Smith and Tocqueville on the commercial ethos.

Smith, Brian A.

Students of political economy's intellectual history frequently focus on the laws and institutions that serve as the necessary supports for commercial society. Without denying the insights this approach conveys, such an emphasis generally overlooks some crucial moral and cultural elements that help maintain support for commerce in democratic society. A close reading of Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on the subject suggests another way of thinking about this matter, one that places neither laws nor institutions in the dominant position. (1) Instead, these authors assume that a people's social habits and mores bear incredible importance for the character of their commerce and that this is the deeper ground on which we might sustain economic life. (2) This article explores one aspect of what Smith and Tocqueville saw as the necessary prerequisite for any society that would embrace a commercial ethos.

Both authors suggest that robust commercial life requires that the population willingly accept risk and bear the consequences--for good or ill--of their financial choices. This attitude must necessarily prevail among all those involved in the economic sphere because all participants in commerce face constant uncertainty. Be they factory workers, oceangoing traders, or the owners of businesses, their livelihood depends on a number of factors entirely out of their control. At a minimum, workers' fortunes rise and fall on the continued success of the business they operate within, and their fates rest on the demand for the specific product or service they help produce. (3) Merchants and traders face a different, but no less imposing set of uncertain conditions. Tocqueville describes the extraordinary fortitude of the American sailor who braves incredible dangers and contrasts them to more timid Europeans:

   The European navigator is prudent about venturing out to sea; he
   only does so when the weather is suitable; if any unexpected
   accident happens, he returns to port ... The American, neglecting
   such precautions, braves these dangers; he sets sail while the
   storm is still rumbling; by night as well as by day he spreads full
   sails to the wind; he repairs storm damage as he goes. (4)

The enterprising American merchant-sailor risks enormous physical hardship to accomplish his goal of selling goods more cheaply and more often. Moreover, he and most other participants in commercial life must live with uncertainty about the future--and this takes a psychological toll. (5)

At first glance, we might understand this entrepreneurial spirit as a form of individualism or independence. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, Smith and Tocqueville tie this willingness to embrace the market's fortunes with our choice to actively incur obligations and accept dependence on other people in community. In turn, these relationships better our minds and morals through habits of conversation and association. (6) Without these ties, people lose the solid ground on which to rest while the rest of the world constantly changes. Exceptionally solitary or asocial individuals aside, both authors insist that the typically risk-accepting and self-interested behavior of the market can only persist over the long term among people who maintain salutary bonds of emotional and physical interdependence.

Our culture's tendencies toward liberal individualism lead many of us to assume that any degree of dependence on others makes us akin to slaves. For Smith and Tocqueville, this represents a grave error. They suggest that the ideal of totally autonomous individuality denies many natural human tendencies. We realize our full humanity only in community. (7) Moreover, Smith and Tocqueville show that the sort of isolation radical individualism fosters may lead us directly into another, more dangerous bondage. I argue that both authors show us that the mirror image of healthy interdependence fostered by family, public life, and voluntary association can be found in tutelary dependence on impersonal authorities and institutions. Whenever we shed the healthy restraints of family and community, this form of bondage poses a grave threat to the commercial ethos by undermining these ties.

This argument bears particular importance because of Smith and Tocqueville's common assumption that the market is an associational principle whose proper functioning rests on psychological and moral foundations that it alone cannot renew. Worse still, they observe at many points in their writings that the day-to-day mobility and instability that the market fosters may well erode these foundations. (8)

Both authors endorse a moral psychology based on sympathy. Put simply, our ability to extend moral recognition to others rests on our imaginative capacity to see their plight impartially, as any human being might when they imagine themselves in the actor's position. Neither cares much for abstract moralizing because of their conviction that without a culture supporting moral rules and concrete habits reinforcing moral behavior, people all too easily fall into self-interested solipsism. (9) A few examples from both authors will illustrate this danger.

