Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Other Adam Smith
WORK NOTES: with Warren Montag
PSEUDONYM(S): Hill, Michael K.
BIRTHDATE: 1964
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.albany.edu/news/experts/8252.php * http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2015/1930 *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 31, 1964.
EDUCATION:State University of California at Humboldt, B.A., 1986; University of California at Santa Barbara, M.A., 1988; State University of New York at Stony Brook, Ph.D., 1994.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University at Albany, NY, associate professor, 2003-. Associate editor of the Minnesota Review; member of editorial boards of the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies; Cultural Logic; and the Global South.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Mike Hill is an associate professor at the University of Albany. He is also an editor at the Minnesota Review and has served on the editorial boards for publications, including the Global South, Cultural Logic, and the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.
After Whiteness
In 2004, Hill released After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority. In this volume, he discusses the concept of whiteness and its evolution. According to Joel Olson, contributor to CLIO: “The book’s overarching theme is what Hill calls an ‘economy of absence.’ This concept is difficult to grasp because Hill does not explain it in detail, but I take him to mean that public life is increasingly concerned with what is not there or with what exists only as a trace of what it once was; nevertheless, the politics of these absences or traces remains significant.”
Olson concluded: “After Whiteness provides an important but flawed contribution to the study of race and whiteness in the twenty-first century. I appreciate Hill’s contribution toward understanding the power of whiteness, in its presence and its absence. Yet before we can analyze what is no longer there, we have to understand what the ‘there’ is. I am much more hesitant than Hill to jettison the input of ‘new abolitionists’ in such work.”
Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere and The Other Adam Smith
Hill collaborated with Warren Montag to edit Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere. The essays in the book focus on The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, an important work by Jurgen Habermas. Kent Worcester, contributor to Library Journal, commented: “Hill’s chapter on E.P. Thompson, Louis Althusser, and Adam Smith is similarly strong, while Montag’s ‘The Pressure of the Street’ is polemically charged if heavy-handed.”
Montag and Hill worked together again on the 2015 volume The Other Adam Smith. In this book, they discuss the work of the eighteenth-century thinker.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries reviewer D.A. Robinson suggested: “This challenging, cogent study is the first serious overview of the career of Adam Smith.” Derek Wall, contributor to the Marx and Philosophy Web site, commented: “This is not an easy book, some of the formulations could have been clearer, yet Adam Smith is a much more difficult and sophisticated thinker than is often supposed.” Wall continued: “Hill and Montag move us beyond interesting but limited binary debates to show that the, apparently, marginal focus on cruelty in Smith’s work, has helped justify a political-economy of neo-liberal necro-economics. This is, in summary, a tough but rewarding book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, April, 2016, D.A. Robinson, review of The Other Adam Smith, p. 1155.
CLIO, summer, 2006, Joel Olson, review of After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority, p. 454.
Library Journal, June 1, 2001, Kent Worcester, review of Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere, p. 196.
ONLINE
Marx and Philosophy, http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/ (July 23, 2015), Derek Wall, review of The Other Adam Smith.
University at Albany Web site, http://www.albany.edu/ (March 28, 2017), author faculty profile.
LC control no.: n 97003739
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Hill, Mike, 1964-
Birth date: 19640731
Found in: Whiteness, c1997: CIP t.p. (Mike Hill) data sheet (b.
7-31-64)
The other Adam Smith, 2014: ECIP t.p. (Mike Hill)
Stanford University Press website, July 1, 2014 (Mike Hill
is Associate Professor of English at the University at
Albany, SUNY)
University at Albany-SUNY website, July 1, 2014 (Mike Hill;
Associate Professor, Department of English; author of:
Whiteness)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
Michael K. Hill
Associate Professor
College of Arts and Sciences
Department: English
Expertise:
Race studies; "whiteness"; U.S. minority relations; civil society; multiracialism; U.S. demographic change; racial passing; history of democracy; relation between "print culture" (the novel) and politics; 18th-century political economy and culture
Campus phone: (518) 442-4046
Campus email: mhill@albany.edu
Biography:
Mike Hill writes on contemporary race relations and "racial formation theory" in the U.S. This includes multiracialism, U.S. demographic change, racial passing. He also works on the history of writing, in particular, how the origin of novel relates to democratic social movements in the formative period of the British Enlightenment.
