On Necessity and Smithian Social Explanation

[This week I am in Minnesota to hang with the excellent faculty and students (and give some talks) at Macalester College, UMN Mankato, and UMN Twin Cities.  So, I may blog less frequently.--ES]

Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (hereafter WN) starts, as the Aristotelian sounding title promises, with a (tentative) causal claim: "THE greatest improvements in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour." (WN 1.1.1) According to Smith, a single cause has a variety of effects, including -- strikingly enough as Craig Smith has emphasized -- on our cognition ("judgment").  After a fuller description of these effects (including the famous pin-factory example), Smith's second chapter, turns to descriving the cause(s) of the division labor:

THIS division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human nature of which no further account can be given; or whether, as seems more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to inquire. (WN 1.2.1)

Now, there is a lot to be said about Smith's account of human propensities (and his bracketing of the further question), but here I focus on the nature of explanation that Smith offers. For, in it we find the template of the dominant form of explanation in Smith's social theory. According to Smith social phenomena (e.g., division of labor), which have social utility,* can be explained by the unforeseen (and unintended) necessary workings of human propensities over time. Stated at this level of generality this will not surprise. Smith thinks that given our original and immediate instincts the propensity to barter and truck will arise eventually (it is “the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence.”) Much ink has been spilled over Smith as a theorist of unintended consequences (and invisible hands, here and here).

But for now I emphasize three related aspects of Smith’s explanatory account here:

1. It is causal (“necessary consequence”). So, regardless of the status of propensities, the persistent triggering of these and their expression can lead to nomological outcomes such that the outcome could not be otherwise.
2. It is a historical explanation. By “historical” I mean to capture three features: (a) that the stable consequence would not have been in “view” (or predictable) to observers of human nature at an early time (and, so not even capable of being intended); (b) that to be a cause here does not require temporal contiguity between the cause and the effect. The same cause(s) can do their work over enormous expanses of time. Of course, this does not require magical historical action at a distance (with temporal gaps between micro-causes); at any given time the relevant propensities of human nature remain the same** and this allows particular kinds of effects to accumulate over time. (Smith makes fun of claims surrounding the “levity and inconstancy of human nature” (WN 1.8.31.)) (c) The explanandum takes place over a very long period of time ("very slow and gradual consequence").
3. Smith’s account requires that after certain consequences become visible to observer-participants they become self-reinforcing. Presumably this self-reinforcement is due to the fact that those that benefit from the cumulative consequences will help prevent backsliding from new social arrangements.  (It may also be aided by the fact that those that do not so benefit will be deprived of various resources to prevent further change.) So, in the long run and in the aggregate, human propensities will produce initially unpredictable, albeit definite and determined outcomes.

Now, (1-3) jointly are characteristic of what I call “Smithian social explanation.” In Smith's hands a lot of important social phenomena fall under this explanation-scheme. For example, Smith uses the scheme to explain:

•The Origin of metallic money in (WN 1.4)

•The division of stock (WN 2.1),

•The natural progress of opulence (WN 3.1),

•The origin justice/morality (WN 5.1.b).

•The origin of cities, agriculture, and civilization (The Theory of Moral Sentiments 4.1.9-10)

 

The scheme has obvious debts to Mandeville, Hume, Kames, and Montesquieu (and more speculatively Spinoza and Toland), but the particulars and the wide application of the scheme are specific to Smith.

 

One surprising consequence, perhaps, of the analysis that I have just offered is that this explanation-scheme does not fit the explanation pattern in the three passages where Smith introduces the invisible hand. In particular, crucially in invisible hand explanations, the stable consequence could have been in "view" to some agents or/and observers. But about that some other time more.

 

Here I just want to note that a lot of the evidence, if any, for Smithian social explanations are going to be buried in the haze of pre-history.  Undoubtedly, this fact led his first biographer, Dugald Stewart to classify Smith's approach as contributions to "conjectural history."*** But Stewart claims that conjectural history at best most provides what we might call a how-possible account: "If the progress delineated in all of them be plausible, it is possible at least, that they may all have been realized; for human affairs never exhibit, in any two instances, a perfect uniformity. But whether they have been realized or no, is often a question of little consequence." (Stewart) For all I know Stewart may be right about this. But it is not Smith's position:  While Smith would acknowledge that human affairs do not exhibit perfect uniformity in two instances, he thinks that certain outcome patterns are "necessary"—presumably as necessary as the mortality of all humans.****

 

*Smith's introduction of utility is striking because it echoes the way justice as a social institution has utility in Hume's scheme. Smith famously argues that Hume's account has no right to appeal to this utility in explaining the origin of the social institution.

**This is compatible with propensities disappearing or being transformed (or with new ones developing).

***I thank Jennifer Smalligan Marušić for letting me read her paper in progress on Stewart and conjectural history.

****David M. Levy has been emphasizing the significance of modality in Smith's thought (see this piece with Sandra J. Peart).

Comments

[Enzo Rossi]

Interesting. Necessity may work for explaining something like the division of labour. Now it seems to me that Smith also uses a similar type of explanation for other phenomena, notably the origin of money. But how do you square this notion of necessity with the observation made by David Graeber (among others) that the historical and anthropological record shows that the origin of money was not a solution to the problem of the simultaneity of needs? If nothing else, conjectural history is a better insurance against future empirical work. Or do you mean necessity just as "this state of affairs had to obtain, no matter how, and here's a simple conjecture of how it may or may not have in fact obtained"? Outcome necessity rather than process necessity, if you like. That would seem to square your view with Stewart's.

Just some idle thoughts, jotted down in haste -- I'm no expert on any of this.

[Eric Schliesser]

A distinction between outcome and process necessity might be useful here. But before I respond, what is process necessity?
In the original post I refer and link to Smith's chapter on the origin of money, so we agree that Smith is using a similar type of explanation.
Graeber's presentation of Smith is subtly misleading (despite the copious quotation) in part by conflating Smith with later text-book views and recent popular self-presentations of economics (in order to create a shared founding myth of the discipline of economics). (Graeber is misleading in other ways, too, about Smith.)
I don't think that Smith's account of the origin of money claims that it is a solution to the (a?) problem of the simultaneity of needs. If it solves a problem in Smith (and Graeber is partially right about this) it is more about solving a problem of exchange.

[Enzo Rossi]

Sorry for being slow in replying. I guess what I had in mind is, very roughly, something like this.

- Outcome necessity = B at Tx iff A at Tx-n. (And say nothing about events in the interval between Tx-n and Tx).

- Process necessity = D at T4 iff C at T3, B at T2, A at T1. (Where there are no relevant intervals between those integers).

So on this account process necessity includes outcome necessity, though I suppose one could tease them apart if the final step in the process is taken to be random or non causal or something like that. And one could also make the iff an if, etc.

You're probably right about Graeber. He certainly bends the classics he talks about. But his point about economics textbooks stands. The economics profession arguably has bet Smith out of shape.