Adam Smith and Economic Citizenship

Recent reevaluations of Adam Smith in political philosophy, eighteenth-century studies and economics have tended to pivot on a single claim: despite clichés concerning unfettered markets and unrestrained self-interest, Smith’s oeuvre has always maintained that human beings are naturally social animals. Anyone who has so much as thumbed through The Theory of Moral Sentiments will recognize this claim as true. If such widespread cultural misperceptions do indeed exist, they could only result from reducing Smith’s entire body of work to a single, decontextualized citation from the Wealth of Nations: “[i]t is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest” (29; I.ii). Nonetheless, recent Smith scholarship, whether focusing on his Stoic inheritance, Moral Sentiments’ impact on economic theory, or influences of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson or Rousseau, has gained traction rereading Smith against the cultural myths according to which “Adam Smith” stands as cipher for self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism.¹ Consequently, Smith has reemerged as a peculiar inversion of the former caricature. Rather than shorthand for homo economicus, Adam Smith has been mystically transformed into a theorist of our ineluctable being-in-common. This depiction, too, reads like a caricature, again reducing Smith’s work to a single quote, this time the first words from Moral Sentiments: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it” (60; I.i).² These countervailing myths, which distinctly resemble the nineteenth-century debates clumsily dubbed “das Adam Smith problem,” have found traction again with conservatives, liberals, and Marxists alike, for whom natural human sociability has become something of a new political catechism.³
 
This recent critical turn to Smith’s “natural sociability,” as innocuous as it may at first appear, is not without a host of problems. First and foremost, as this essay argues, it elides from Smith’s work the absolutely central mode of unnatural relations: citizenship. Even if it accepts that human beings are always political creatures – a tradition running from Aristotle’s anthropos zoon politikon physei to Burke’s “art is man’s nature” and social contract theory’s principle adversary – Smith’s work “naturalizes” human relationships, rendering citizenship a superfluous political category. As Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence suggest, the citizen is a historical remnant from republican traditions of antiquity, undoubtedly central to Smith’s humanist education at Glasgow and Oxford, but out of place in the modern global economic order described in the Wealth of Nations. Citizenship, however, does not simply vanish from Smith’s texts. When Smith addresses citizenship head-on, the limitations of “natural” human relationships become all too clear, as does the need for its unnatural double, the citizen. As I will argue, the re-evaluations of Smith’s sympathy, his impartial spectator, and his vague gestures toward Stoic cosmopolitanism appear like so many liberal-humanist pipedreams, if not apologies for the status quo. Most notably, Rothschild, McCloskey and Sen use Smith’s moral philosophical work to justify the ever-increasing inequalities of the market. At best, what they propose is a kinder and gentler capitalism. At worst, their argument is pure cynicism. Imagine seriously arguing that inequalities of the marketplace are always already cushioned by velvet ties of sympathy!
 
Against this liberal humanist resuscitation of Smith’s sympathy, I am interested in reading Smith’s moral philosophy – the seemingly benign categories of sympathy and natural sociability – as a screen displacing the critical issue of citizenship. Behind “natural sociability” lurks the profound implication of Smith’s unsystematic treatment of the unnatural citizen. In what follows, I present Smith’s rejection of the citizen as a consequence of people’s supposed natural disposition for society. As a result, both Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations turn every citizen into a potential refugee, ultimately displacing onto capital all the benefits of cosmopolitan citizenship. It is this line of inquiry that this essay outlines, an opening salvo into demystifying “natural” associations by placing these empty concepts alongside Smith’s overlooked economic theory of citizenship.
 

