Abstract
Given in full, the usually abbreviated title of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) outlines with the clarity characteristic of its author the work’s precisely defined concerns. Identified with a simplicity which the work’s near-thousand pages belies, Wealth of Nations answers the question its title poses in its very first sentence, but in such a way as to suggest the need for the two volumes of further analysis which await the reader. On his opening page, Smith defines the nature of a nation’s wealth as ‘all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes’ and the origin of that wealth as ‘[t]he annual labour of every nation’.1 Stated thus, Smith’s perception that the labour of a nation is also its wealth is plain, but the complexity of what labour might be, the different forms of activity which might constitute it, the relation between the labour of an individual and the wealth of a nation, and so on, becomes evident as the introduction progresses. If Smith’s original statement, that a nation’s wealth consists in its labour, might seem foreclosed, once lines of discussion and analysis are sketched, and the bewilderingly varied range of activities which might be described as forms of labour are described, the term ‘labour’ emerges as an abstraction only possible through an almost wilful forgetting of the variety of material and intellectual practices which it might name. Labour, in this sense, is a collective noun whose analytical value lies precisely in its ability to mediate between, on the one hand, the specificity and differences of labouring acts, and the requisite abstractions of Smith’s economic analyses on the other. It is a term which translates the historical and varied reality of acts of toil, labour and effort into the abstracted form of the significance of those acts within the terms of the political economy which Smith is here writing.
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Notes
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 10. Subsequent references will be abbreviated to WN.
‘The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries: Illustrated by the History of Astronomy’, in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 33–105.
For Mary Poovey, political economy’s production of ‘knowledge’ as a combination of the specific and particular with the general and abstract makes it characteristic of what she identifies as ‘the modern fact’. See her A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (University of Chicago Press, 1998).
See J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 113–15; Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton University Press, 1977).
Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 52.
Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), vol. 1, p. 333.
David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), pp. 269–70.
Christine Battersby, ‘Hume, Newton and the “Hill Called Difficulty”’, in Philosophers of the Enlightenment, ed. S. C. Brown (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 31–55. On Hume’s Newtonianism, see Nicholas Capaldi, David Hume: The Newtonian Philosopher (Boston: Twayne, 1975), and William A. Wallace, Causality and Scientific Explanation, 2 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 40–4. For Hume’s critique of some foundational concepts of Newtonian natural philosophy, see Heimann and McGuire, ‘Newtonian Forces’, p. 263.
Hume, ‘Of the Passions’, in Four Dissertations (London, 1757, repr. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), p. 181.
Hume, Letters, ed. Greig, vol. I, Letter 3, March or April 1734, pp. 12–18. The letter may never have been sent, and its intended recipient is the subject of some conjecture. Greig follows John Hill Burton, author of The Life and Correspondence of David Hume, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1846), in seeing it as addressed to George Cheyne; however, Ernest Mossner suggests that the addressee was John Arbuthnot. See Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘Hume’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 1734: The Biographical Significance’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 7 (1944), 135–52.
My argument in this section has already appeared in similar form in my article, ‘The Physiology of Political Economy: Vitalism and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 63:3 (2002), 465–81.
S. Todd Lowry, ‘The Archaeology of the Circulation Concept in Economic Theory’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974), 429–44; Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
Daniel Defoe, The Review, VIII (16), 1 May 1711.
Adam Smith, The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), no. 161, p. 201.
For Cullen’s important medical practice, see Guenter B. Risse, ‘Doctor William Cullen, Physician, Edinburgh: A Consultative Practice in the Eighteenth Century’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 48 (1974), 338–51. On the role of Cullen’s ‘vitalist’ account of nature as self-healing in his teaching, see Rosalie Stott, ‘Health and Virtue: Or, How to Keep out of Harm’s Way: Lectures on Pathology and Therapeutics by William Cullen c. 1770’, Medical History, 31 (1987), 123–42.
On mechanist natural philosophy and the shift to a vitalist physiology, see Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton University Press, 1970); Theodore M. Brown, ‘The College of Physicians and the Acceptance of Iatromechanism in England, 1665–1695’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 44 (1970), 12–30, and Brown, ‘From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth-Century English Physiology’, Journal of the History of Biology, 7 (1974), 179–216. Steven Shapin discusses the social and institutional factors behind this shift, in ‘Social Uses of Science’, in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge University Press, 1980), 93–139. For changes in medical practice consequent on a rejection of mechanistic theory, see W. F. Bynum, ‘Health, Disease and Medical Care’, in Ferment of Knowledge, ed. Rousseau and Porter, pp. 215–16.
On Whytt, see R. K. French, Robert Whytt, the Soul and Medicine (London: Wellcome Institute, 1969), and French, ‘Sauvages, Whytt and the Motion of the Heart: Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Animism’, Clio Medica, 7 (1972), 35–54.
Whytt’s major work was An Essay on the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions of Animals (1751), also presented to the Society. Other work includes ‘Account of some Experiments made with Opium on Living and Dying Animals’, an attempt to map the relationship of the muscles to the nervous system by demonstrating that opium affects the body via the nerves rather than through the blood, published in the Society’s Essays and Observations, Physical and Literary (1756). A paper by Whytt in the first volume of Essays and Observations (1754), ‘Of the Difference between Respiration and Motion of the Heart in Sleeping and Waking Persons’, examines the action of the heart during the diminished bodily sensibility of sleep. On the history of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society, see Roger L. Emerson, ‘The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, 1737–1747’, British Journal for the History of Science, 12 (1979), 154–91, and Emerson, ‘The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh 1748–1768’, British Journal for the History of Science, 14 (1981), 133–76. On Haller, see Andrew Cunningham, ‘The Pen and the Sword: Recovering the Disciplinary Identity of Physiology and Anatomy before 1800. I: Old Physiology — the Pen’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 33 (2002), 631–65, and Cunningham, ‘Old Anatomy’. On Whytt’s dispute with Haller, see also Cunningham, ‘Old Anatomy’, pp. 67–8.
Mandeville, ‘Remark Y’, in The Fable of the Bees, vol. 1, p. 250.
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© 2012 Catherine Packham
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Packham, C. (2012). Labouring Bodies in Political Economy: Vitalist Physiology and the Body Politic. In: Eighteenth-Century Vitalism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230368392_4
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