For Smith, the division of labor in a relatively free commercial environment brings about rapid improvement in the material quality of life for all men, freeing them from old ties to the land, (10) but this set of changes in economic life creates a severe dilemma in that the simple and repetitive operations that occupy the worker's day leave him with "no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention," generally becoming "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." If the everyday bonds of society--that is, our simple conversations and social habits--remain the source of the commercial man's ability to bear the risks of the market, then Smith's belief that an extreme division of labor in industry "renders him ... incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation" bears real importance. (11) Shorn from real conversation, neither the ordinary laborer nor the single-minded trader retains much space to recognize one another's moral importance; for both authors, this solitude abets self-interested solipsism. (12)

Seeing the progress of industry decades later, Tocqueville remarks that the enormous increases in opulence and comfort that commerce fosters "have not been obtained without a necessary cost" in the way the "industrial class, which gives so much impetus to the well-being of others, is thus much more exposed to sudden and irremediable evils." (13) The social movement commercial society fosters leads to a situation where "nobody's position is quite stable" and "a man's interests are limited to those near himself." (14) When tied with the native Cartesianism of democratic and commercial culture, where "each man is narrowly shut up in himself, and from that basis makes the pretension to judge the world," these forces present severe dangers to society. Because of them, men might treat those outside their families with a sort of benign neglect rather than an engaged sympathy--a tendency that I will argue leads directly into the danger of tutelary dependence. (15)

If the means businessmen use to foster commerce undermine the very ethos through which individuals find the strength to bear the market's instability, then a decent political economy must foster the social habits and cultural resources that support enterprise. (16) Stripped to their purest forms, the market forces that both Smith and Tocqueville describe encourage a type of unmoored independence that quickly undermines the energy that drives the system along. When unchecked, this situation leads commercial people into a sleepy dependence on authorities for their security. (17) The seemingly paradoxical alternative both authors present us is not that we should seek more freedom but, rather, that we place increased attention on the ways healthy interdependence actually works to preserve our liberty and prosperity. (18)

I wish to focus on three sets of associations and the manner in which they help maintain the commercial ethos. Each of them bears particular importance because of the way they mitigate the danger of solipsism and help guard individual commercial men against the psychological burden of market-related risk. These include the personal relationships of the family, obligations as public members of a local community, and the value of wider voluntary associations, particularly churches.

In addition to being an important reason for entrepreneurs to work diligently to improve, family forms the bedrock of our ability to embark on the sort of behavior the market demands of those who would succeed. First and perhaps most importantly, families provide constant reinforcement of whatever habits and mores prevail in their corner of society. While this may have both good and ill effects, the wider society has no hope of maintaining decent order without a virtuous foundation in the home. (19) Schools and other associations can help generate the individual security that participants in the market need, but they cannot alone suffice. Moreover, members of well-ordered families help one another from day to day. Even in a society that emphasizes resolute autonomy, family represents an instance where mutual aid and interdependence remains normal and expected. Smith and Tocqueville suggest a number of consequences that follow from this most foundational of associations.

For Smith, perhaps the most essential benefit of family comes by way of its stability. We require sympathy above all other psychological needs. However, our ability to extend this response to those who deserve it comes only from long habit. (20) We need the space carved out by the home because it remains the central place in our lives within which we might be cared for and grow to believe that we deserve this affection. (21) Obviously, market relationships pose a stark contrast to familial ones. Early in Wealth of Nations, Smith observes that commercial man "stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.... But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence alone." (22) While in the market people interest one another by paying for their time, the home normally remains quite different. The family does not so much directly prepare us for market behavior as it does carve out an emotional space where we can find respite from the competitive world.

For this reason, Smith emphasizes the indecency of applying the terms of market relations within the family and the insufficiency of mere justice within its bounds. Rooting his moral theory in sympathy rather than justice, Smith understands the latter in terms of restraint, as an ideal that "is upon most occasions, but a negative virtue, and only hinders us from hurting our neighbor." As a consequence, people may "often fulfill all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing." By contrast, he identifies the family as a space of active benevolence where merely obeying the minimum standards of the law usually commands outright blame. By denying aid to our family, we might not violate any laws but in so doing our reputation and ability to cultivate sympathy in others will likely diminish. (23)

Both authors suggest that the home helps maintain the commercial ethic in two major ways: as a moral restraint and a place of rest. The contrast between domestic benevolence and self-interest in the wider world clarifies our moral obligations. Our sympathies lie close to home and magnify our need to work for the benefit of specific people rather than humanity as a whole. Even though the commercial man's family members enjoy "his warmest affections" and remain the persons "upon whose happiness or misery his conduct must have the greatest influence," Smith does not necessarily see this limitation on sympathy toward the outside world as an incentive to act wrongly toward others. Our social nature makes it difficult to hide who we are and what we do with our lives. He argues that we wish to be the proper object of love and sympathy. A good family actually restrains excesses of self-interest precisely because it reinforces moral behavior through common action and conversation. (24)