i. Decline of the Republic and the Rise of Creaturely Life

 
Citizenship is today undeniably a central political battleground precisely because it is haunted by its double; estimates suggest that undocumented residents, les sans papiers, and all of those living in the citizen’s shadow may have already surpassed 30 million people worldwide.⁴ Even if the U.S. has made small gains (such as President Obama’s DACA Act), divisive rhetoric about immigration has sunk to new lows, and anti-immigration legislation has rarely been more draconian. While the country was still reeling from the passage of anti-immigration legislation, Arizona SB 1070, Republican ideologues, especially Kris Kobach, continued to cultivate the so-called “self-deportation” legislation. Passed into law in both Alabama and South Carolina, Kobach’s “self-deportation” vision had also been adopted by the defeated Romney campaign. So-called “self-deportation” relies entirely on making the lives of undocumented residents intolerable, so that living in the United States will seem worse than staying in the hopeless situations people fled. If the Arizona anti-immigration bill essentially transforms the police into an anti-immigration force, Kobach’s proposals go one step further, transforming every “citizen” – every cashier, repairman, as well as potential employer – into an “immigration checkpoint.” If we are naturally social and sympathetic, this legislation clearly stands human nature on its head. No longer is man a wolf to man; it is the citizen one must fear. Now more than ever, America’s economic refugees emerge as the new stateless people, recalling the displaced refugees for whom, as Hannah Arendt argues, the “rights of man” have been revealed as a groundless abstraction without the rights of citizenship. Economic refugees have continually faced the double-bind: mare than the obvious fact that the U.S. economy depends on illegal labor,, the impossible logic of attaining political refugee status is perhaps the most illuminating of refugee’s position. In the latter case, many applications are denied because political refugees are always economic refugees as well, the latter invalidating the former.⁵ These political refugees perfectly capture the modern contradiction of immigration: they are denied political asylum because they also have a body, and therefore are always necessarily economic beings as well.
 
In light of its contemporary importance, it does seem strange that for Smith, citizenship barely warrants being mentioned. It is tempting to pin Smith’s lack of attention to citizenship on the historical fact that his unfinished work on jurisprudence, burned by Smith’s express wish before his death in 1790, may well have contained a more nuanced reflection on this point. To the extent that, as Smith explains in the “Advertisement” to the sixth edition of Moral Sentiments, the Wealth of Nations functions as an inquiry into the government as it concerns the “police, revenue and arms,” one might expect a more thorough discussion of citizenship in another, unfinished work dedicated to the theory of jurisprudence. And yet, Smith’s 1763 lectures on jurisprudence delivered in Glasgow give no such indication. To the contrary, Smith’s spotty thoughts on citizenship are clearly dismissed as of limited importance, especially in the context of large, modern nation-states. Student notes of his lectures, published as Lectures on Jurisprudence, record him as saying:
 

In generall when the citizenship intitles one to peculiar priviledges, family descent (…) the number of citizens being small, gives one a probable chance of being preferred to some office or employment as their number is very large in proportion to that of the number of citizens (…). But in large ones, where this priviledge gives one no other advantage than that of electing or being elected out of a vast number of others, the place of ones [sic] birth generally determines whether or not he is to be accounted a citizen.

(40)

In other words, republican citizenship in a small principality may help one to obtain an administrative position, taking one’s turn at ruling and then at being ruled. In a large nation, as “descent” gives way to merely indicating place of “birth,” the value of citizenship declines. Significantly, the principal reason that someone would care about citizenship in this era before strict immigration laws, worker protections, or modest welfare-state benefits, would be political enfranchisement – which these student notes record with a clear sense of derision: citizenship “gives one no other advantage than that of electing or being elected out of a vast number of others.”

 
In this context, citizenship becomes an empty category, its only value being access to an irrelevant electoral political system. Smith’s position makes sense historically, however, as the importance of politics in the old republican sense of the term has waned in the new globalized, commercial world.⁶ Implicitly, Smith appears to champion what contemporary citizenship theory describes, against the competing communitarian and republican models, as the model of liberal citizenship. This may have seemed self-evident to Smith as Smith’s own historical moment signals the birth of the self-interested liberal citizen whose orientation becomes his own “life, liberty and … happiness,” while politics gives way to political economy. As Herman van Gunsteren points out in his Theory of Citizenship, “Until a hundred years ago, owning property, rather than having a job, was considered the primary condition of citizenship” (103), but once workers were included, insurance and potential labor-power came to function as if it were property.⁷ As a consequence, the workplace and the worker have all but elided active citizenship; the political citizen retreats to work, becoming thereby a passive economic citizen, the very essence of liberal “citizenship.” Here, for Smith, citizenship, no longer tied to the active politics of the republic, has become a category without content. Workers, not citizens, are the inhabitants of the burgeoning industrial age, and the workplace, not the agora, provides their stage.
 
