Self-Interest and the Common Good in Early Modern Philosophy

Abstract

In this chapter, I taxonomize early modern modes of relating self-interest and the common good. I discuss Protestant natural law theory, republicanism, utilitarianism, and—my main focus—Scottish social thought from Adam Smith and others. My aim is twofold. First, historically, I lay out the conceptual field for the early modern relation of self-interest and the common good while giving special attention to Scottish innovations. Second, from a philosophical point of view, I argue that the Scottish theory of the common good offers some of the best conceptual resources for considering the relation of individual and community in present-day large, industrial nation-states and empires. More specifically, I claim that the Scots develop a concept of the common good that is (1) more social and economic than its alternatives, (2) more systemic and less dependent on the psychology and intentions of individuals, and (3) less tied to thick notions of community (including the state) and more amenable to empire. I conclude by bringing out the significance of these claims for our thinking about self-interest, the common good, and community.

1 Introduction

Before I examine eighteenth-century discussions on the relationship between self-interest and the common good, I want to take some time to reflect on some assumptions at work here. Are we sure this distinction between the common good and self-interest has an origin?

Another way to frame this question is to compare the self-interest/common good distinction to things that do and do not have origins in human history. Forks have an origin. So do baseball, farming, stirrups, and monogamy. There are human groups that engaged in those practices and had those technologies and human groups that did not. One can tell a meaningful story about when, how, and why they were adopted or rejected. Alternatively, gender relations do not have an origin among homo sapiens. Nor does fire use or friendship. Histories of those practices and technologies focus on changes over time and across cultures.

Do we have examples of societies in which the distinction of the common good and self-interest is not present? Perhaps the distinction between self-interest and the common good is universal in human communities. A good case is clearly available for self-interest being universal. It has been a widely held view that individuals act in response to their self-interest. We have no good reasons for thinking that paleolithic or Bronze age humans did not possess coherent self-identities and accompanying conceptions of their own interests as distinguished from the interests of others.

Is the concept of a common good universal too? If what we mean by “common good” is an objective demand that stands against self-interest or subjective desire, then it would be universal. After all, if a young boy in New Guinea aims for initiation into a men’s house, for example, he surely understands that his desire to avoid the trials of initiation is irrelevant to whether he can succeed. That is, he appreciates that there is subjective desire (e.g., an interest in avoiding pain) and objective demand (e.g., the requirements of successfully navigating the rituals of initiation). Is not the distinction between self-interest and the common good just a sub-type of the universal distinction between subjective desire and objective demand? If so, why should we think it has an origin among human beings?

But the common good ultimately appears more specific and less universal than an objective demand. The reasons for thinking so are linguistic and social. First, as authors in this collection note, there are histories for the terms expressing the concepts of the common good and self-interest.¹ That earlier eras did not have terms for concepts like the common good does not mean, of course, that they lacked the concepts. The advent of a term, however, indicates that something meaningful is likely happening.

In addition to evidence from written language, we have reasons that originate in social structure for thinking that the distinction between self-interest and the common good may very well have an origin. The common good attaches to a subset of relations of self and group – it is not present in every such relation. In particular, the common good as an objective demand on individuals within a group requires a conception of community as something beyond the individuals within it. The community as something greater than an aggregate of individuals and their interests. Here’s one suggestion for what that might mean: when a community moves beyond something like the “Dunbar number” – that is, beyond an intimate community (roughly 150 people) in which all the members know each other – it becomes an abstraction.² The community is now something that we can begin thinking of as having its own good and as something that makes demands upon us. The distinction between self-interest and the common good does have an origin, then, because a community beyond intimacy has an origin.

Now that we have cleared some ground, let us build upon it. In this chapter, I taxonomize early modern modes of relating self-interest and the common good. I discuss Protestant natural law theory, republicanism, utilitarianism, and – my main focus – Scottish social thought from Adam Smith and others. My aim is twofold. First, historically, I lay out the conceptual field for the early modern relation of self-interest and the common good while giving special attention to Scottish innovations. Second, from a philosophical perspective, I argue that the Scottish theory of the common good offers some of the best conceptual resources for considering the relation of individual and community in present-day large, industrial nation-states and empires. More specifically, I claim that the Scots developed a concept of the common good that is (1) more social and economic than its alternatives, (2) more systemic and less dependent on the psychology and intentions of individuals, and (3) less tied to thick notions of community (including the state) and more amenable to multi-ethnic, global empire. I conclude by bringing out the significance of these claims for our thinking about self-interest, the common good, and community.

