The Tao Exposes Slavers to Contempt.

• Author: Klein, Daniel B.

Adam Smith is more often referenced than read in academic political economy. When Smith is referenced, it is sometimes suggested that he was advancing a narrow economic idea associated with the expression invisible hand. But a cursory reading of Smith's work quickly reveals that he saw human existence in fundamentally moral terms, and that his aim was to improve our morals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, human chattel slavery was the institution most antithetical to Smith's worldview. In fact, even the first (1759) edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments--hereafter TMS (Smith [1790] 1976)--contains a passage condemning slavery. The second sentence zeroes in on the slave trade:

There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished. (TMS, 206-7) The passage takes for granted self-ownership--the soul's ownership of its person--which, as Hume ([1740] 1978, 488-90) indicated, constitutes the most native ownership and forms the template of the ownership principle. Smith, in his jurisprudence, spoke of how that principle gets "extended" to other objects (Smith [1763] 1982, 10, 16, 19-23, 27, 34, 38, 39, 207, 308, 309,432, 434,460, 466, 467, 468).

I have written in The Independent Review about the slave-trade passage in relation to the surrounding text (Klein 2020; see also Klein and Asher 2022). Smith leads British readers into identifying with the respectable persons shackled by slavers from Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Smith indicates that "[n]o society could subsist a moment, in which the usual strain of men's conduct and behaviour was of a piece with the horrible practice" of slavery (TMS, 211).

Here, I leave aside the surrounding text and treat the words within the passage itself.

The first sentence moves the scene from the Americas to Africa, to illustrate anew the contrast between polished and "savage" cultures. The interaction taken up is a practice, Hume noted in 1752, "which has been abolished for some centuries throughout the greater part of Europe"...