Inequality and Inequality

Inequality and Inequality May 5, 2017

In Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue, Ryan Patrick Hanley explains why Smith considered the “inequality of precommercial societies [to be] infinitely more pernicious than the inequality to be found in commercial society.” He does this by demonstrating “how the conditions that afford the powerful with maximal opportunities to gratify their selfishness are at once the conditions that afford the weak with maximal freedom.”

Feudal, pre-commercial societies offer “minimal opportunities for indulgence,” and so “it is impossible for even the most selfish and unjust man ‘to lay out his whole fortune on himself; the only way he had to dispose of it was to give it out to others.’ But such gifts came with strings attached, as they had the devastating consequence of having ‘rendered the whole of these people dependent on him,’ which gave the lords ‘vast authority’ and enabled them to ‘attain such influence’ over their dependents as to ‘make them in a manner their slaves.’” In this setting “rent came to signify not the value of land but the ‘acknowledgment of their dependence’ . . . . Rent itself, largely paid in food, was then consumed by the rent-payers, leading to a dependence on the landowner ‘for maintenance and every thing they enjoyed,’ with the natural effect of leading to the system of vassalage in war.” 

Pre-commercial inequality was the inequality between benefactor and dependent client. That “uncivilized” inequality was dehumanizing to dependents.

Modern men are as selfish as they ever were, but commercial institutions turn selfishness and inequality to the advantage of the whole: “while selfishness may be constant, by bringing more opportunities for the gratification of such selfishness, commercial society renders selfishness advantageous. Smith’s claim is that, in commercial society, ‘the arts which are now cultivated give him an opportunity of expending his whole stock on himself,’ in turn stimulating the many tradesmen dedicated to the gratification of such desires—tradesmen he calls the ‘ministers of luxury.’” 

Precisely because of the rich man’s fascination with “trinkets and baubles,” and new technologies that broke down “bounds to his vanity or to his affection for his own person,” he facilitates a “revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness.” Commercial society is more equitable, and the inequalities that inevitably continue to exist are inequalities among free men, rather than the inequities of master and slave.


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