2 Protestant Natural Law

Cicero’s famous statement from De Legibus that Salus populi suprema lex esto (“The safety of the people should be the supreme law”) played an oversize role in early modern political theory and argument. The French, for example, cited “necessity” or the safety of the people as the ground for an alliance with the Lutheran Swedes during the Thirty Years War. The public good justified Charles I’s ship money and his seizure of private property independently of parliament’s agreement.³

Invocations of the common good in the early modern period served both to justify and criticize conduct by a sovereign and a sovereign’s representatives. That is, the common good functioned as an evaluative concept and rhetorical device. Politically active members of the ruling oligarchy marshalled the common good to judge alliances or dissent or violence or speech by claiming that those acts harmed or served the common good.

In this period, the Protestant natural law tradition of political thought established by Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, Thomas Hobbes, and others dominated conventional philosophical thought in the universities and informal scholarly communities.⁴ It also put the common good at the heart of natural law, but only in an attenuated sense of it. Pufendorf, who may have been the most influential of all of them, characterized the fundamental law of nature as “That every man ought, as much as in him lies, to preserve and promote society: That is, the Welfare of Mankind”.⁵ In other words, humans are under the obligation of sociability. Pufendorf’s idea of sociability, however, does not express an Aristotelian demand that we realize our social nature because we are not, in fact, naturally social. Rather, humans are incorrigibly passionate, grasping, and prone to antagonism. The obligation to sociability is simply the obligation to live peaceably with our neighbours. When Pufendorf talks about the public welfare or the common good, he means little more than achieving peace and stability, though what the sovereign could do to promote peace (e.g., enforce religious conformity, restrict speech) was much greater than what liberal societies today permit.

In the political realm, the main actor is the sovereign rather than the citizens. The main obligation of the sovereign is to make the public good the supreme law.⁶ But again, the “public good” here is thin, amounting to little more than security and the conditions that make it possible (e.g., religious intolerance). If the sovereign fails in this basic duty of ensuring the public good, then leading members of the state can consider whether this justifies replacing the sovereign.

Pufendorf’s voice was part of a chorus. For example, Gershom Carmichael, the first professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow and key figure in the advent of the Scottish enlightenment, wrote a commentary on Pufendorf and catalogued our duties and rights. He asserted that the first obligation to others is that “each man should promote, so far as he is able, the common good of the whole human race and, so far as it may be consistent with the common good, the particular good of individuals”. The second obligation is that “each man should pursue every man’s interest but especially his own, provided he does no harm to anyone”.⁷

In both Pufendorf’s and Carmichael’s thought (and it would be easy to produce other examples), the central feature of social and political life is the potential for conflict between individuals and their interests. That conflict needs amelioration. Political theory details the jurisprudential structure of right and duty that should condition and cushion social relationships. Political agents – especially the sovereign but also members of the political elite – should direct themselves to serve the common good by limiting that conflict. That social life is unnatural and that our self-interested moral psychology promotes conflict were widely shared stances among the natural lawyers in this tradition.

The Protestant Natural Law tradition built the state out of its component parts – families and individuals. Its moral psychology tended towards the simple and hedonistic. Its great question: how can one create a unity from constituents that often repelled one another and did not naturally act in concert? Its answer: via the sovereign managing and motivating the state’s subjects. The common good is achieved through the catalysis of the sovereign. As an enzyme brings substrates together and orients them so they can generate more complex molecules that make life possible, so too the sovereign brings subjects together to synthesize the state and create the conditions for a flourishing civil society, even if subjects would not create either on their own. In so doing, the sovereign makes a community and promotes the common good of safety and stability that enables the self-interested subjects to build houses, plant fields, and have children without fear.

3 Republicanism

John Pocock influentially argued decades ago that the natural jurisprudential tradition had been overemphasized in histories of early modern political thought. He contended instead that “the central question in Anglophone political theory” from 1688–1776 and beyond was not the jurisprudential one about the respective rights and duties of sovereigns and subjects, but “whether a regime founded on patronage, public debt, and professionalization of the armed forces did not corrupt both governors and governed”.⁸ This expresses the republican or “civic humanist” emphasis on the threat of corruption. That is, the polis breaks apart as its citizens eschew the public good and pursue their own interests in wealth, luxury, and power. The great opponent of corruption is virtue – in particular, the virtue of subordinating self-interest to the common good.