Even while Smith appears to dismiss the importance of citizenship, it nonetheless does play a role in both Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, the implications of which are dramatic. The use of the word “citizenship” in Moral Sentiments is revealing. Twice, both in Parts I and II of his moral philosophical treatise, Smith replaces his standard term, “fellow-creatures,” with a surprising and politically inflected “fellow-citizens” (19; I.III; 8; II.II). In both instances, however, Smith employs “fellow-citizens,” ironically, to point to an unequal relationship between a “superior” and the subordinated citizen-subject, not to describe the mutual respect of co-citizens. In the first instance, Smith designates a superior “nobleman” to function as a model of propriety for subordinate “fellow-citizens,” while in the second a “superior” imposes propriety on his “fellow-citizens” by law. Surprisingly, in both instances, “fellow-citizens” replaces “fellow-creatures” to mark the subordination of the citizen and his presupposed inability to act in such a way that “natural” sympathy prescribes. In fact, here, the citizen is marked out by his inability to act appropriately and needs lessons in the propriety of natural sympathy. And yet this makes perfect sense according to the logic of Moral Sentiments, in which sympathy is entirely contingent on propriety. That is to say, everyone appears to be potentially worthy of sympathy – not, to be sure, of pity, but of simple human relations as such – if and only if they act according to the rules of propriety. Sympathy, in this light, requires a disciplinary society. Otherwise, sympathy breaks down and individuals are cast beyond the pale of human emotions, or at least beyond “our” sympathy. In fact, such people become worse than mere outsiders; they become objects of disgust evoking antipathy. In these two instances, Smith’s “citizen” has not yet internalized the propriety of action that makes “natural” sympathy possible, and he must learn to endure suffering like so many statues of Laocoön who, as Winkelmann explains, makes us “wish that we were able to endure our suffering as well as this great man” (qtd. Lessing 7).
 
Remnants of Smith’s republican citizen emerge again in Part III of Moral Sentiments. Smith introduces this section, entitled “Of the Foundation of Our Judgments Concerning our Own Sentiments and Conduct, and the Sense of Duty,” by saying that “[i]n the two foregoing parts of [Moral Sentiments], I have chiefly considered the origin and foundation of our judgments concerning the sentiments of others. I come now to consider more particularly the origin of those concerning our own” (148; III.i.i). While the first two sections famously articulate a theory of social relations determined by one’s ability (or, as is often the case, inability) to imagine one’s self in the place of another person, then to sympathize with figures in what Smith renders as so many tableaux vivantes, the third section redirects the viewer’s gaze back on himself, thereby taking up the perspective of the “impartial spectator.” This marks a shift from judging spectator to moral actor—or, more accurately, to the moment when one becomes both. Tellingly, Smith here also dismisses, in the most explicit terms of Moral Sentiments, a solitary individual who might live, literally or figuratively, in the isolation imagined by the theorists of the state of nature: “Were it possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character, of the propriety and demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face” (148). Society is the mirror reflecting the moral person back to the individual, even if it is not literally there; the individual can see himself through the eyes of his “fellow-citizens” or the impartial spectator, even when alone. Ultimately Smith insists that, against the skepticism of Bernard Mandeville or Pierre Nicole, not only do we want to appear praise-worthy to our “fellow-creatures,” but we desire to be praise-worthy in actuality as well. Such a distinction is only possible, however, once one becomes both actor and spectator of the drama of one’s own unfolding life.
 
This is a crucial moment in the Moral Sentiments, for two reasons. The first, as David Marshall suggests in The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith and George Eliot, is that here “[i]dentity is itself undermined by the theatrical model which pictures the self as an actor who stands beside himself and represents the characters of both spectator and spectacle” (176).⁸ This is actually what it means to never be without others; rather than sympathetic human relations, Moral Sentiments pushes toward the vaguely Stoic and fully neurotic internalization of social normativity under the guise of “propriety.” Secondly, Smith addresses directly the skeptical critique of social relations, perhaps most notably the version proposed by Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. This skeptical position, everywhere in eighteenth-century moral thought, was associated (and often confused) with Epicureanism.⁹ But in Mandeville’s formulation, which became a touchstone for Smith, Rousseau, Hutchinson, and Kant, civic-minded action results from nothing other than self-interest. According to the Fable of the Bees, asocial man recognizes that the best way to satisfy self-interested desires is to act as if he were civically minded.¹⁰ Smith’s theory of propriety serves as a much better argument against Mandeville’s skepticism than do the more explicit engagements with Mandeville’s work (such as the opening pages of Wealth of Nations, Moral Sentiments’ Part VII, chapter IV “Of Licentious Systems” which he revised continually from the first edition to the end of his life and “Letter to the Edinburgh Review,” in which Smith unconvincingly presents Mandeville as espousing natural sympathy). Smith returns to well-worn territory, to a common place of moral philosophy at least since Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; here, however, the objective is to dispel the skeptical threat that humanity is simply a loose aggregate of self-interest machines. We judge ourselves, Smith insists, according to the same criteria by which we judge the actions of others. We become another to ourselves, in fact, in order to make this possible, adopting the position of the impartial spectator. In this respect, there can be nothing hidden, no secret self-motivated objectives distinguishing the vain “pretentions of the coxcomb” from truly praise-worthy action that is properly motivated.
 
