Cosmopolitical Economy: Exchangeable Value and National Development in Adam Smith and Maria Edgeworth

Abstract

All constitutions of government ... are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. --The Theory of Moral Sentiments No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. --The Wealth of Nations IS CLASSICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, AS DEVELOPED AND EXPOUNDED BY Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, a mode of imperialism? Recent work by Katie Trumpener and others points us in just such a direction. Trumpener, for example, argues, with respect to the English colonization of the Celtic periphery of Britain, that imperial governance and movements for economic modernization went hand in hand in practice, and as matters of policy, and were reflected as such in the cultural debates surrounding a range of political positions in Scotland, Ireland, and England. (1) It is my contention, however, that an even stronger argument can be made: imperial governance and economic modernization go hand in hand on a more general level than the mere practicalities of imperial relations and the modes of national representation such as the survey or the tour that those practicalities give rise to; they go hand in hand in the very principles of Smithian economics as such--even, ultimately, in Smith's notion of exchange. Like other participants in the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith subscribes to notions of social and cultural development; indeed, he frequently draws on what he considers to be the barbarism and relative underdevelopment of the Scottish highlands for examples of the social forms preceding modern English society. But what drives these larger social and cultural developments is, for Smith, the degree to which free commercial relations have been allowed to prevail over other, particularly feudal, forms. The expansion of the means of subsistence by way of the freedom of individuals to engage in voluntary acts of exchange is the very hallmark, for Smith, of modern society, and nations are to be found in hierarchical social and political relationships with each other above all because they are at different stages of a common development toward commercial liberty. (2) Yet despite the considerable reach of Smith's theory of exchange, his importance to the political dimensions of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century literature has not received the critical attention it deserves. (3) Literary critics, social historians, and political theorists have focused, naturally enough, on the cultural and social implications of the great political texts of the late eighteenth century, especially the works of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin. (4) In the study of Jane Austen, for example, influential interpretations of the social meaning of her novels by Marilyn Butler and Claudia Johnson have concentrated on her relationship to Jacobin and anti-Jacobin tendencies in English literature after 1790. (5) Yet Smith's great economic text was at least as influential on cultural and social questions at the time, and perhaps more influential over time, than the explicitly political texts that followed it. Creative writers from William Wordsworth to Charles Dickens took clear positions on the premises of political economy as presented by Smith, his defenders, and his inheritors. Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, for example, are both, broadly speaking, conservative thinkers, but whereas Austen resisted Smithian ideas, Edgeworth promoted them. (6) Conversely, many of those who vehemently disagreed over such political issues as the perfectibility of society or the morality of monarchy concurred on the need to surmount the inheritance of Gothic custumary and modernize the British economy along broadly Smithian lines. (7) These examples illustrate that, in Britain circa 1800, advocacy of economic modernization in no way entailed advocacy of political modernization, and adherents and opponents of Smith could be found among both progressives and conservatives. …