Rousseau’s account of the Spartan mother at the beginning of Emile serves as a paradigm of this style of republican virtue. When the mother nervously asks a helot how the battle has gone, he sympathetically bears the terrible tidings: all five of her sons have been killed. “That’s not what I asked you!” she replies. The helot corrects himself and tells her Sparta has been victorious. The mother goes to the temple to give thanks.⁹ Other memorable expressions of this ethos come from the most famous French paintings of the period, particularly those from David. “The Lictors bring to Brutus the bodies of his sons” and “The Oath of the Horatii” both employ Roman republican models of public-spiritedness and the willingness to sacrifice one’s own life and the lives of one’s intimates to serve the state.¹⁰ While David’s Roman paintings offered French viewers mirrors from the past, his “The Death of Marat” reverses the temporal direction. The depiction of Marat’s body hearkens to the sacrifice of Jesus. What greater instance of the subordination of self-interest to the common good can there be than the crucifixion? And as Jesus gave himself for our sakes, Marat has given himself to France.

In Britain, republican themes were taken up by Country Whig thinkers and controversialists like John Toland, Andrew Fletcher, Charles Davenant, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and, perhaps most famously, Lord Bolingbroke. They warned of the dangers of corruption as reflected in professional standing armies, the monied interests and the national debt that paid for foreign wars. They worried about the loss of public virtue and the weakening of the landed interests that could act as a check on executive power. Their works discuss citizenship (especially as partaking in both ruling and being ruled), humans as political animals, and the importance of virtue for the state – particularly the virtues of frugality and of acting for the public good at the expense of the private. Machiavelli and Harrington were widely cited in these contexts, along with a variety of ancient thinkers and examples (e.g., the Roman and Spartan republics).¹¹

But perhaps the best way to see republicanism manifest in early modern Britain is via the work of the third Earl of Shaftesbury. While Shaftesbury has cosmopolitan Stoic tendencies that should prevent us from naively calling him a republican theorist, he nevertheless created a moral and psychological framework that republican theorists (e.g., other Country Whigs) eagerly modified and embraced and that provided a clear alternative to the jurisprudential tradition.¹²

Shaftesbury is a key figure in the development of eighteenth century British moral philosophy – his main work, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, triggered both admiration and strong critical response.¹³ Though Shaftesbury’s ties to Locke were extraordinarily close (Shaftesbury’s grandfather had been Locke’s great patron, and the young Shaftesbury had been Locke’s pupil), his work develops in reaction to what one finds in Locke, Hobbes, and Pufendorf – and to jurisprudential approaches to morality more generally. In criticizing Locke and putting forth a virtue theory, Shaftesbury wanted to defend the naturalness of morality and to refocus attention on agents (and the system of which they are a part) over acts.¹⁴ The naturalness of morality expresses itself in Shaftesbury’s views on human nature, which differ strongly from Locke’s. Three claims have special relevance for our discussion.

First, we can act from affections that are not self-interested. For Shaftesbury, the neo-Epicurean idea that humans only act in pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain degrades humanity and collapses religion and morality into prudence. Our capacity to act disinterestedly undergirds republican claims about the individual’s relation to the common good. Indeed, this disinterestedness constitutes political virtue in which the citizen – like the Spartan mother – puts aside her interests for the sake of the polis.

Second, contra the jurisprudential tradition, aspirations for the culture of the self extend well beyond sociability and self-management.¹⁵ Instead, Shaftesbury is inspired by ancient Stoicism and Cambridge Platonism to assert that we are capable of moral self-governance and of making ourselves beautiful and virtuous. We make ourselves virtuous in a way akin to how an artist makes a beautiful work of art. We must attend to the overall economy of our social affections and self-directed affections such that we become good for the system(s) of which we are a part. When we do that, our actions and affections achieve a “Beauty and Comeliness”, to which the human heart “cannot possibly remain neutral”.¹⁶

Finally, Shaftesbury’s break from a law-based morality is manifested in his claims that evaluations of character underlay evaluations of actions. The rightness of an act is not determined by the conformity of that act to a law, irrespective of the motive (e.g., self-interest) that secures the conformity, but ultimately by the affection from which the act arises. So, “[w]hatsoever is done thro’ any unequal Affection, is iniquous, wicked, and wrong. If the Affection be equal, sound, and good […] this must necessarily constitute what we call Equity and Right in any Action”.¹⁷ Whether the affections are good or bad in individual cases depends on their relation to the good of the system(s) of which we are a part. Good affections promote an objective harmony in the system.