The impact of Smith’s logic becomes clear by way of the opposition between the citizen and the public enemy. Because we supposedly know our own motives, “we dread the thought of doing any thing which can render us the just and proper objects of the hatred and contempt of our fellow-creatures” (154; III.ii.ix), even when nobody else could possibly know. We would ourselves know, by virtue of our ability to imagine what others would say if they did know, the criminal nature of our thoughts and deeds. But if it is criminal thought or action that puts us at odds with our “fellow-creatures,” it is public punishment that ironically sutures the citizenry and its outcast, the criminal, back together:
 

Men of the most detestable characters, who, in the execution of the most dreadful crimes, had taken their measures so coolly as to avoid even the suspicion of guilt, have sometimes been driven, by the horror of their situation, to discover, of their own accord, what no human sagacity could ever have investigated. By acknowledging their guilt, by submitting themselves to the resentment of their offended fellow-citizens, and, by thus satiating that vengeance of which they were sensible that they had become the proper objects, they hoped, by their death to reconcile themselves, at least in their own imagination, to the natural sentiments of mankind.

(155; III. II.xi)

The concept of citizen, here, limits our universal, natural sympathetic “fellow-feeling.” Indeed, Smith’s citizen comes into relief at the moment of the criminal’s exclusion from this category. After committing a crime, guilt puts us at odds with the suddenly clearly defined category of the citizen, with whom the criminal can reunite only by “submitting themselves to the resentment of their offended fellow-citizens.” “By thus satiating that vengeance” of one’s fellow-citizens, citizens who in the context of Smith’s text emerge by virtue of antipathy of resentment and vengeance, one can regain natural sympathy. Capital punishment reconciles man (or “creature,” to use Smith’s language) and citizen. This reconciliation, however, can only be anticipated in the imagination, because in the cold hard light of reality the death penalty must take place. More than anything else, however, Smith’s citizenry takes shape in this bizarre vignette, to paraphrase Carl Schmitt, precisely around the decision on the exception. If natural sympathy is universal, Smith’s citizens appear to draw the line between citizen and criminal, the exclusion overriding (or, underwriting, as the case may be) the universalism of natural sympathy or Stoic cosmopolitanism. Citizens emerge and tighten their ranks, precisely at the moment when they exclude the criminal–or even as they watch his execution.

ii. Constructing the Economic Citizen

 
In the previous section, a reading of Smith’s casual reflections on citizenship makes clear the limits of natural sympathy and, inversely, the need for a much more concrete definition of citizenship. In this section, I want to focus on yet another problem of natural sympathy – its commodification – as an implication of Smith’s unsystematic treatment of the problem of citizenship. Commodified natural relations are not relegated to the political economic formulae of the Wealth of Nations, but emerge in the pages of Moral Sentiments at the very heart of human sympathy itself. At its outset, Moral Sentiments imagines an ambiguous concatenation of theatricality and sympathy as somehow essential for counteracting the “Epicurean” threat posed by “those who are fond of deducing all our sentiments from certain refinements of self-love” (64; III.II.i). Appearances, Smith assures his reader at the commencement of Moral Sentiments, do not lie. As such, after the initial definition of sympathy as the process by which an observer “chang[es] places in the fancy with the sufferer” (61; I.i.i), the reader is presented with a litany of exemplary scenes demanding our sympathy. The list of examples paints a perplexing portrait of this experience: the reader confronts, first, “our brother on the rack,” then “a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person,” and “a dancer on a slack rope,” or “the sores and ulcers which are exposed by the beggars in the street,” culminating in the “heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us” (61). Conjuring a vertiginous world of street performers, beggars who simply function as a locus for “sores and ulcers,” and scenes of inflicted pain, Smith finally leaves the reader in the relative tranquility of the aesthetic domain of the theater or romance. This list already presents something of a hierarchy, juxtaposing inexplicable cruelty with scenes of poverty and public spectacle and, finally, the sentiments of the theater. Indeed, the theater will have been the truth and the end point of all the other examples: aesthetic, pleasurable and, ultimately, commodified. While public punishments may be free and open to the public, theatrical dramas of star-crossed lovers are not.
 