Hill's most recent book, coauthored with Warren Montag, is The Other Adam Smith (Stanford University Press, 2015), examines not just Smith the economist, but Smith the philosopher, Smith the literary critic, Smith the historian, and Smith the anthropologist. Placed in relation to key thinkers such as Hume, Lord Kames, Fielding, Hayek, Von Mises, and Agamben, this other Adam Smith, far from being localized in the history of eighteenth-century economic thought or ideas, stands at the center of the most vibrant and contentious debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
His other books include: Whiteness: A Critical Reader (NYU, 1997); Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere (Verso, 2001); and After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (NYU, 2004).
An additional book, Ecologies of War: Racial Complexity in an Age of Failed States, will be published on the University of Minnesota Press. Hill is currently on the editorial board of the Review of Education/Pedagogy/and Cultural Studies; Cultural Logic; and The Global South. He is also Associate Editor of the Minnesota Review.
QUOTED: "Hill's chapter on E.P. Thompson, Louis Althusser, and Adam Smith is similarly strong, while Montag's 'The Pressure of the Street' is polemically charged if heavy-handed."
Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere
Kent Worcester
126.10 (June 1, 2001): p196.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere. Verso, dist. by Norton. 2001. 276p. ed. by Mike Hill & Warren Montag. index. LC 00-061438. ISBN 1-85984-777-3. $30. SOC SCI
This collection explores the politics and intellectual history of Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (published in 1961 in German and in 1989 in English), one of the most influential works of postwar social science. As the editors note, Habermas "seems to have provided `modernity' with its most theoretically sophisticated defense." In highlighting the emergence of civil society and a "public sphere" in 18th-century Britain, Habermas provided "a set of realistic objectives for social reforms." But editors Hill (Whiteness: A Critical Reader) and Montag (Bodies, Masses, Power), along with their contributors, take issue with Habermas's conception of the public sphere as a safe environment in which individuals can formulate their ideas and debate issues without having to resort to force or action to advance their position. Their point is that in the real world ideas are always linked to economic, political, and/or social interests that embody the threat of force (even if the threat isn't always carried out) and that Habermas is putting an ideological gloss on a system based on coercion. While some of the contributors explore these issues by way of historical research, others tackle Habermas's conceptual apparatus by way of theoretical critique. The strongest chapters are those that connect Habermas's research with the broader intellectual concerns of thinkers such as Etienne Balibar and Michael Hardt. Hill's chapter on E.P. Thompson, Louis Althusser, and Adam Smith is similarly strong, while Montag's "The Pressure of the Street" is polemically charged if heavy-handed. Highly recommended for university libraries.--Kent Worcester, Marymount Manhattan Coll., NY
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Worcester, Kent. "Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere." Library Journal, 1 June 2001, p. 196. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA76487812&it=r&asid=e44b0dcfc7f5c55301880feebd23a7e0. Accessed 3 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "This challenging, cogent study is the first serious overview of the career of Adam Smith."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A76487812
Hill, Mike. The other Adam Smith
D.A. Robinson
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1155.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Hill, Mike. The other Adam Smith, by Mike Hill and Warren Montag. Stanford, 2015. 397p index afp ISBN 9780804791946 cloth, $90.00; ISBN 9780804792943 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9780804793001 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-3346
B1545
2014-25816 CIP
This challenging, cogent study is the first serious overview of the career of Adam Smith (1723-90). The "other" Smith is a capacious thinker interested in the fine arts, ethics, stoicism, crime, pleasure, even literary history. Hill (Univ. of Albany, SUNY) and Mon tag (Occidental College), both English professors, show that Smith should be read not only as an economist and amateur philosopher but also as a writer and thinker--a public intellectual, a philosophe. Liberating Smith's economic theory from that of contemporary idealogues, the authors argue that ignorance of Smith's other writing and thinking has led to a limited understanding and application of The Wealth of Nations. The authors' literary approach is refreshing: it is grounded in philosophy, history, and economics, disciplines that provide them with fascinating theoretical tools for reading Smith from a variety of perspectives. A chapter addressing Hume, Jacobitism, and the novel is a tough read and a bit of an outlier, but the book ends powerfully; the authors interweave Smith's economics with those of his successors, particularly Malthus, and examine the fascinating implications of a necro-economic theodicy. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--D. A. Robinson, Widener University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Robinson, D.A. "Hill, Mike. The other Adam Smith." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1155. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661477&it=r&asid=f2e024dbc50245c0f496cf8c80554a21. Accessed 3 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "The book's overarching theme is what Hill calls an 'economy of absence.' This concept is difficult to grasp because Hill does not explain it in detail, but I take him to mean that public life is increasingly concerned with what is not there or with what exists only as a trace of what it once was; nevertheless, the politics of these absences or traces remains significant."