As Shaftesbury’s response to Locke on human nature clearly shows, the republican tradition rejects the atomist premise of the natural law thinkers. On the republican account, the whole is prior to the part, the polis is prior to the citizen, and the common good is prior to the good of the individual. The republican polis provides its citizens with the opportunity to realize their essential humanity as social and political animals (i.e., human as zōon politikon). But the polis needs more from its citizens than the fear, prudence, and self-management of Hobbesian and Pufendorfian subjects. It requires virtue. In particular, the disinterested virtue of subordinating one’s interests to the good of the homeland, up to and including the sacrifice of one’s life.

4 Utilitarianism

While it thoroughly rejected natural law, utilitarianism nevertheless remained closer to some of the premises of Protestant natural law and of Lockean thought than it did to republican ideas. Utilitarianism had a thicker conception of the common good than natural lawyers and transformed the common good into the standard of the greatest happiness. In so doing, it changed the common good into a cosmopolitan norm, independent from nation states, shared language, culture, nationality, and ethnicity. It also reduces “good” to pleasure and the absence of pain. It is, in that philosophical sense, a hedonist theory. Finally, utilitarianism asserts the ultimate harmony between self-interest and public happiness. Eighteenth-century utilitarians in Britain explain the potential lack of conflict between the happiness of individuals and the general happiness either in religious or non-religious terms. I will give an account of both views.

The “Anglican utilitarians”, who include John Gay, John Brown, Soame Jenyns, Edmund Law, Abraham Tucker, Thomas Rutherforth, and William Paley, developed their views at Cambridge and were strongly influenced by Locke.¹⁸ They defend the thesis that actions are right or wrong depending on whether God has willed them, and since Anglican utilitarians are theological optimists, God’s benevolent nature and creation indicate that he “could have no other Design in creating Mankind than their Happiness”.¹⁹ God’s will, in other words, is that we act so that we promote the happiness of our fellow humans.²⁰

Following Locke, the Anglican utilitarians defend a hedonistic and associationist moral psychology in which we act always in pursuit of our self-interest. Though immediate self-interest and the public happiness can oppose one another (e.g., in cases where the common good demands self-sacrifice), God’s providence eliminates any ultimate conflict between self-interest and the common good because the person who sacrifices himself or herself for the common good will get rewarded after death. That is, God ensures that what is in the public good never truly conflicts with my self-interest. As John Brown put it, the “moral Government of God” will “at length produce a perfect Coincidence between […] virtuous Conduct and the Happiness of every individual”.²¹ “Virtuous conduct” here simply means the conformity of action and affection to the public good and the motive to virtuous conduct is the immediate feeling or prospect of “private Happiness”.²² In other words, self-interest properly understood motivates virtuous action (i.e., action that promotes the general happiness).

God’s providence eliminates the possibility of moral tragedy – that my own interest could conflict with what is best for the general happiness. For this reason, God is necessary for morality according to the Anglican utilitarians. Without God and an afterlife, there is no guarantee that my own interest will be best served by promoting the public happiness. Then one is left to either deny that virtue is in all cases obligatory or contend that the “Good of Mankind is a sufficient Obligation”. “But how can the Good of Mankind”, asks Gay, “be any Obligation to me, when perhaps in particular Cases, such as laying down my Life, or the like, it is contrary to my Happiness?”²³

For utilitarians such as Bentham and James Mill that omit God from their theories, it is the human legislator’s job to coordinate the interests of individuals and of the public. As Bentham describes it, the “business of government is to promote the happiness of the society, by punishing and rewarding”.²⁴ Government has little to do with improving citizens. All it can do is manage and organize the behaviour of individuals through direct legislation (e.g., criminal law and sanction) and through indirect legislation (e.g., an administrative state that incentivizes some behaviours over others). In his Principles of Penal Law, Bentham compares finding a “useful balance” among the passions to the successful use of dykes to irrigate land. He concludes by contending that “the art of constructing dykes consists in not directly opposing the violence of the current, which would carry away every obstacle placed directly in its front”.²⁵