Of course the text claims to be, on the contrary, depicting the bonds forged immediately between individuals, simply relying on “fancy” to bridge the gap between them. At its most basic level, moral sentiments claim to suture humanity in a perfectly symmetrical relation: both, as Smith writes, according to the “great law of Christianity” to “love our neighbor as we love ourselves,” and according to the “great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbor” (17; I.i.v). Against this backdrop, the example of the “real calamity” – such as Smith’s hypothetical drama of a man losing his leg which provides an example of bad drama, one no one would willingly pay to see – proves an exception to the rule. As for drama properly speaking, even if the eighteenth-century British stage had been the focus of much censorious scrutiny, certainly neither ancient nor Elizabethan tragedy lacked physical suffering. Tragic drama, for all its historical differences, appears to be an uninterrupted display of physical suffering, from Oedipus to Titus Andonicus. Smith parries this criticism, stating that “some Greek tragedies attempt to excite compassion, by the representation of the agonies of bodily pain. Philoctetes,” for instance, in Sophocles’s adaptation of the myth, “cries out and faints from the extremity of his suffering” (80; I.ii.i). However, “it is not the pain that interests us, but some other circumstance… not the sore foot, but the solitude, of Philoctetes which affects us, and diffuses over that charming tragedy, that romantic wildness that is so charming to the imagination” (80). Without these attenuating circumstances, physical suffering, in every case, becomes burlesque or simply looks “ridiculous.” Theater should, therefore, model the very propriety that allows neighbors to become fully human objects of sympathetic interest.
 
But art – the theater in particular – appears to play a disproportionate role in Smith’s examples of “natural” sympathy. Moral Sentiments does attempt to ward off the potential difficulty that sympathy may be an aesthetic rather than a moral category by distinguishing intellectual from moral judgments, disinterested curiosity from sympathetic engagement. To this end, Smith writes, “We may judge of the propriety or impropriety of the sentiments of another person by their correspondence or disagreement with our own, upon two different occasions; either, first, when objects which excite them are considered without any peculiar [i.e., particular] relation, either to ourselves or to the person whose sentiments we judge of; or secondly, when they are considered as peculiarly affecting one or the other of us” (70; I.ii.iii.). The first class of judgments, which Smith calls “qualities of taste and good judgment” of the “man of taste,” and which concerning such things as “the beauty of a plain, the greatness of a mountain, the ornaments of a building, the expression of a picture, the composition of a discourse” (70) are disinterested judgments. Aesthetic judgments such as these, ostensibly, are not of terribly great concern because they do not intersect with the moral world, and therefore do not appear to have any direct bearing on social or political relations. In that these judgments are abstracted from the pragmatic concerns of utility, the fact that two people disagree about what is beautiful or sublime will not make them mortal enemies. By contrast with these thoroughly aesthetic judgments – not only clearly “aesthetic” by virtue of references to questions of taste and beauty which inundated the aesthetic treaties of the period but also the “disinterestedness” which Kant will soon pick up as the crucial component of aesthetic judgment – sympathy needs to keep both feet in the world of practical action, the touchstone of moral philosophy since Aristotle’s articulation of phronesis as practical judgment. Here Smith says that moral philosophy and aesthetics must be treated as separate categories, declaring his moral philosophy to be inoculated against the contagion of art.
 
Even so, Smith’s text does precisely the opposite, inverting the relation between theatrical and real worlds, transforming sympathy into a theatrical construction, and moral philosophy into an aesthetic theory. One finds the key precisely in what is now a growing list of the scenes of cruelty in Moral Sentiments. Why then does Smith insist that the scene of real suffering makes for such bad drama and the failure of sympathy? This is the case in the section “Of Passions which take their Origin from the Body,” because one cannot sympathize with another’s physical pain, hunger, or any other affliction grounded in biological existence rather than in symbolic economies of wealth, reputation, honor, etc. This is true, not because “these are the passions that we share in common with the brutes”; instead, the “true cause of the peculiar disgust which we conceive for the appetites of the body when we see them in other men is because we cannot enter into them” because they remain strictly bodily, obtuse, and cannot therefore be part of the symbolic register of the imagination (78; I.ii.i). That is to say, we cannot make them into a tragic drama or an aesthetic object to contemplate in the tranquility of the theater of our imagination. They remain at the register of brute fact.
 