"After Whiteness provides an important but flawed contribution to the study of race and whiteness in the twenty-first century. I appreciate Hill's contribution toward understanding the power of whiteness, in its presence and its absence. Yet before we can analyze what is no longer there, we have to understand what the 'there' is. I am much more hesitant than Hill to jettison the input of 'new abolitionists' in such work."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661477
After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority
Joel Olson
35.3 (Summer 2006): p454.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
http://www.ipfw.edu/engl/clio.html
After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority. By Mike Hill. New York: New York University Press, 2004. xii + 268 pages.
Poor whiteness studies. No one loves it anymore. It had a brief moment in the suns of academia in the mid-1990s, producing a long shelf of books (including a pile of anthologies), a flurry of conferences and papers, and even media attention, with articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lingua Franca, the New York Times, and elsewhere. But now no one wants it. Conservatives such as David Horowitz, feminist scholars such as Robyn Wiegman, and labor historians like Eric Arnesen have attacked it. Even the very people who are credited with founding it have distanced themselves from it. David Roediger, author of perhaps the most influential book in the genre (The Wages of Whiteness [1991]), for example, distinguishes what he calls "critical studies of whiteness" from whiteness studies.
And now comes Mike Hill. As editor of an early collection on whiteness in the minnesota review, as well as the anthology Whiteness: A Critical Reader, Hill was a founder of the genre, and an interesting one, too, because his work never quite fit in with the camps that quickly set up within it. Now in his latest book, After Whiteness, he has come not so much to bury whiteness studies as to go beyond it.
Only part of the book is about whiteness studies. Further, only part of the book is about theorizing life "after whiteness," which makes the title somewhat misleading (and ironic: Hill may want to go beyond whiteness, but the word apparently still sells books). The book's overarching theme is what Hill calls an "economy of absence." This concept is difficult to grasp because Hill does not explain it in detail, but I take him to mean that public life is increasingly concerned with what is not there or with what exists only as a trace of what it once was; nevertheless, the politics of these absences or traces remains significant.
For instance, in regards to whiteness, Hill argues that there both is and is not a "there" to whiteness today. As whites come to believe that they will become a minority in the twenty-first century and thus whiteness will become increasingly "absent," they become more consumed with it. On the left, whiteness studies advocates highlight whiteness as an obstacle to a progressive politics, while the right wants to melt whiteness into the ideology of colorblindness. Yet both remain unconscious of the tension between the simultaneous presence and absence of whiteness. This is what it means to be "after whiteness," a condition in which the privileged status of whites is both there and not there simultaneously. Hill, for his part, seeks to be conscious of the tensions wrought by this economy of absence and to keep "the temporal irony of [whiteness's] absent presence at the forefront and in play" (9).
The book is divided into three sections held together by the "economy of absence" theme. Part 1, "Incalculable Community," notes an irony of the colorblind era. W. E. B. Du Bois famously argued in Black Reconstruction in America (1935) that the "public and psychological wages" of whiteness have prevented whites from recognizing their class interests and organizing with nonwhite labor for socialism. Today, however, the "wages of whiteness" arguably pay less than ever, yet we seem no closer to cross-racial class unity than when Du Bois wrote during the heart of the Depression.