With the proper institutions and incentives established, passions will be productively channelled through the mechanism of self-interest. This embracing of institutional organization and rationalization gets its energy from the early utilitarian acceptance of self-interest as sufficiently dominating human psychology so that all analysis of group interactions, not simply in economics but also in politics and morality, should be elucidated in terms of it. Explaining moral life scientifically required this approach, as they had learned from Helvetius and Locke. The accusation that utilitarianism embodied cold, calculating economic thinking has its source, in good measure, from the promotion of this thesis. There is scarcely any discussion of inculcating virtue in the citizenry because the self-interest of citizens is, contra republicans, always the basis of conduct. There is little interest shown in interiority at all – the external expression of interiority in action is what matters. A smoothly functioning municipal law (determined according to utilitarian principles, naturally) leads to prosperity and to ever-increasing civilization.²⁶

In sum, the Anglican and secular utilitarian traditions in Britain deemphasize the state in favour of the cosmopolis while retaining a hedonistic moral psychology (though one that is less Augustinian, more optimistic, and less needful of coercion for social life to be possible than what one finds in Pufendorf). The utilitarian common good is an aggregation of the good of individuals rather than the good of a determinate community. I owe no more to my countryman than to another human. Impartiality trumps provincial feeling.

This utilitarian approach revolutionizes the ideas of the common and the community in “common good”. Bentham puts the claim bluntly and clearly, as per usual:

The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning of it is often lost. When it has a meaning, it is this. The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is, what? – the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.²⁷

On this deflationary account, the “common” in “common good” now means nothing other than the capacity to experience pleasure and pain. The “community” even extends beyond humanity to all sentient beings. But simple sentience is insufficient as a basis of nation, cooperative action, or loyalty. Being a citizen of a cosmopolis does not satisfy political and social appetites.

5 Scottish Thought

Up to this point, we have seen early modern accounts that emphasize the conflict between self-interest and the common good while presenting different answers for resolving that conflict: the sovereign, the virtue of citizens, and the clever management of the technocrat. The importance of community for each type of theory differs. The natural law sovereign attempts to build and defend a coherent state. The small republican polis faces external threats, while the bigger, wealthier republic must ward against internal threats of corruption. The utilitarian concerns himself with the cosmopolis, and the local community remains something to manage and tolerate in order to achieve aggregate happiness. Finally, we have seen different accounts of the common good. For the utilitarian, it is the happiness of all sentient beings, and the “common” here is simply the capacity to feel pleasure and pain. For the natural lawyer, security constitutes the most fundamental part of the common good – the pessimistic psychology of the natural lawyers allows for little else. The republican emphasizes the shared and robust nature of the community and the public good, while setting a high bar for the disinterested virtue and conduct of citizens required to support them.

There are two key elements to the Scottish account of the common good as elaborated by Ferguson, Smith, Millar, and others. First, economic prosperity becomes a component of the common good.²⁸ This innovation expands the community that can share a good from the polis or state to the empire. Second, the doctrine of spontaneous order emphasizes mechanisms for fostering the common good that are social and systemic more than psychological. Let us examine each of these key elements in more detail, starting with the relation between the common good, mercantilism, and empire.

It has often been noted that the Scottish Enlightenment developed in a province of empire. After the 1707 Act of Union, Scottish political life and many of its political luminaries migrated to London from Edinburgh. By its sheer size, cultural and economic capital, London established the systole and diastole of life throughout the British Isles and, to a lesser extent, throughout the limbs and extremities of the far-flung empire. Hume, Kames, Ferguson, Smith, and Millar spent most of their working lives in secondary and tertiary cities. This ‘province in an empire’ context combines with the developing sophisticated analyses of social institutions and organizations to open up new horizons for the relation of self-interest and common good. What kind of community is possible within an empire? Further, given that community, how does an individual’s self-interest relate to the public good?

These kinds of questions took on special urgency with the unrest in the American colonies. In the very first “fact” submitted to a “candid world” justifying the American colonies independence from Great Britain, King George III is charged with refusing assent to laws “the most wholesome and necessary for the public good”. Adam Smith sympathized with the colonists and saw that the mercantilist system guiding the practice of the British empire was meant to take advantage of the colonies rather than contribute to their public good. The colonies were being exploited by design. The whole mercantilist system depended on exploitation – of slaves, of native peoples, of colonists – and it extended across the globe.