To return to the list of pathetic scenes at the outset of the Theory of Moral Sentiments: following immediately after the often cited example of seeing “our brother on the rack” in the first section of Part I, Smith famously explains that sympathy functions by “changing places in fancy with the sufferer.” As such, “when we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or the arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall we feel it in some measure” (61; I.ii.i). In section I, Part II, just before the apparent digression into the tragedy of the leg, Smith repeats himself virtually verbatim, making however two crucial changes: “If, as I have already observed, I see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg, or the arm, of another person, I naturally shrink and draw back my own leg, or my arm.” Here, not only does Smith exchange pronouns, substituting an “I” for the “we,” but his conclusion also points in an entirely different direction. Sympathy, one learns, remains possible just until the stroke falls. Smith adds the conclusion: “when it does fall, I feel it in some measure… My hurt, however, is, no doubt, excessively slight, and, upon that account, if he makes a violent out-cry, as I cannot go along with him, I never fail to despise him” (79; I.ii.i). At the precise moment that suffering passes from potentiality to actuality, when the sympathetic “we” dissolves into the solipsistic “I,” sympathy, contrary to all expectations, transforms into its opposite, becoming disgust at the scene and even contempt for the sufferer. Sympathy comes to an abrupt halt the moment the decorum of the theater has been broken; the fourth wall between spectator and spectacle reemerges precisely at the point at which it should come crumbling down, and sympathy gives way not to apathy, but to antipathy. The spectator cannot “fail to despise” the sufferer.
 
Smith’s affective world, therefore, diverges between two different registers: sympathy with the imaginative afflictions of the symbolic order and vile disgust with the suffering, physical and abject body that hungers, receives blows and bears wounds. No doubt, the former is a theatrical sympathy, or in Rousseau’s terms, amour proper passing itself off as amour de soi, a theatrical self-interest masquerading as sympathetic fellow-feeling. One can easily imagine the value of Smith’s inquiry, especially as it describes the mechanisms and mediations by which experience of sympathy’s “immediacy” gets produced. Sympathy’s long standing connection to occult promises of direct access to the other, here, stand exposed as so much mysticism. Smith’s moral philosophy, therefore, asks: which objects mediate our affective relations? By contrast to Sen’s and Rothschild’s archeology of modern economics, which returns to some moral philosophical soil, Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests makes precisely the opposite claim concerning the relationship between Smith’s economic work and moral philosophy, stating that Moral Sentiments “paves the way for collapsing […] other passions into the drive for the ‘augmentation of fortune'” and “the drive for economic advantage [which] is no longer autonomous but becomes a mere vehicle for the desire of consideration” (108-9).
 
What sets Hirschman apart from the resuscitation of a so-called “ethics of the marketplace” without a consideration of citizenship is his focus on the perplexing chapters which begin Section III of Part I of Moral Sentiments. Yet even Hirschman’s examination avoids the nucleus of Smith’s sympathy, one binding the market to the theater. It is in this section, “Of the Effects of Prosperity and Adversity upon the Judgment of Mankind with Regards to the Propriety of Action,” that Smith begins his overlooked discussion of the function of sympathy with respect to commercial society. He begins with the relatively modest claim that, even if “our sympathy with sorrow is, in some sense, more universal, than with joy,” what the spectator feels, for precisely the reasons that pain makes for bad theater, “does not, indeed, […] amount to that complete sympathy, to that perfect harmony and correspondence of sentiments which constitutes approbation.”¹¹ At the outset of Moral Sentiments, Smith cautions his reader to hear “sympathy” resonate in its fullest etymological sense and not limit its connotations to feeling another’s sorrow only. Of the OED‘s examples, only two, both later than Smith’s Moral Sentiments, explicitly distinguish sorrow and joy: first, Coleridge’s August 30 th Table-talk of 1833, which states that, “For compassion a human heart suffices: but for full and adequate sympathy with joy, an angel’s only,” and, second, Disraeli’s Endymion, which claims that the “sympathy of sorrow is stronger than the sympathy of prosperity.”¹² By contrast to these examples, however, Smith pushes the definitions of sympathy away from the former – mere “agreement, accord, harmony” – but in precisely the opposite direction from the one pursued by Coleridge and Disraeli. Even if misery provides a “more pungent feeling,” fellow-feelings with pleasurable emotion, according to Moral Sentiments, “approaches much more nearly to the vivacity of what is naturally felt by the people principally concerned” (95; I.i.iii). In retrospect, this seemingly offhand theatrical example reveals its exemplary status; one can sympathize with another’s misery, but only if it is adequately theatrical and, therefore, creates a certain element of pleasure. As Smith states, “there are evidently some principles in [man’s] nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it” (60; I.i). Sympathy with misery, unless already theatrical or aesthetic, remains an impossibility.
 