Hill argues that this absence of class solidarity can be explained by examining how the state has shifted its approach to racial identification. Racial categories have multiplied in the twenty-first century and the state has blessed this, as evident by the 2000 Census, which allowed respondents to check off more than one racial category. As Hill cleverly demonstrates, however, the multiplication of racial identities actually undermines efforts against racial discrimination. This curious turn of events was ironically initiated by civil rights legislation itself. Civil rights rests on the logic of individualism, which implies allowing the individual to define herself racially. Such self-definition inevitably leads to fluid notions of race. In response, the state switches from its Herrenvolk-era role of classifying people by race in order to maintain white domination to recognizing and protecting individualized racial identification. Ironically, by encouraging the proliferation of racial identities, the state sloughs off its responsibility to protect civil rights. When race is a melange of multiple identities rather than a structure of advantage and subordination, "Racial difference is developed to a point where racism no longer matters to the law" (47). The state no longer enforces (white) racial homogeneity, yet its promotion of racial heterogeneity emphasizes difference to the point where collective identities (which have always been crucial to fighting discrimination) are undermined. The result is that the struggle for racial justice recedes even as whites become a numerically smaller (and ostensibly less powerful) group. It is not that white privilege has disappeared but that its perpetuation is now fostered by the proliferation of racial identity rather than its containment. This is whiteness's economy of absence. Hill's argument regarding the absence-yet-presence of whiteness is persuasive and a real contribution to attempts to theorize race in the post-civil rights era.
Part 2, "A Fascism of Benevolence," examines the race-class-gender-sexuality matrix through an analysis of the male Christian revivalist organization Promise Keepers. Contrary to those scholars who belittle Promise Keepers' emphasis on racial healing, Hill argues that racial harmony is central to the organization's attempt to build a new patriarchal heterosexual masculinity to replace the one lost to the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and the subsequent deindustrialization of the economy. Creating this new masculinity, as Hill persuasively shows, requires that white Promise Keepers come to terms with their racism so that they may forge a bond with their brothers of color. Unlike the Jim Crow era, in which white men's superior racial position depended on containing Black men's perceived sexual threat (as the ritual castration of lynch victims demonstrates), Promise Keepers insist that only the dissolution of whiteness into a broader multiracialism can sustain the bonds of true manhood. Thus, rather than white supremacy it is "racial difference [that] functions ... as a form of heterosexual masculine repair" (96). Hill suggests that the multiracial, postwhite nation to come may not bring socialism, as Du Bois hoped, but could simply reproduce heterosexual masculinity in new ways.
Part 3, "Race Among Ruins," is the most difficult section of the book and the least convincing. Its focus is on how knowledge is produced in the public research university and how its production is related to the postwhite era. The ideal of the university is to emphasize Enlightenment rather than corporate values, but in today's "ruined university" the imperatives of profit and utility have replaced the noble quest for truth. Ignorance of such market pressures compromises scholarship.
This ignorance is particularly noticeable in the area of whiteness studies, Hill argues, and he offers a biting critique of the field, aimed in particular at Roediger and the renegade antiwhite journal Race Traitor. Hill contends that whiteness studies is ignorant of the materialist context from which it emerged. Whiteness studies appears as an area of study, he argues, just as the "ruined university" enforces multiculturalism and chops back affirmative action at the same time. It is no coincidence, he argues, that a genre of scholarship that places the white male worker at the center of history develops at the very moment when the white male's privileged place in academia is under threat yet preserved, that is, absent yet present. Roediger and Race Traitor fail to subject themselves to materialist and feminist critique, and thereby fail to recognize how their work fits with the interests of the corporatized university.
This critique is central to Hill's argument in part 3, but it is undermined by interpretive and genealogical errors. His claim that Roediger and Race Traitor place the white male worker at the center of antiracist struggles cannot be sustained by a serious reading of these texts. Hill's argument borrows heavily from Wiegman's 1999 critique of whiteness studies ("Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity," Boundary 2 26.3 [1999]:115-50). Following Wiegman, Hill maintains that by focusing on whites' specific privileges and on their obligation to resist them, Race Traitor and Roediger ironically end up putting whites right back at the center of antiracist discourse--and themselves at the center of scholarship on race and history. In this way, "the status of the white worker studied by labor historians is moved into an unsettling closeness with the intellectual labor historian himself' (177). Yet a careful reading easily refutes this. Race Traitor and Roediger encourage whites to join the rest of the (not-white) working class in struggle, not lead them, and there is no inherent masculinist bias to such participation. The purpose of committing treason against whiteness, Race Traitor explains in its very first editorial, is to encourage whites "to take part, together with others, in the process of defining a new human community" ("Abolish the White Race By Any Means Necessary," in Race Traitor, ed. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey [New York: Routledge, 1996], 14). Such modesty jars Hill's confident critique, yet nowhere does he take it into consideration. That this sort of misinterpretation of the "new abolitionist" school of whiteness studies has been repeated so often as to make it lore does not make it true.