One key component of economic growth in Smith’s analysis is that trade and the division of labour are mutually beneficial. Smith reveals that the exploitative practices of mercantilism, particularly the practices of the centre against the periphery, are self-defeating. Mercantilists mistakenly understood trade as asymmetrically beneficial, that is, as almost always favouring the side that received money rather than the side that received goods or services. This stems from another error – mercantilists overemphasized the importance of gold and silver for the wealth of a nation. These doctrines led mercantilists to favour policies such as tariffs, minimizing national debt, maximizing exports and minimizing imports, and colonization that serves to increase the imperial centre’s supply of hard currency. Mercantilist ideas thereby inject animosity into relations among nations and among parts of an empire. Where, for instance, can one find a common good between a colony and an imperial centre when trade always has a winner and a loser?

Smith’s view of a nation’s wealth as the value of the goods it produces enables both sides of a transaction to contribute to the community’s well-being. Through the division of labour, a nation’s wealth grows. While the benefits of that growing wealth are unevenly distributed – sometimes grotesquely so – the basic needs of citizens get met with more regularity. Moreover, there are many indirect ways in which wealth binds citizens together. For instance, as Pocock describes the Financial Revolution (1688–1756), the Bank of England and national debt were “a series of devices for encouraging the large or small investor to lend capital to the state, investing in its future political stability and strengthening this by the act of investment itself”.²⁹ Rather than linking the citizen to the state via service in a militia, the modern nation state emphasizes the bonds of debt and credit.

To summarize this point: Smith brings economic welfare more centrally into the idea of the common good and provides a new causal story that shows how economic prosperity arises – a story that undermines the basis for mercantilism and provides a new ground for conceiving of the common good of diverse peoples, such as those in the British empire. Though the Scots were generally anti-imperialistic – often vehemently – they nevertheless articulate goods that can tie an empire together.

The second key element of the Scottish analysis of the common good is that the mechanism whereby a community achieves that good is fundamentally social. The common good is not, contra the republican view, a product of the virtue of individual citizens, who, like the Spartan mother, subordinate self-interest to the good of the polis. Nor is the common good the successful realization of a wise legislator’s plan as Benthamite utilitarianism supposes. Rather, it arises spontaneously through the self-interested actions of many individuals that are coordinated – not by a plan or by an individual designer, but by various signals sent from each to each. This is a novel development in conceiving the relation between self-interest and the common good. It treats the common good as resulting from the dynamics of a system of self-interested conduct. It is a new model of the common good that developed along with the new field of political economy and what we would call the social sciences more broadly.

The most obvious predecessor and influence on the development of Scottish ideas about spontaneous order is Mandeville. Mandeville’s controversial claim that private vices often produce public benefits scandalized many in the early eighteenth century. Mandeville’s idea was as follows. Humans naturally prefer their own good to the good of others and virtue requires self-denial. Humans are not naturally sociable or virtuous.

The Chief Thing, therefore, which Lawgivers and other wise Men, that have laboured for the Establishment of Society, have endeavour’d, has been to make the People they were to govern, believe, that it was more beneficial for every Body to conquer than indulge his Appetites, and much better to mind the Publick than what seem’d his private Interest.³⁰

How can lawgivers get citizens to prefer the public interest over self-interest? The only way is to show them “an Equivalent to be enjoy’d as a Reward for the Violence, which […] they of necessity must commit upon themselves”.³¹ The reward for this self-directed violence is praise and honour, and the penalty associated with ignoring the public good is contempt and shame (this solution is akin to Gay’s use of associationism to account for the ability of individuals to act in accordance with the utilitarian criterion of the public good). With the use of these tools, legislators make a creature that is ill-suited for social life into one that is “useful” and “tractable”.³² This is the process of civilization where “Man […] is become a Disciplin’d Creature, that can find his own Ends in Labouring for others, and where under one Head or other Form of Government each Member is render’d Subservient to the Whole”.³³ Through the “Witchcraft of Flattery” and the threat of punishment, the politician engineers a citizenry that can live peacefully together. As this account of getting self-interest to discipline itself shows, Mandeville shares with Pufendorf, Locke, and other natural lawyers a pessimistic psychology.

