Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.” Then he repeats Hobbes’s argument for the necessity of strong government: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”32 In the absence of the wisdom of angels, the Constitution set up intricate rules for establishing the main branches of government — the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. Then it clearly defined and limited the powers of each, so the net effect would be a pleasingly mechanical, apparently scientific system of checks and balances, which would automatically convert competing selfish interests into the best possible outcome. The machinery of government would make wisdom redundant.
In the eighteenth century, in the aftermath of an order based on a landed aristocracy and a landless peasantry, it must have seemed easier to accept as truth the Lockean assumption that private property was fundamental to human freedom and that wealth would constitute a minimal measure of wisdom and worthiness to govern. In fact, in 1787 most states had property qualifications for voting and holding office, and this probably excluded at least a third of the white male population. Women, Native Americans, and slaves were of course also excluded.33 Those who attended the convention — white, Protestant, property-owning men — could reasonably assume a larger moral consensus than we can today. In fairness, many of the founding fathers were also imbued with a high-minded sense of service, and none would have been fully satisfied with wealth as a measure of wisdom. But today, when the top 10 percent of the American population owns over 70 percent of the nation’s wealth, and where elections are determined by increasingly unregulated and undisclosed financial contributions to media campaigns, we can see the Madisonian formula for what it always was — wishful thinking. It succeeded in replacing an aristocracy of birth with an aristocracy of avarice — the rule of the wealthy.
Instead of seeking a politics that nurtures love of wisdom, the Federalists produced a government that would mitigate the effects of selfishness. The Constitution offered a mechanical arrangement of competing powers and interests intended to produce the best possible collective outcome for all. It provided a moral justification for shifting attention away from the community to the self-interested individual. The reductio ad absurdum of this approach is the notion — attributed to the conservative former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher — that “there is no such thing as society; there are [only] individual men and women and… families.” The political culture focused on rights and freedoms and said almost nothing about the individual’s responsibilities and duties toward the community — to the good of the social whole. The pursuit of wisdom was made irrelevant to government.
The Free-Market Machine:Short-Sighted, Narrow-Minded, and Selfish
If modern government was to have only the most minimal role in restricting the freedoms of individuals and providing for the common good, what would regulate the vast arena of economic activity, ensuring the optimum distribution of goods and services? The answer came from Adam Smith, the brilliant Scottish economist and philosopher.
Smith’s central work, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, has been celebrated as having more of an impact in transforming the world than the Bible. Although Madison never mentions Smith in The Federalist, his formula for government assumes the truth of Smith’s simple reasoning. Smith claimed to identify a natural law of the market that would automatically convert self-interest into public benefit. He reasoned that in a situation of complete freedom, where all relevant knowledge was available, competition between self-interested individuals, seeking only their own profit, would produce an outcome benefiting all. If every transaction between buyer and seller was voluntary, then, ipso facto, no exchange would take place unless both parties agreed and presumably benefited. It was as if there was an invisible hand, the hand of God, that operated in a free market guiding individuals who intended only their own gain to promote an end — the public good — that was no part of their intention. No governmental coercion, no violation of freedom, and no concern for the good of the whole would be required to produce the cooperation necessary for all to benefit. As Smith put it: “It is not through the benevolence of the baker that we get our bread.” He added that he had “never known much good to come from those who affected to trade for the public good.”
The irony of Smith’s genius is that he provided a philosophical and moral justification for the free market that inadvertently resulted in the elimination of philosophical and moral reasoning from economic life. Its impact on economics was equivalent to the effect of Cartesian dualism on metaphysics: “Don’t do what I do. Do what I tell you to!”
Smith pointed out that the market mechanism ensured that, not only would both parties to a transaction benefit, but society as a whole would be served by an overall increase in the “wealth of the nation.” He gave the famous example of the pin factory to show how the profit motive would impel a division of labor producing dramatic efficiencies in boosting production. Where one man working alone, without machinery, could barely make one pin a day, division of labor enabled ten men with machinery, each doing one piece of the job, to make a total of around forty-eight thousand pins a day, at forty-eight hundred each. “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper.”34
The logic was compelling and the practice conclusive. The quickest way to boost profits was to grow the size of the business so as to take advantage of economies of scale: invest in machinery, institute a division of labor, buy raw material more cheaply in bulk, and save on bulk distribution. Labor would be kept cheap so long as the population kept growing, which it would as a consequence of the steady improvement in material existence. Increased profits would feed back into a spiral of continually growing productivity.
Smith’s insight brought together the mechanics of Cartesian-Newtonian science, the profit motive, and minimal government in the explosive growth of the mechanized production line. The factory soon became one of the defining institutions of modernity, bringing together raw materials, machinery, and the masses of workers displaced from the countryside. The results were rapid urbanization together with near-miraculous quantities of cheap commodities.35 City life and shopping reinforced in the most conspicuous way the power, truth, and goodness of the mechanical, materialistic metaphysics of modernity.
Certainly, the rise of America’s cities, especially by the late nineteenth century, provided opportunities for cultural creativity, but it also brought overcrowding, exploitation, pollution, and a life chained to the clockwork routine of the production line. The heaviest price was paid in the invisible currency of res cogitans — psychology. The production line subjected the working populations to a life-world defined by the division of labor, fragmentation, and hyperspecialization implicit in Descartes’s method. Under the feudal system, the individual artisan — fashioning, say, a bow, barrel, or sword — would gather raw materials and control much of the pace and nature of the work. Generally, the work involved learning a craft and some creative expression, and to this degree it reflected the individual who made it and who could take pride in the product. The sale or exchange of the product was also made more meaningful by face-to-face relationships within a localized community.
Now urbanized masses work according to the time clock and assist machinery; they focus endlessly on a few simple, repetitive tasks and produce identical products for distant markets. Depersonalization only increases as state, corporate, and educational bureaucracies apply the mechanical logic of the factory to society as a whole. The resulting irony has been that even though industrial capitalism has globalized, the experience of the urban individual has only become more fractured and narrowly focused. Today, economies are global and interdependent, but people continue to experience themselves as isolated, atomized individuals, no different from any other cog in the machinery of corporate and national bureaucracies. Meaning comes from doing your job and taking care of yourself.
Loss of autonomy and this fragmented experience of both the