While Smith primarily emphasizes the family in general as a moral restraint, both he and Tocqueville note the way family provides a protected space from the worries of the market. He observes that American fortunes are highly unstable, and implies that it is the prudential actions of American wives that keep their families from being likewise unstable. (25) While Smith does not explicitly discuss the importance of equality, both he and Tocqueville highlight aspects of the division of household labor between husbands and wives. Smith claims that men and women naturally tend to act on their sympathies rather differently--women's "humane" actions emphasize caring and emotional support for those close to home and men might be more disposed to action in the outside world. (26) These forms of benevolence most common to the family renew the personal energy and will necessary for the commercial ethic to flourish.

Tocqueville likewise suggests that amidst the upheavals of life in commercial society, women renew the energy of the family, providing a strength and respite for their loved ones that allows them all to face the instability of the market. (27) Today many of us would vehemently disagree with the details of their argument, but this need not lead us to deny that commercial peoples need a family unit that provides respite to allow us to work outside the home. (28) Tocqueville and Smith suggest that markets tend to narrow our sense of interests to ourselves and a few others but that strong family life naturally moderates excesses of self interest. At the same time, both observe the myriad ways our dependence on a spouse and obligations to children renew our capacity to accept risk in the world. The family prepares us for our encounter with the world--and as we shall see below, our public duties and chosen affiliations also reinforce our ability to develop virtues suitable for commercial life.

For both authors, obligations in public life--particularly the involuntary ones--also serve as a kind of salutary interdependence. (29) In commercial societies, this bears particular importance. Commerce thrives on social mobility but it in turn abets rootlessness. Smith observes that city life, or really life in any new locale filled with strangers, creates a situation where the average person sinks into a sort of "obscurity and darkness." (30) Even more than Smith, Tocqueville emphasizes the ways in which modern people would prefer to remain at home, tending their own business rather than the commonweal. Without anyone to care for them or groups with which to associate, they fall into the danger of isolated solipsism. Public duties present one way to draw men out of themselves and connect them to the larger community, even if they are relative newcomers. Such roles engage us in the lives of others, an association we desperately need in order to feel rooted in a community we would rather leave to its own devices. Both Smith and Tocqueville suggest that the wide variety of responsibilities that inhere in citizenship help us stay morally and psychologically capable of dealing with the risks of the market. Both suggest that commercial peoples need grounding in a community because this relationship to the wider world encourages at least two valuable character traits.

First, activity in public life fosters wider sympathy for many people with whom we would not otherwise commonly associate. Without some duty or incentive drawing them out of their private affairs, rootless commercial men will normally leave their fellow citizens alone, neither helping nor harming them. (31) However, participation in juries and the practical administration of the community places us in contact with those more emotionally distant from us and may foster the sorts of sympathy that allow for benevolence among strangers: "By making men pay attention to things other than their own affairs, they combat that individual selfishness which is like rust in society." (32) In curbing egotism, this practice assists the moral life of the family, and for those already actively engaged in public life, reinforces our sense of belonging in a community.

Second, participation in public affairs helps commercial people maintain confidence in their judgment and helps restore certain virtues often lost in the humdrum of work. For both authors, an advanced division of labor begets a narrowing of the mind and a diminished capacity for action outside of established routines: "When a workman has spent a considerable portion of his life in this fashion, his thought is permanently fixed on the object of his daily toil; his body has contracted certain fixed habits which it can never shake off." The central problem here is that "the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments." (33) Both authors suggest that public activity is a means for shaking commercial men out of this torpor.

Tocqueville emphasizes the way juries "teach each individual not to shirk responsibility for his own acts, and without that manly characteristic no political virtue is possible"; even if they do not confer any specialized knowledge of the law, they do however, convey some of the "habits of the judicial mind into every citizen." (34) Although time-consuming, participation expands the individual's confidence in their judgment and reinforces their ability to come together to accomplish their ends. Because of this, Tocqueville suggests that "one may think of political associations as great free schools to which all citizens come to be taught the general theory of association," without which liberty and commerce cannot long survive. (35) Similarly, Smith commends militia service because of the manner in which it opens the mind to new and different forms of activity, forcing the citizen-soldier to apply their character and virtue to the perfection of another art and to contemplate the needs of the whole community. (36) In both cases, this counteracts the winnowing effects of the advanced division of labor by opening additional paths of mental activity. This might give a larger percentage of the population a taste of what members of more elevated professions that encompass a wider range of activity (such as scholars and teachers) enjoy: practices that "necessarily exercise their minds in endless comparisons and combinations, and renders their understandings ... both acute and comprehensive." (37) This mental stimulation and practiced habit of action outside of the norm stands as a reminder of their ability to self-organize and remedies difficulties without help from government--a habit vital to fostering entrepreneurship. (38)