Hill also mistakes Race Traitor and Roediger's political ambitions for scholarly ones, and in so doing evacuates the politico-strategic nature of their arguments. Rather than jumping on a 1990s academic fad, Roediger and the editors of Race Traitor (Noel Ignatiev, John Garvey, and Beth Henson) are all longtime radicals in the independent Marxist tradition. Their argument that socialism in the United States is blocked by the racial chauvinism of the white working class traces back to several radical organizations that they belonged to in the 1960s and 1970s, then to C. L. R. James, and then to Du Bois. To criticize them for not being aware of how their research relates to the material conditions of the public research university (that is, for desiring "an economic outside to which [they] may refer without [their] own conditions of production being part of the expanded economic equation" [177]) incorrectly presumes that their work emerged in an academic context and that a place in the "ruined university" is their objective. Yet of the persons mentioned above, only Roediger teaches at a public research university. In fact, it is hard to imagine an area of scholarship more influenced by independent or marginal scholars. Tracing the genealogy of their work to Du Bois, James, and radical organizations of the 1960s and 1970s rather than the "ruined university" empties out a large part of Hill's critique. Hill wants to save literary studies and the public research university. Fair enough. But these scholars want a new society, and their work seeks to suggest strategies to build it. To not critique them on these terms is to make their political presence absent.
After Whiteness provides an important but flawed contribution to the study of race and whiteness in the twenty-first century. I appreciate Hill's contribution toward understanding the power of whiteness, in its presence and its absence. Yet before we can analyze what is no longer there, we have to understand what the "there" is. I am much more hesitant than Hill to jettison the input of "new abolitionists" in such work.
Joel Olson
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, Arizona
Olson, Joel
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Olson, Joel. "After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority." CLIO, vol. 35, no. 3, 2006, p. 454+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA152196108&it=r&asid=266c53083ae1ba5b1b58fe03c450d0da. Accessed 3 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A152196108
QUOTED: ""This is not an easy book, some of the formulations could have been clearer, yet Adam Smith is a much more difficult and sophisticated thinker than is often supposed."
"Hill and Montag move us beyond interesting but limited binary debates to show that the, apparently, marginal focus on cruelty in Smith's work, has helped justify a political-economy of neo-liberal necro-economics. This is, in summary, a tough but rewarding book."
'The Other Adam Smith' by Mike Hill and Warren Montag Mike Hill and Warren Montag
The Other Adam Smith
Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2015. 397pp., $29.95 pb
ISBN 9780804792943
Reviewed by Derek Wall
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About the reviewer
Derek Wall
Derek Wall is International Co-ordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales. He is an associated tutor in Politics, Goldsmiths College, London. His books include The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (Routledge) and The Commons in History (MIT). He is a columnist for the Morning Star newspaper and is writing a book on post-capitalist economics.
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Review
There are, at least, two reasons why Marxists might consider reading Adam Smith. First, while Adam Smith has been seen as the prophet of the free market, a debate has raged as to the nature of his politics with some arguing that he was very much on the left. Second, any reader of Marx's volumes of Capital, will know that Marx was an obsessive reader of Adam Smith's political economy. Marx's Capital is, at least partly, a detailed reading of Smith's The Wealth of Nations, with Marx noting the silences and contradictions in the text around questions of value and accumulation.
Mike Hill and Warren Montag argue, convincingly to my mind, that Adam Smith was a major thinker across a vast range of fields. In turn, they suggest not just the other Adam Smith but multiple others. While all texts can give rise to different readings, they hint that multiple Adam Smiths are more immediately obvious from reading his output than that of many other thinkers.
