On the Scottish Enlightenment

by Don Boudreaux on April 13, 2009

Here's a letter that I sent recently to the Wall Street Journal:

Bravo to the letter writers who challenge Thomas Frank's denigration of
"eighteenth-century man" (Letters, April 11). The 18th century gave us
history's most momentous advance in the social sciences. I speak here
of the Scottish Enlightenment, led by David Hume and Adam Smith. These
thinkers were the first fully to grasp the fact that complex and
productive social order emerges from – and can emerge only from -
millions upon millions of individual actions of countless persons, each
of whom aims to achieve only very localized goals. These Enlightened
Scots taught us not only that a peaceful and productive society
requires no great planner or overseer, but also that efforts to
enthrone any such planner or overseer inevitably lead to poverty and
tyranny.

Alas, far too many twenty-first century men, such as Mr. Frank, remain insufficiently astute to learn this lesson.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

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brotio

What's a douchbag? And, when did Mierduck start giving spelling lessons?

Daniel Kuehn

Gil -

RE: "You missed my point D. Kuehn. I said the 18th century was important because there was actual action not philosophy (which of course predates the 18th century)."

Fair enough. But I also think you're selling short the philosophy that did go on.

Andrew Duffin

By a strange irony, the country that produced this empowering movement - ie, erm, Scotland - is now at the forefront of those nations denying its truth.

The Scottish economy is now more than 50% in the public sector - a figure hardly seen in Europe since the fall of communism.

Gil

You missed my point D. Kuehn. I said the 18th century was important because there was actual action not philosophy (which of course predates the 18th century).

Daniel Kuehn

Zen -

RE: "Hey Douchbag, the only good thing about your letter is the WSJ had the good sense not to print it."

Shut up, Zen. The more you act like a douchbag yourself to Don, the more skeptical people will be of dissent on this blog - and that won't help anybody.

I have wondered, myself, about how successful your letters to the editor are, Don. I've written about half a dozen in my time and not a single one has been printed. How often do they make it in? It's a great outreach - a lot of economists write columns, but the rapid-response letter to the editor is underutilized, I think.

Daniel Kuehn

Zen -

RE: "Rand was a selfish bitch, nothing more. Had her overly simplistic views of economics been allowed to become the status quo, we would still have illiterate mill girls in textile factories being paid 10 cents for an 18 hour day and being raped by their shift supervisors."

I don't think she was a "selfish bitch", but it is very important to point out that she was not an economist so much as she was a philosopher that thought a lot about the economy. That doesn't on it's face make her irrelevant to economics - but I do think it means we should proceed with caution. Some people can pull off the philosophy to economics transition quite well (Smith, Mill), others less well (Marx). I tend to put Rand in the "less well" category for precisely the reason you state - it's oversimplistic. It seems more like an emotional and philosophical response to Stalinism (and it's very good at that), rather than a serious consideration of economics.

Zen

Hey Douchbag, the only good thing about your letter is the WSJ had the good sense not to print it.

Zen

Rand was a selfish bitch, nothing more. Had her overly simplistic views of economics been allowed to become the status quo, we would still have illiterate mill girls in textile factories being paid 10 cents for an 18 hour day and being raped by their shift supervisors.

Pick another heroine, Mr. Smith, Rand will only leave you seduced and abandoned.

Daniel Kuehn

Gil -

Perhaps "Oligarich Republic" is accurate enough, but I think you're missing the big pucture. The 18th century marked a turning point where the defense of liberty, while embattled and still imperfect, finally became a permanent fixture in human society. You can't write off the Revolution because it established a less than perfect republic - that risks the same overstatement and hyperbole that leads people today to mistakenly claim tht we're on "the road to serfdom".

Mike

Great post, Don.

I wonder if Frank realizes he is the Floyd R. Turbo of the Journal's editorial page.

Gil

No the 18th century wasn't a brilliant time be alive because some writers wrote "the free market should have no intervention" because there are more people alive today who are of that view than in those times. Nor is any period in time 'enlightened' because someone gets half-drunk into the 'philosophical phase' and ask "why can't there be peace in the world?" The reason Libertarians can get a rosy view the 18th century because a certain group of men threw off the shackles of an imperial government and formed a nation that was not a Democratic Republic but an Oligarchic Republic and came the closest to where private land and business owners were, in essence, the government and the markets were relatively free.