For Smith’s moral sympathy the divisions between theater and society become indistinct and the question of sympathy, no longer relegated to the space of the literal theater, enters into civil society as a generalized spectacle.¹³ This is true not only because one experiences another’s success with a more accurate “vivacity,” but because one cannot fail to despise the sufferers of “real calamity.” Smith writes: “It is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more entirely with our joy than with our sorrow, that we make a parade of our riches, and conceal our poverty” (99; I.iii.ii). More to the point, it is the “parade of riches” which makes one visible before the eyes of others, while poverty’s condemnation is not simply the want of necessary goods, but one’s disappearance altogether from the scene of public concern. If the man of “rank and distinction” “is observed by all the world,” the poor are “out of the sight of mankind.” As wealth makes an individual a proper subject for sympathy, the spectacle of the suffering of the monarch, in the final instance, is where one can sympathize with physical suffering. Not only does penury make for a much less spectacular display – precisely why we love the useless displays of the palace much more than the utility of the prison – but it also opens onto the biological need or what Hannah Arendt will refer to as the “social problem,” a problem that cannot be aestheticized or transformed into a commoditized spectacle, which is precisely what prevents it from moving into the domain of sympathy. Strikingly, while Smith’s text collapses ethics and wealth, recent criticism has mirrored the movement of the market itself, specifically the latest mode of late-capitalism, with its increasing focus on “ethics” (everywhere, from market coffee to shoes, we see increasing “ethical” commerce and fair trade, while the financial industry remains as invidious as ever). Natural, sympathetic relations are never natural. More than that, they always divide friends from enemies, rich from poor. Artificially contrived antipathy proves to be the truth of natural sympathy.
 

iii. Capital’s Cosmopolitanism

 
If Smith’s oeuvre appears, up to this point, to outline little more that the limitations through which citizenship dismembers the inclusive nature of natural sympathy, this does not mean that Smith presents no positive theory of citizenship at all. It is just that for him the benefits of citizenship apply to what we would call today corporate investment – or simply “capital” – rather than to people, a logic that seems only to have been fully realized in the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision. What little discussion there is of citizenship in The Wealth of Nations is based on the similar logic, the logic of exclusion, now not of impropriety or criminality but of labor. Only a handful of references to citizenship in the Wealth of Nations occur within the context of national defense. As such, the concept of the citizen appears to be deployed by Smith rather cynically as a necessary fiction to generate national identity in time of war; most of his examples refer to the citizen-soldiers of ancient Greece and Rome, especially in Book 5, “Of the Expenses of the Sovereign of Commonwealth.” Smith’s most significant comment on the question of citizenship within The Wealth of Nations is, however, precisely a disavowal of the concept. In Chapter IV, “How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country,” of Book III, Smith writes that “A merchant . . . is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what country carries on his trade; and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together with all its industry which it supports, from one country to another” (346). With this gesture, Smith supplants citizenship by the cosmopolitanism of modern capitalist societies. The notion of citizenship appears anachronistic to the extent that new forms of mobile capital, rather than land, are the foundation of Smith’s vision of the emerging economic-political order.
 
