The Worldly Philosophers and the War Economy

Abstract

philosophy? Does empire? Do economists have any particular insight into these topics? Do we have any professional obligations when faced with the threats and circumstances of wartime or the rise of imperial pretension? The topic receives little enough attention, yet the philosophical tradition of our discipline is broadly antiwar. This is not, as some suppose, because commerce is inherently a pursuit of the peace loving. Quite to the contrary. As Kunibert Raffer (1987) has shown, trade between the strong and the weak was through history generally forced by the former on the latter typically when the option of pillage was not available. Mercantilism was a doctrine of trade as war by other means. To the mercantilist, the accumulation of surplus served the same purposes as the privateer. But opposition to mercantilism was the hallmark of the first modern economists. Seen in this light, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) is a pro-peace tract. Smith identified the fund of labor as the source of wealth, and he did so in order to undermine the rationale for the pursuit of trade surpluses. Further, by making the distinction between productive and unproductive employments (with soldiery counted among the latter), Smith placed expenditure on the military firmly among those types of spending to be kept as small as possible; he