Daniel Kuehn

Michael Smith -

RE: "Please continue stating the issues as clearly and fundamentally as possible -- and let those who seek only “non-polarizing” views go elsewhere."

Despite my disagreements with Don, I never thought his MISSION was to polarize debate, as you seem to. If dissent and distinctions are unwelcome here, then Cafe Hayek is reduced to an Austrian cheer squad, with minor skirmishes between "minarcho-" and "anarcho-" libertarians (two new vocab words I've learned since posting here). I think Cafe Hayek is open to dissent and distinction - the goal is not to polarize. I hope my raising disagreements with Don - sometimes harshly worded ones - isn't taken as disrespect for the host or the blog.

Daniel Kuehn

Michael Smith -

RE: "he seeks to evade any discussion of the fundamental principle discovered by the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers -- namely, that freedom is the necessary precondition of a productive society and that government controls and planners inevitably lead to tyranny and poverty. "

Quite the contrary - I'm addressing the fundamental principles directly and arguing that Don is the one confusing non-fundamental disagreements with disagreements on fundamental principles.

RE: "evade the fact that our basic choice is between capitalism and socialism -- between freedom and tyranny - between economic prosperity and economic impoverishment"

At first I thought the problem with many posters on this blog was that they did not understand the concept of tradeoffs... no I realize you guys do understand tradeoffs. What you don't understand is the concept of the margin.

My point is that virtually everyone in this country and this administration choose capitalism over socialism - and that the disagreements are on the margin of specific points of policy in a capitalist economy. I am making the case that the differences are over nuance and not fundamentals. But that isn't an attempt to evade the fundamentals - it's a recognition that nobody is disputing the fundamentals. By conflating the caveats with the fundamentals, you are trivializing the fundamentals.

RE: "Please continue stating the issues as clearly and fundamentally as possible -- and let those who seek only “non-polarizing” views go elsewhere."

This word that I used - "polarizing" - really bothers you... you seem to think I've fallen into some rhetorical deceipt that a well chosen quote from Ayn Rand will reveal. Perhaps I should have substituted it for the word "inaccurate". There's no Randian dispute with me considering Don inaccurate is there?

Michael Smith

Excellent point, Don.

Daniel Kuehn attempts to evade the issue you’ve raised by accusing you of “polarizing” the situation. Here is what Ayn Rand said about the accusation of “polarizing”:

An anti-concept is an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate . . . .

One of today’s fashionable anti-concepts is “polarization.” Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad—undesirable, socially destructive, evil—something that would split the country into irreconcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of “argument from intimidation”: it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would “polarize” the country—which is supposed to make one’s opponents retreat, protesting that they didn’t mean it. Mean—what? . . .

It is doubtful—even in the midst of today’s intellectual decadence—that one could get away with declaring explicitly: “Let us abolish all debate on fundamental principles!” (though some men have tried it). If, however, one declares; “Don’t let us polarize,” and suggests a vague image of warring camps ready to fight (with no mention of the fight’s object), one has a chance to silence the mentally weary. The use of “polarization” as a pejorative term means: the suppression of fundamental principles. Such is the pattern of the function of anti-concepts. From “Credibility and Polarization” in the “Ayn Rand Letter”

Rand’s last paragraph identifies precisely what Daniel Kuehn seeks to do with his accusation of “polarization”: he seeks to evade any discussion of the fundamental principle discovered by the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers -- namely, that freedom is the necessary precondition of a productive society and that government controls and planners inevitably lead to tyranny and poverty.

The whole purpose of denouncing “polarization” and demanding a “nuanced” view is to evade the fact that our basic choice is between capitalism and socialism -- between freedom and tyranny - between economic prosperity and economic impoverishment. The historical record of socialism -- in any of its forms, from communism to fascism to the welfare state -- is so awful and so horrific that the only way to push it is to pretend that one is really pushing something else. And the only way to do that is to prevent any discussion of fundamentals.

A debate on fundamentals -- a thoroughly “polarizing” exposure of exactly what is being advocated by the Obama administration -- is desperately needed. Please continue stating the issues as clearly and fundamentally as possible -- and let those who seek only “non-polarizing” views go elsewhere.