The third sort of salutary interdependence men incur that helps keep them disposed toward the market is that of the wider set of voluntary associations. Associations particularly address the dangers of exhaustion, isolation, and solipsism that threaten the commercial ethos. Tocqueville tells us that without habits of coming together, commercial men easily grow weary of engaging in society and thus lose sight of the practices that foster entrepreneurship. The consequent isolation unmoors him from the moral and psychological supports community provides. As I noted earlier, solipsism opens the door to purely self-interested behavior, which in turn further exacerbates the other dangers. Voluntary association addresses these threats in several concrete ways, as well as some intangible but even more crucial ones.

Where public duties thrust members of a polity into contact with a wide variety of strangers who pursue different private ends, voluntary associations bring citizens who share common goals together to achieve them. Concretely, associations assist their members with various kinds of education and welfare, but they also further reinforce the sense of interdependent individualism that commerce requires to sustain itself. (39) More specifically, Tocqueville remarks on the many ways that voluntary associations reinforce the sort of spirit that commercial men need. In the market, people need habits of self-reliance--or at least reliance on particular people who share common goals and interests. A small charitable group can do things others cannot: "It devotes itself to the greatest miseries, it seeks out misfortune without publicity, and it silently and spontaneously repairs the damage." (40) These groups can mitigate some of the risks inherent in the market; they reinforce commercial society's healthy interdependence while reducing the need to look to the state for additional support. Among the groups that do this, both Tocqueville and Smith point toward religious institutions as the most important.

Smith and Tocqueville place enormous weight on the nature of the church as simultaneously a moral tutor and a powerful support allowing commercial peoples to accept risk. Without certainty in their beliefs, "men are soon frightened by the limitless independence with which they are faced." Constantly pressured by the marketplace, they "are worried and worn out by the constant restlessness of everything."41 We cannot escape religious belief: "It is by a sort of intellectual aberration, and in a way, by doing moral violence to their own nature, that men detach themselves from religious beliefs; an invincible inclination draws them back. Incredulity is an accident; faith is the only permanent state of mankind." (42) Moreover, religious belief cannot simply be limited to the status of a moral teaching, for the point is not so "much to render the people good citizens in this world, as to prepare them for another and better world in a life to come." (43) By emphasizing the general character of faith as a teaching about reality and our utterly dependent place within the cosmos, both authors recognize the importance of religion for creating characters able to bear hardship in the world.

Thus, for both Smith and Tocqueville, the family, public service, and voluntary associations help foster salutary interdependence and carve out moral and psychological space for individuals to maintain a robust economic life driven by innovation and entrepreneurship. Together, they allow us to develop habits of action necessary for commerce. However, when these healthy forms of interdependence fail, both authors note that the spirit of commerce falters--but it does so for reasons students of the market seldom fully recognize. (44) Both Smith and Tocqueville present an intriguing analysis of how this comes about.

The failure to maintain deep associational bonds and faith opens a space where vulnerable, isolated individuals lose the habit of coming together for action. Tocqueville warns that if commercial peoples "did not learn some habits of acting together in the affairs to daily life, civilization itself would be in peril." (45) Ultimately, such peoples find themselves entirely unable to accept political, emotional, or economic risk. (46) Yet, this does not by any means imply that they successfully avoid chance and fortune. Instead, they find themselves in a new position of even deeper dependence than they existed in before, and what is worse, with no way out. Having no group outside their immediate family they can turn to for help, weakened commercial men increasingly turn to powerful individuals and the state to fill this void. (47)

In light of the rapid changes and complexity of commercial society, neither doubts the need for the state to stand above the market; they both inexorably link economics to politics and the laws. After establishing national defense and the rule of law, Smith argues that government's final duty rests in establishing important public institutions and projects that no individual or group could afford or have any incentive to build. (48) Tocqueville claims that as commerce proceeds, two things change: "On the one hand, among these nations, the most insecure class continuously grows. On the other hand, needs infinitely expand and diversify, and the chance of being exposed to some of them becomes more frequent each day." (49) As a matter of defending the commercial republic from political instability, he endorses some provision for aiding those harmed most by the business cycles a free market makes inevitable. (50) Both share a profound concern for the means the state and its agents use in interacting with citizens' economic and social lives--and particularly, the danger that comes from the moral and psychological dispositions the state's actions foster.

