (98). Gallagher's argument relies on a fallacy, the notion that Smith could only operate in one particular social and intellectual context, and that this context determined his approach to all the issues he addressed. Britain in the eighteeenth century was an aristocratic society, but it was many other things as well. Not least, it was not a single country. Not once in Gallagher's text to the terms "Enlightenment" or "Scottish Enlightenment" appear. Gallagher at best pays lip service to the notion that Smith was a philosopher who may have had a coherent philosophical program with its own logic and demands, and that Smith was at least as concerned with those as he was with the aristocracy and political power. There is no acknowledgment that when he took up his pen to write about economics, Smith was setting foot in a field that had been in ferment for two decades at least, and even longer depending on how one defines that field. Indeed, there is little attention paid to the debates on trade, luxury, and commerce in which Mandeville, Bolingbroke, Hume, and Smith were participating. There was a lot more going on that Gallagher takes heed of, all of which would render a much more plausible account of her subject. And because she takes no heed of it, she completely mischaracterizes Smith. He was, she realizes, "in a way, delegitimizing the social and political establishment of the nation" (91) and she even recognizes that he had a "skeptical view of government" (95). But she has no idea why, and instead propounds the ludicrous view that Smith "rejected authority itself" (98). Smith did not reject authority itself. He rejected its organization, distribution, obligations, and prospects, and Gallagher would have seen this if she had actually paid attention to her evidence. She notes (95) that Smith dismissed as "unproductive hands" the ecclesiastical establishments, court retinues, and vast peacetime armies whose consumption of most of the public revenue was an example of the kind of "public prodigality and misconduct" that could impoverish a great nation (I.442). Smith does qualify his screed against these wastrels by suggesting that private industry will make up for public waste, so Gallagher construes this as evidence of his argument for the irrelevance of power. Yet if she paid a little more attention, she might have noticed that by labeling courts, armies, and church hierarchies as "unproductive," Smith was offering a striking rebuke of traditional notions of national greatness, or "opulence" as he called it. One wonders what counts as political for Gallagher if Smith's demand that "kings and ministers" abandon their "highest impertinence and presumption . . . to pretend to watch over the economy of private people" (I.446) is not. In Gallagher's account, Smith's desire for the removal of "[a]ll systems either of preference or of restraint" stems from his conviction that the unintended social benefits of the pursuit of happiness alone can remedy the imbecility and irresponsibility of government. As a result, "The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance fo which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of society" (II.274) Smith's defense of freedom of trade and "natural liberty" stemmed not from a belief that government was powerless and incompetent, but that it was powerful and incompetent. Kings and ministers had the ability, but not the talent and wisdom, to superintend private industry. None of that means, though, that there was nothing that they could or should do. Smith thought that "the sovereign" had profound responsibilities for the well-being of society, something which Gallagher evades through her bizarre description as "exceedingly brief" (12, 98) Smith's elaboration in Book IV of the Wealth of Nations of the responsibilities of government or the financial obligations necessary to fund them. Depending on the edition one is using, that "brief" section is 250-300 pages long. In other words, Smith ignores politics and has no use for it except for all the times he talks about it, and he talks about it a lot. Smith offered some of his most incisive commentary on the nature and purpose of government in several profound passages in The Theory of Moral Setntiments, passages which make a mockery of Gallagher's interpretation. Smith did doubt the motives of rulers, not because of any moral infirmity, but because of proclivities in human nature no one could avoid, proclivities which if manifest would turn government from something beneficial to a source of grievous harm. People admire the lifestyles of the rich and famous less, Smith argues, for their outward trappings than for the ease and convenience of living those trappings signify. What enthralls us about riches and fame is "the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or oeconomy by means of which it is produced" (214). The same impulse "frequently serves to recommend those institutions which tend to promote the public welfare. When a patriot exerts himself for the improvement of any part of the public police, his conduct does not always arise from pure sympaty with the happiness of those who are to reap the benefit of it." Increasing trade and improving police "are noble and magnificent objects." The better they are administered, the better the government will run. We seek to remove obstructions that hinder "the perfection of so beautiful and grand a system." But although all constitutions can be "valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them," not everyone has this end in mind. Some "patriots," motivated by a "certain spirit of system," are much more concerned with seeing their schemes implemented than they are with their potential effects. They act "rather from a view to perfect and improve a certain beautiful and orderly system, than from any immediate sense of feeling of what they suffer or enjoy" (216-7). Public spirit, when it sprang from "love of system" rather than a desire to promote the public good, was to be feared. Smith makes plain that encouraging it can only lead to disaster. "The man of system . . . is apt to be very wise in his own conceit" and is so infatuated with his scheme of government that he finds even the slightest alteration intolerable. He takes no regard to opposition to his plans, except to overwhelm it. What follows are some of the most poignant words in all of moral philosophy, words which demolish Gallagher's mirage of an apolitical Adam Smith: "He [the political man of system] seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which thehand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a priniple of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it." If the principles of the chess-piece and its master coincide, society will be well and prosper. But woe betide the society where they conflict, for there "the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder" (275). This is indeed an argument against political power, but not, as Gallagher has it, against its existence. Smith believed in political authority; he did not believe in how it was being used and to what ends it was being used. There is a world of difference in that distinction. Gallagher's depiction of Smith's "apolitical approach to history and society" (65) falls apart. Smith's approach was profoundly political. Never did he concede "the impotence of political practice and power" (90). Instead, he was convinced that power and practice were no longer suited to the needs of society and had, accordingly, to be readjusted to meet new needs which the old practice could not contemplate. Anyone who bases their interpretation on the absurd claim that "Smith's work is not about the redistribution of political authority, but about the ultimate insignificance of political power" (97) cannot be taken seriously as a Smith scholar. There is something to be said for idiosyncratic and revisionist accounts. After all, they often drive scholarship forward. Gallagher, unfortunately, proves herself in the end to be a woman of system, caring more for the design of her plan than the effects of its execution. Tendentious, misleading, and evasive, her account treats history as a chess-piece she can move at will. But Smith has a principle of motion of his own, and as a result Gallagher's work succumbs to "the highest degree of disorder." Editions consulted: The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: CUP, 2002) The Wealth of Nations, ed. Andrew Skinner (2 vols., London: Penguin Classics, 1999)

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-25 00:00:00 Beth Smith Almost a basic book but indeed with original approach. After all its a book from Cotton and Wilkinson!