Daniel Kuehn

Sam -

RE: "So, size matters?"

I don't know - you'd have to ask lenders. I imagine it varies by lender. I'm just saying that there is a limit to which a mid-level power that depends on borrowing from it's own citizens can tyrannize those citizens (or else they would lose that line of credit). That was the insight of thinkers who talked about being "a free nation deep in debt". A self-financed bully has no such limitation placed on him.

My point is simply that if you're a rich Chinese banker with a lot of money to invest and you see an economic juggernaut like the United States, it's going to look like a pretty safe investment to you, regardless of how the U.S. treats it's citizens. So in other words, there's a limit to which I buy the "free nation deep in debt" argument, although I'm sure it appleis in many cases.

Douglass North wrote some about this with respect to the founding of the Bank of England - although I think that had much less to do with the relationship with individual liberty.

Sam Grove

The U.S. is such an economic juggernaut that I'm sure it would have no trouble borrowing, no matter what it's position on individual liberties.

So, size matters?

Daniel Kuehn

* is not irresponsibly two-dimensional

Daniel Kuehn

Sam -

I personally think public debt has the potential for good or evil. The argument was that as long as the state depended on private creditors for it's existence their ability to trample on the public's liberties would be limited. An endebted government that overstepped it's bounds would find it harder to borrow. A tyrant that owned property outright and ran a balanced budget had no such constraints and could only be stopped by armed resistence to the tyrant's violent coercion.

And then of course there's the Hamiltonian perspective that proper debt management will build credit - which in and of itself is a fairly pedestrian insight (same logic as to why younger people improve their credit scores by borrowing for school or a car to get lower interest rates when it comes time to purchase a house).

My point being that despite the demonization of Hamilton and others that has gone on, "18th century man" had a much more nuanced position on public debt than the letter-writer let's on... and they were able to hold this nuanced position without abandoning Smith's insight that the government was not a good steward of public lands.

I imagine these insights hold quite true for mid-level powers. The U.S. is such an economic juggernaut that I'm sure it would have no trouble borrowing, no matter what it's position on individual liberties. So I wouldn't count on that logic holding true for the U.S. today. The other difference today is the spectacular dependence on foreign creditors who may have other things in mind than our individual liberties when they lend to the government.

What it means today is a complicated question that is besides my point. My point is simply that we should take care that our idea of the "18th century man" or even our idea of the "18th century liberal" is irresponsible two-dimensional.

Sam Grove

many thinkers considered an active market in government bonds to be an innoculation against tyranny

Were they right?

Did they explain how that worked?

Daniel Kuehn

Ah yes - once again some unemployment insurance reform is tantamount "enthroning an overseer", and anyone who thinks it a good idea is at best "insufficiently astute", and at worst disrespecting the legacy left to us by one of the greatest economists and greatest philosophers of all time. Way to polarize Don! Granted, I'll agree Frank (and for that matter Sanford) unnecessarily polarized things before you even got into the conversation.

I find the first letter in response to Frank very interesting... he has an unusually one-sided view of the way that 18th century liberals understood public debt. Smith's writings about public management of land are obviously a relevant caution... but in terms of the broader 18th century perspective on lending to the government, many thinkers considered an active market in government bonds to be an innoculation against tyranny, rather than a license for it. I also found it funny that the first letter cited Thomas Jefferson as an example of how 18th century man lived within his means (much as I love Jefferson).

STS

Don - the University of Edinburgh has a series of podcasts from 2006 on the Scottish Enlightenment.

http://websiterepository.ed.ac.uk/explore/av/enlightenment2006/discussions.html

Hammer

The double post made that even more perfect, DG!

I suppose adding a third "Perfection again!" would ruin the symetry, but still, excellent!

dg lesvic

Perfection again!

dg lesvic

Perfection again!

MnM

The first two letters hit the nail on the head.

Mr. Frank's piece is subtitled "South Carolina's governor is touchingly naïve", but Mr. Frank does nothing to demonstrate that naivete. Personally, I don't care which way Mr. Frank leans politically, but the least he could do is tell us why he thinks the governor is naive, rather than simply asserting it.

Heck, his column doesn't even have enough meat to sink your teeth into...