While Smith did not foresee the growth of a welfare state, he nonetheless feared the increasing tendency of ideologues to impose grand theoretical systems on politics. Usually driven by an exaggerated, general sentiment of benevolence, this character, a

   man of system ... is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is
   often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan
   of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from
   any part of it.... He 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. (51)

Such ideologues despise the individual motives of private citizens, and, as such, they represent an enormous threat to any private enterprise. In subjecting the laws to their frequently changed plans, they remove the stability and order that commerce so desperately requires. They would in time subsume all private enterprise to the needs of the system, removing "obstructions" from the supposed good of society. (52) In so doing, they could not help but undermine the healthy moral links between benevolent individuals to replace them with the ideal system. However, from his vantage point before the growth of industry and attendant laws to regulate aid to the poor, Smith could only see part of the danger.

In the wake of those historic changes, Tocqueville tells us that the state easily crowds out individual and associational action, and that a failure to see the consequences of poorly structured aid can completely undermine the commercial ethic on each of the levels that I outlined above. First and foremost, he observes that poorly considered benevolence can shatter the family and implies that other perilous unintended consequences can flow from the best of intentions. In England, unwed mothers faced a perverse set of incentives regardless of their partner's circumstances: "The relief granted to them ... exceeds the expenses caused by the infant. So they thrive from their very vices," and continue to bring children into an environment that mandates dependence on the state. (53) Tocqueville and Smith argue that in a well-ordered society, legislators must maximize the ways individual self-interest aligns with the common good. Ill-considered benevolence that harms the family--in this case by encouraging children to be born out of wedlock--erases the principal means by which society passes on moral restraint; at the same time, it models a malign dependency on the state for the generations to come.

Tocqueville identifies another tendency that he thinks tends to undermine political participation in favor of increasing uniformity of public opinion alongside the growth of central power. It is true, Tocqueville writes, that the

   constitution and needs of democratic nations make it inevitable
   that their sovereign power should be more uniform, centralized,
   extensive, and efficient than those of any other people. In the
   nature of things society there is more active and stronger, and the
   individual more subordinate and weaker: society does more and the
   individual less. That is inevitable. (54)

Commercial people will quickly admit the necessity for some significant types of government action in their everyday lives. A few of these that Smith and Tocqueville observe include uniform codes of law, the administration of justice, and the maintenance of roads. While Smith and Tocqueville laud these aspects of governmental centralization, they both recognized the likelihood that such reforms would be accompanied with attempts to centralize the administration of their people's lives in detail. (55) This naturally strips power from localities and, with the loss of power, any interest people might have to participate in local politics. Moreover, administrative centralization cuts off another path to enlarging the sympathies and quality of the commercial man's heart and in turn further undermines the commercial ethos.

Tocqueville observed that his contemporaries thought that as individuals grew proportionally weaker, the state should step in to replace their activity. (56) If the incentives for voluntary associations diminished and the habits of participating in them faded, another great source of commercial vitality might wither and die. (57) His terror rests in the idea that isolated, solipsistic individuals who constantly rebel against the idea they should depend on others might begin to look to the state alone for guidance and for security of their livelihood. He drew the tendency quite starkly:

   The taste for well-being is always increasing and the government
   gets more and more complete control of the sources of that
   well-being. Thus men are following two different roads to
   servitude. The taste for well-being diverts them from taking part
   in the government, and that love of well-being puts them in even
   closer dependence on governments. (58)

He saw the first glimmer of this in the desire for sinecures with the government in what he called "place hunting." There, the isolated society's desire for stable places to rest without engaging in the tumult of the market leads them into seeking appointments in the civil service, creating a permanent constituency forever desiring the expansion of the administration into more and more areas of life. (59)