Capital remains free to move from one country to another due to the slightest “trifling disgust.” This is perhaps why Smith, always so attentive to his prose style, here finds himself reaching with an ambiguous expression: “A merchant . . . is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country” (346). On the one hand, this may mean simply something like that a capitalist’s citizenship is of no real importance. Money recognizes no national borders, only the reach of the market. But given the context of this quote, the ambiguity of “not necessarily a citizen” appears to result from another cause. Once one establishes the context, Smith’s reflections on citizenship and cosmopolitanism resonate with an entirely different tenor:
 

The capital, however, that is acquired to any country by commerce and manufactures is all a very precarious and uncertain possession till some part of it has been secured and realized in the cultivation and improvement of its lands. A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade; and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together with it all the industry which it supports, from one country to another. No part of it can be said to belong to any particular country, till it has been spread as it were over the face of that country, either in buildings or in the lasting improvement of lands.

(122)

I find this quote extraordinary for several reasons: First, there is substantial evidence for another way of reading Smith’s equivocation concerning the capitalist as “not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.” Certainly, it is clear that the actual citizenship of an individual with money to invest is of little interest; from Smith’s perspective, capital is economic potential that can take shape virtually anywhere in the world where “the market” has spread and where sufficient division of labor has made investment possible. And yet the cosmopolitan potential of capital must necessarily be realized somewhere, in a particular space, within a particular political order: “capital,” Smith states here, remains “very precarious and uncertain . . . till some part of it has been secured and realized in the cultivation and improvement of its lands.” Further, “no part of [capital] can be said to belong to any particular country, till it has been spread as it were over the face of that country, either in buildings or in the lasting improvement of lands” (346; V.IV.iii). That is to say, capital remains precarious until located in country, at which point it “belongs” to that country. The formerly cosmopolitan capitalist must also belong, at some point, to a country. But now the cosmopolitan logic of capital trumps the local logic of the citizenry.

 
The second aspect of the passage that I find interesting is the elision from this formula of one of the three crucial terms that make up the triumvirate of Smith’s Wealth of Nations: land, capital, and labor. Following immediately after the opening consideration of the division of labor, Smith’s text introduces its three key concepts – land, capital, and labor – as the constituent elements of price, which require rent, interest, and wages. Much of the rest of the text follows the circuitous logic of the interrelation of these three elements. In this respect, the preceding quote specifically addresses the relation between two of these three concepts: land and capital. Again, it is precisely the capitalist who is “not necessarily the citizen of any particular country,” but the missing term here – laborers – appears to have no real bearing in this discussion of the citizen. Even as Smith bemoans the fact that wages are typically pushed as low as possible and often fall below the level of human decency, he does say explicitly, in Chapter VIII (“Wages of Labor”) of Book III, that “the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men” (118). Indeed, man as laboring man appears to have no claim to citizenship precisely because, while clearly situated in a particular location, the laborer remains a mere commodity. If any notion of citizenship appears possible, it is certainly the exclusive domain of the “not necessarily the citizen,” or the capitalist, who begins to belong to a country to the extent that he begins not to work or fight, but to invest “either in buildings or in the lasting improvement of lands.” The unprotected laborer now finds herself or himself subordinated to the cosmopolitan circulation of the new citizen: money itself.
 
What then to make of the resolute choir of recent critics singing Smith’s praises by resituating his legacy within a philosophical, rather than solely economic, tradition? What are we to take from these new readings of Smith, each text making some new apology for the most pernicious myths of Smith’s supposed unqualified support of lassez-faire economic theory, but now civilized, refined, and domesticated by what McCloskey would have us believe are the “bourgeois virtues”? One might recall, as Smith does in the notoriously incomplete section of the Moral Sentiments, that Bernard Mandeville had just decried these precise “virtues” as simply one more tool in self-interest’s arsenal – and among them, sympathy as being particularly effective. Smith’s sorely neglected reflections on the citizen make these recent formulations of Adam Smith an inverted problem, consciously or otherwise, of the relation between sympathy and economics. Rather than being an ethical economics, Smith’s notion of cosmopolitanism – and the lack of any definite citizenship – begins to erode his conception of ethics. It demonstrates that ethics itself becomes a commodity exchanged in the marketplace. Through a notion of “economic citizenship,” Smith insists on the reciprocal relationship between capital and citizenship. Indeed, in the Wealth of Nations, Smiths designates capital as a kind of “world citizenship” or cosmopolitanism that, although fundamentally nation-less and abstract, must eventually manifest in a particular locale, or geography. As Smith reiterates throughout the Wealth of Nations, capital must eventually “cultivate the land”; this concrete intersection of capital and geography is the location of Smith’s citizenship. It is precisely at these locations that one must demand not sympathy, but the rights of citizen-laborer.