While self-interest can be redirected to promote occasional self-sacrifice and consideration of the common good, Mandeville emphasizes that the extent of this redirection is limited. Mandeville’s great insight, however, is the claim that we do not need individual virtue and self-abnegation to promote the public interest. His anti-republican, anti-Country party doctrine is that virtue weakens and vice strengthens the state. Virtues rarely “employ any Hands, and therefore they may render a small Nation Good, but they can never make a Great one”.³⁴ The pursuit of some kinds of vice – such as vanity, covetousness, and ambition – ends up promoting the public good. While famously attacking Shaftesbury (“A Search into the Nature of Society”), Mandeville notes that the “nature of Society” is such that it is “not the Good and Amiable, but the Bad and Hateful Qualities of Man, his Imperfections and the want of Excellencies which […] are the first Causes that made Man sociable”.³⁵ Even more provocatively, he states that

Evil in this World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that makes us sociable Creatures, the solid Basis, the Life and Support of all Trades and Employments without Exception: That there we must look for the true Origin of all Arts and Sciences, and the Moment Evil ceases, the Society must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved.³⁶

Through their vices, the “sensual Courtier”, “Fickle Strumpet”, “haughty Dutchess”, and “profuse Rake” all provide “an honest Livelihood to the vast Multitudes of working poor”.³⁷ The summary of Mandeville’s message is that “Private Vices by the dexterous Management of a skilful Politician may be turned into Publick Benefits”.³⁸ His witty broadside articulated the governing ideas of many of the hard-nosed, Court-allied citizens in the century.

In Mandeville, then, we see the seeds of the Scottish doctrine wrapped in an insightfully puckish (or shockingly decadent) theory. In his An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Adam Ferguson was one of the first to develop the core of Mandeville’s ideas into the doctrine of spontaneous order. As Ferguson famously expressed the idea (in a wording later used by Hayek in a paper title), the institutions or “establishments” of civil society are the “result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”.³⁹ Cotton markets, English syntax, norms for getting on and off an elevator or subway car – all of these are examples of institutions that arise spontaneously from the undirected actions of individuals. These individuals rely on signals such as prices and confused looks to regulate those actions. But there is no central legislative body or designer that manages the system.

Influenced by Butler, Hutcheson, Hume and others, Smith rejected Mandeville’s hedonistic moral psychology. But while he emphasized the immorality of Mandeville’s psychology and moral theory, it is clear that he and other Scots took a great deal from Mandeville’s analysis of social and political life – particularly concerning the relation of self-interest and the common good. The most famous expression of a Mandevillian moment comes from Smith’s use of the phrase “invisible hand”. In the Wealth of Nations, he notes that merchants, by pursuing their own interests and trying to maximize the value of their work and capital, end up promoting markets and thereby the “publick interest” as much or more than they would have if they had explicitly worked for the common good. Unlike in the case of the Spartan mother, the merchant promotes the common good even though he is indifferent to it. Whether he has good intentions or possesses virtue is largely immaterial to his capacity to produce benefits for the public. It also does not matter whether he shares a sense of community with others. They need not have the same heroes or a shared history or even speak a shared language. By simply working for his own self-interest, the merchant serves others’ interests. Admittedly, it is ‘self-interest, public benefits’ rather than ‘private vice, public benefits,’ but the parallels are important.

In Smith’s other use of the phrase “invisible hand” in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, he describes a “proud and unfeeling landlord” who “in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest that grows” upon the fields, but who nevertheless through the economic stimulation that his consumption triggers, ends up dividing with the poor “nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been made if the earth had been divided into equal portions”. The landlord does not intend this distribution. He does not aim for beneficence, nor does he know that he is advancing the “interest of the society”. He is only intending his “own conveniency”.⁴⁰

This way of thinking about the common good and self-interest was part of a larger shift towards systems over individuals in social and political thought. With the financial revolution, the growth of national debt and systems of credit, the growing importance and sophistication of monetary and fiscal policy, the size and expense of standing armies, the advent of factories and the birth of the Industrial Revolution, the nature of politics and government changed significantly over the course of the eighteenth century. This put pressure on theorizing about politics. At the end of our period, this was reflected in the reconsideration of political jurisprudence and its importance for moral philosophy. While the American and French Revolutions kept the relations of magistrate and subject in the foreground for a time, philosophers acknowledged that Pufendorfian ideas were not capturing essential features of the exercise of political authority. In particular, they recognized that some of the key features of political life had little to do with relations between individuals, like that between magistrate and subject. Rather, the state – and its common good – was becoming larger, more impersonal, and more concerned with systemic economic issues. This is the transition from the Protestant Natural Law tradition of political jurisprudence to what Foucault called the “science of government”. Ferguson, Smith, Millar, and other Scots most clearly express this change.