Policies, social habits, and personal choices that undermine the integrity of family, public obligations to local government, and the vibrancy of voluntary association necessarily diminish the commercial ethos. Without these salutary interdependencies, commercial people lose the strength to undertake risk and seek respite in the only remaining alternative: the state. This creates a vicious dependence, one anathema to the spirit of commerce precisely because it relies on a tutelary administrative state to care for all citizens, one which "likes to see the citizens enjoy themselves, provided they think of nothing but enjoyment." (60) The choice Smith and Tocqueville present to us falls between two extremes. One requires embracing natural forms of interdependence with particular individuals, joining small groups to achieve specific ends, and investing one's time in the administration of local government. The other, by default, evacuates the meaning and power of association and local government, while neutering the power and moral authority of the family. Thus, understood rightly, Smith and Tocqueville encourage us to foster local life without undermining our incentive to take risks, care for ourselves, and save for our future. The challenge, implicit in their writings and of particular resonance for us today is to do all this while remaining mindful of all the ways we really do need the state.

* I would like to thank Ralph Hancock, Joseph Reisert, Sarah Morgan Smith, and the audience at the 2008 New England Political Science Association Conference for their helpful comments.

References

Clark, Henry C. 1992. "Conversation and Moderate Virtue in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments" The Review of Politics 54, no. 2 (Spring).

Den Uyl, Douglas J., and Charles L. Griswold, Jr. 1996. "Adam Smith on Friendship and Love." The Review of Metaphysics 49, no. 3 (March).

Devine, Donald J. 1977. "Adam Smith and the Problem of Justice in a Capitalist Society." The Journal of Legal Studies 6, no. 2 (June).

Fleischacker, Samuel. 1999. A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Henderson, Christine Dunn. 2005. "Plus ca change...: Innovation and the Spirit of Enterprise in America." The Review of Politics 67, no. 4 (Autumn).

Lawler, Peter Augustine. 1995. "Tocqueville on Pride, Interest, and Love." Polity 28, no. 2 (Winter).

Lerner, Ralph. 1979. "Commerce and Character: The Anglo-American as New-Model Man." The William and Mary Quarterly 36, no. 1 (January).

Mathie, William. 1995. "God, Woman, and Morality: The Democratic Family in the New Political Science of Alexis de Tocqueville." The Review of Politics 57, no. 1 (Winter).

Mitchell, Joshua. 1995. The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Newbert, Scott L. 2003. "Realizing the Spirit and Impact of Adam Smith's Capitalism through Entrepreneurship." Journal of Business Ethics 46, no. 3 (September).

Smith, Adam. 1981. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner. 2 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

--. 1984. Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie.

Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1969. Democracy in America. Edited by J. P. Mayer. Translated by George Lawrence. New York: Harper Collins.

--. 1997. Memoir on Pauperism. Translated by Seymour Drescher. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

Brian A. Smith

Assistant Professor

Department of Political Science and Law

Montclair State University

Notes

(1.) Joshua Mitchell, The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 157.

(2.) On the common ideas of Tocqueville and Smith on the commercial society, see Ralph Lerner, "Commerce and Character: The Anglo-American as New-Model Man," The William and Mary Quarterly 36, no. 1 (January 1979): 8-11. On Smith's vision of entrepreneurship, see Scott Newbert, "Realizing the Spirit and Impact of Adam Smith's Capitalism through Entrepreneurship," Journal of Business Ethics 46, no. 3 (September 2003); for an account of some of the issues related to Tocqueville's understanding of trade in society, see Mitchell, Fragility of Freedom, 115-20, 132-10, and 152-61.

(3.) Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols., ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 51-52, 84-87; Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, trans. Seymour Drescher (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 46-47.

(4.) Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper Collins, 1969), 402-3.

(5.) Christine Dunn Henderson, "Plus ga change...: Innovation and the Spirit of Enterprise in America," The Review of Politics 67, no. 4 (Autumn 2005) emphasizes the extraordinary use American entrepreneurs make of time (756-59). This connects to my argument in that the innovations she notes rest on vital psychological traits fostered only by salutary interdependence.

(6.) Henry C. Clark, "Conversation and Moderate Virtue in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments," The Review of Politics 54, no. 2 (Spring 1992), 187; Henderson, "Plus ca change ...," 755.

