This is one of a series of posts developing material read for a Gordon-Conwell course on Social Justice for the efforts of Christ the King Presbyterian Church to reach out to our city. The full index of such posts can be found here. Critical comments are encouraged.
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One of the books I’m currently reading is Miroslav Volf’s Work in the Spirit (Oxford University Press 1991), in which he offers a charismatic theology of work[1] as a subset of life lived in the Spirit, as against a more commonly given vocational theory. I’ll post more on the difference between these two in a later post. For now I want to summarize and comment on his dealings with Adam Smith, continuing the thread begun with Milbank and Sen.
Smith, Volf writes in his second chapter, singled out human work as the source of human wealth: ‘The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life.’[2] But ‘work was not only the main source of economic wealth. It also provided the structure for the whole fabric of society.’ (48) The sociopolitical and intellectual character of society was largely determined by the prevalent modes of production; consequently, work assumed a central position in Smith’s thought, though not without paradox. The relation of society and of the individual to work were misaligned, a tension Volf finds unresolved in Smith’s work. For society, work was a means for achieving happiness for all, which was primarily to be secured through the production of goods for consumption: ‘All the arts, sciences, law and government, wisdom and even virtue itself tend all to this one thing, the providing of meat, drink, payment and lodging for men.’[3] But for the individual, work was a necessary evil, without inherent human dignity and necessarily involving a sacrifice of liberty. Work was primarily a means of generating wealth, and if the distribution of that wealth were inequitable, those who accumulated more would find ways less and less to engage in the necessary evil of work, instead commanding the labor of others. ‘The more wealth one has, the more one will be able to “avoid irksome labour and impose it on others.”[4]‘ (50)
The paradox is partially resolved by noting that the central position that it occupied in Smith’s theory of societal welfare was not an inherent property of work; it would occupy this position only so long as it was the sole means of generating wealth. Thus Volf explains the drive in Smith’s thought to eliminate human labor from the productive process, especially his emphasis on the division of labor. The division of labor was more than a means of making human labor more efficient (and thus less necessary to generate a given level of wealth), however; in addition to its economic significance it held anthropological and sociopolitical signifiance. To the former, Volf believes that Smith reversed Plato’s dictum that essential differences across humans fit them for different occupations, holding instead that where all men were created equal, it was the differences in their activities that separated them in character, talent and virtue. To the latter, Smith believed that the division of labor favored civilized relations among men forced to exchange goods and labor with one another, an example of Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ principle that there exists a harmony between the individual pursuit of self-interest and the maximization of social welfare.
This is not to say that Smith failed to recognize the alienating effects of the division of labor. The majority of the population, he observed, are powerless in their dealings with the wealthy minority that employ their labor; they are exploited and estranged from their true selves by the stupefying effects of performing a single menial task with minimal contribution to a final product. ‘The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations… generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as is possible for a human creature to become. … mutilated and deformed in an… essential part of the character of human nature… all the nobler parts of human character may be, in a great measure, obliterated and extinguished’[5] in the great majority of the people. He offered no solution to this problem, but simply portrayed it as a necessary evil in advanced civilizations. As Sen noted, Smith held that it was incumbent on the members of society to balance the excesses of the free market, and the corresponding inequities in wealth and opportunities for creative, fulfilling work (or leisure time), against the efficiencies to be gained from the market that make possible much of this wealth, and these opportunities, in the first place. But he does not appear to have offered much of a systematic way of thinking about this,[6] and this makes more understandable Milbank’s position that Smith was offering essentially a heterodox theodicy, justifiying the actions of the Invisible Hand who had first instilled in humans the heterogeneous desires[7] that lead the division of labor and market efficiency.
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[1] Volf’s definition of work is ‘honest, purposeful, and methodologically specified social activity whose primary goal is the creation of products of states of affairs that can satisfy the needs of working individuals or their co-creatures, or (if primarily an end it itself) activity that is necessary for acting individuals to satisfy their needs apart from the need for the activity itself.’ (10-11)
[2] Smith, Adam, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, New York: Random House, 1937, p. 734
[3] Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenues and Arms, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896, p. 338
[4] West, E.G., Adam Smith, New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1969, p. 169
[5] Smith, Wealth, p. 734
[6] Neither, of course, did Marx, who is the subject of the rest of Volf’s second chapter; Marx, to the contrary, saw the same tradeoffs – both costs and benefits – identified by Smith and simply concluded that free market capitalism was a bad deal. It is important to note, though, that he did recognize the wealth-generating capacity of capitalism, and held that it was for this very reason a necessary stage in history: one needed a surplus of wealth to have sufficient leisure time to reorganize society along communist lines.
[7] Volf fails to recognize this exception to the extent to which Smith believed that all men are created equal.
[...] Miroslav Volf on Adam Smith [...]