6 Concluding Reflections

We have surveyed the most notable early modern philosophical theories on the common good, self-interest, and their relations. What can we take away from this survey? In conclusion, I highlight three points.

First, among the theorists we have examined, there are profound differences concerning the content of the common good – differences that express distinct ideas about political communities. What kinds of goods do members of a community share that leaders should foster? The natural lawyers, many of whom lived through religious and civil wars, emphasized the blessings of peace and stability. Utilitarians identified pleasure and the absence of pain as the good that humans held in common. Political communities were simply instruments for promoting that common good. Republicanism developed from the Greek and Italian polis and expressed a richer idea of the community and the citizenry that holds that community together. The common good for the republic is based on sacrifice, history, and cultural tradition. Scottish theorists foregrounded material prosperity in the content of the common good, analysed the causes of economic growth, and thereby made it easier to think of a common good that an empire can share.

These differences regarding self-interest and the common good raise numerous questions. For instance, how robust must common goods be for a community to coalesce around them and be maintained by them? Is security and prosperity enough? Or does the political community require less rational and more ideological bases of allegiance to keep itself together? How much does the nation need to access the unconscious of its citizens through symbol, imagery, and story, for example? Does community membership typically require shared heroes and villains? Is a common story the most important common good – a story that tells what it means to be Romanian or Dutch or a New Yorker? Of the early modern accounts that we have surveyed, only republicanism takes seriously the a-rational or irrational bases of community and the common good. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the paradigmatic republican community is small.

Second, the Scots – and especially Smith – identify new relations between self-interest and the common good and analyze them as mediated by systems and organizations. This makes their theory particularly relevant for considering the common good and its relation to self-interest in the context of the modern industrial state, where systems such as markets and bureaucratic organizations such as the firm and the government determine large swaths of people’s lives. This systemic and social approach to the common good deemphasizes individuals and their psychologies, characters, and intentions and concentrates instead on social dynamics. For good and ill, it shifts the focus from individuals to the interactions of individuals and the coordination of their activities (e.g., via market signals).

This attention on systems and organizations rather than on individuals also changed the nature of political theorizing. It led to a move away from jurisprudence towards modern social science. This manifests among the social theory of the Scots and develops into present-day economics and sociology.

Finally, if Scottish thinkers reveal the social dynamics that underlie the relations of individuals to communities, then we might also wonder if the social nature of the “self” in “self-interest” has been sufficiently appreciated. How and in what cases does the individual actually relate to the community as an individual, rather than as a member of a group – family, caste, clan, class, religion, political faction?

The early modern theorists often acknowledge that social identities frequently trump our identities as individuals in our interactions with the community. The clearest example of prioritizing the group over the individual in early modern political thought arises in the very constitution of the state. On Locke’s account, for instance, “Conjugal Society” is the “first Society”, and political society is not a voluntary agreement among individuals but a voluntary agreement among heads of families. So too for Pufendorf. And as Carmichael puts it, “Because husbands are the heads of their families, civil societies are usually constituted by such heads of families not vice versa. The prerogatives of husbands are therefore older than civil societies”.⁴¹ The majority of a nation’s subjects on this account did not relate to the community as individuals in the realm of politics.

Children and women also had restrictions in property ownership and employment and could only act economically via the male head of the family. Even more generally, rights and obligations vis-à-vis the community were often determined by group membership (e.g., guild, clan, class, religion) rather than through individual identity. This highlights the problem of how to model the normative elements that are most important in political and social discourse.

We began by thinking about the concept of the common good and asking what kinds of histories we can write about it. We end, then, with the issue of what kind of meaningful interactions an individual has with a community rather than with intermediate groups and organizations. That is, we end by raising the question of how useful the distinction between self-interest and the common good continues to be given the constitution of self and community in the modern industrial state.