(7.) Douglas J. Den Uyl and Charles J. Griswold, "Adam Smith on Friendship and Love," The Review of Metaphysics 49, no. 3 (March 1996): 625-26; Peter Augustine Lawler, "Tocqueville on Pride, Interest, and Love," Polity 28, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 227.

(8.) Smith, Inquiry, 795-96; Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, 536-38.

(9.) Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 9-26; Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, 561-67; Samuel Fleischacker, A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 142-43; Den Uyl and Griswold, "Adam Smith on Friendship and Love," 630-31.

(10.) Smith, Inquiry, 13-24; Fleischacker, A Third Concept of Liberty, 156.

(11.) Smith, Inquiry, 782; Clark, "Conversation and Moderate Virtue," 192-98.

(12.) Smith, Inquiry, 267, 637; Smith, Theory, 17.

(13.) Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, 46-47. Echoing Smith and also noting the technical improvements industry brings about, Tocqueville nevertheless remarks that when "the principle of division of labor is ever more completely applied, the workman becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent. The craft improves, the craftsman slips back" (Democracy in America, 556).

(14.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 507.

(15.) Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, 430-34.

(16.) Although she focuses on the issue of innovation, Henderson ("Plus ga change...") develops an important parallel to my argument.

(17.) Tocqueville would emphasize the role egalitarianism and popular sovereignty play in fostering this illusion of autonomy: "Aristocracy links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link.. There are more and more people who. have gained or kept enough wealth and enough understanding to look after their own needs. Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody.... Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart" (Democracy in America, 508). Also see Lawler, "Tocqueville on Pride, Interest, and Love," 225.

(18.) Lawler, "Tocqueville on Pride, Interest, and Love," 218; Mitchell, Fragility of Freedom, 195.

(19.) Clark, "Conversation and Moderate Virtue," 187.

(20.) Smith emphasizes this idea of stability: "Vice is always capricious: virtue only is regular and orderly" (Inquiry, 225).

(21.) Smith, Theory, 113, 219; Den Uyl and Griswold, "Adam Smith on Friendship and

Love," 623-24.

(22.) Smith, Inquiry, 26.

(23.) Smith, Theory, 81-82; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 585; Donald J. Devine, "Adam Smith and the Problem of Justice in a Capitalist Society," The Journal of

Legal Studies 6, no. 2 (June 1977): 400-404.

(24.) Smith, Theory, 113-15, 219-20; Clark, "Conversation and Moderate Virtue," 192-98.

(25.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 593.

(26.) Smith, Theory, 190-91.

(27.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 593-94.

(28.) Lawler, "Tocqueville on Pride, Interest, and Love," 233-34. Mathie rightly suggests that the power of liberal individualism in society complicates this ("God, Woman, and Morality: The Democratic Family in the New Political Science of Alexis de Tocqueville," The Review of Politics 57, no. 1 [Winter 1995]: 11-12).

(29.) Both authors mention a variety of public services ordinary citizens should perform. Tocqueville's description of the Puritan township mentions many of these (Democracy in America, 61-98); Smith's repeated insistence on militia service and other public works echoes many of the same sentiments (Inquiry, 689-788).

(30.) Smith, Inquiry, 795.

(31.) Smith, Theory, 10, 30; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 563-64.

(32.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 274.

(33.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 555; Smith, Inquiry, 782.

(34.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 274.

(35.) Ibid., 522.

(36.) Smith, Inquiry, 697.

(37.) Ibid., 783.

(38.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 162.

(39.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 513-17; Smith, Inquiry, 723, 758-88.

(40.) Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, 69.

(41.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 444.

(42.) Ibid., 297.

(43.) Smith, Inquiry, 788.

(44.) Elsewhere Smith notes that liberty depends on this as well. See Smith, Inquiry, 334 and Fleischacker, A Third Concept of Liberty, 152-53.

(45.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 514.

(46.) Henderson, "Plus ca change...," 767-68.

(47.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 672.

(48.) Smith, Inquiry, 723.

(49.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 50.

(50.) Ibid., 554.

(51.) Smith, Theory, 233-34.

(52.) Ibid., Theory, 234.

(53.) Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism, 67-68.

(54.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 696.

(55.) Smith, Inquiry, 689-816; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 87-98.

(56.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 515.

(57.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 523.

(58.) Ibid., 682-83n8.

(59.) Ibid., 632-34.

(60.) Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 692; Lawler, "Tocqueville on Pride, Interest, and Love," 221.