The notion that Smith was an uncritical advocate of the market has been strongly questioned. Hill and Montag note, for example, that while Alan Greenspan spoke of his support for an ‘ideology’ of self-regulating markets and gave an Adam Smith Memorial Lecture in Kirkcaldy, the former chair of the Federal Reserve remained 'bound to a version of Smith that, while not exactly false, can be sustained only by suppressing the enormous complexity and constitutive contradictions of his actual work.' (3) In dramatic contrast to Greenspan the Marxist sociologist Giovanni Arrighi has argued that Smith was a ‘'Theorist of commercial society who rejects the idea of a self-regulating market and sees the necessity for state intervention to insure economic growth and protect against crisis' (4).
Adam Smith promotes the market but is clear that market power is often asymmetric with the wealthy using their power to combine and reduce wages for workers. There are numerous statements in The Wealth of Nations that can be quoted to support a left Adam Smith. Perhaps most dramatically he Smith was cynical about the motives of business people, and is well known for observing that business people would tend to meet so they could conspire against the public by raising prices.
Commentators from the left make use of his other major published work The Theory of Moral Sentiment to present a quasi-socialist Adam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiment suggests that social good is promoted by empathy and allied values, apparently contrasting with the notion that rational self-interest alone in a market setting is sufficient. Thus left interpreters of Smith have much material to support their reading. Hill and Montag reject this a binary of the 'left' versus the 'right' Smith and in doing so note that while best known The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments are only part of Smith's output. While Smith had some of his work destroyed, such as his study of astronomy, which he felt was inadequate, much was published in his life time and more has emerged since. Most dramatically a number of unknown Adam Smith texts were discovered in an Aberdeen junk shop in the 1960s. Smith was not primarily an economist but wrote on a large number of topics, and it is important to acknowledge often largely forgotten texts including Essays on Philosophical Subjects, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Lectures on Jurisprudence, and Correspondence.
There are obvious parallels with the evolving reception of Marx's work. It might be possible to debate the difference between a young Adam Smith who wrote the more humanistic and left The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and the 'mature' Smith who wrote The Wealth of Nations. In turn new writing by Marx continues to be published in the 21st century and the Paris Manuscripts and Grundrisse transformed readings of Marx in the 20th century. Hill and Montag resist any easy division between a young and mature Smith and note that both readings are inadequate to our understanding of Smith. They also note that tensions and contradictions in Smith's work cannot be dismissed, it is not a problem of which Adam Smith to ignore so as to construct a coherent reading. Smith's own investigations generated particular problems which he was unable to resolve, even if we accept a crude notion of a 'left' and a 'right' Smith: these are features inherent in his work. Hill and Montag argue that Smith's corpus cannot
be reduced to being either a theory of the immanent rationality of the market or the expression of an original intersubjectivity grounded in sympathy, or even an ingenious amalgamation of the two. On the contrary, Smith's works more often than not produce the very contradictions on which they founder. The market performs its miracles (above all in the corn trade) only at the expense of the life it is supposed to support, just as sympathy arises precisely from the impossibility of a communication of sentiments between individuals. (21)
Clearly Smith was an eccentric and ambiguous character. Contemporaries noted that he had a 'tendency to absence', for example, he would often talk to himself and sleep walk. He was once so focused on his thoughts that he stepped into a tanning pit full of foul substances and on another occasion forgetfully placed bread and butter in his kettle before making his tea. He lived with his mother for most of his life, who out of maternal affection rather than material self-interest made his meals. Boswell claimed that Smith was reluctant to talk about his ideas in case this reduced his income from book sales. However Smith's personal absences and ambiguities do not sufficiently explain those in his texts.
Smith, of course, was Scottish and wrote at a time when national identities were being formed, Scotland's union with England was strongly contested and the 18th century was a period of conflict. Hill and Montag note that while Smith and the other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were working, 'the nation was at war with its self'' (19). They suggest that Smith can be seen as trying to investigate or even create disciplinary divisions of knowledge in a context where discourse was being mobilised in an attempt to discipline the Scottish population so as to resist popular contention including rioting, from getting out of control. In a number of wide ranging chapters that bring together literary theory and the study of 17th century Scottish and English history, they suggest that disciplinary questions were of great concern to Smith.
Economics via the invisible hand of the market can be seen in this context as a form of governance. However the market mechanisms explained by Smith tends to be corroded in various ways. I have tended to argue that Smith was crudely an egalitarian sympathetic to a 'fairer' and more democratic order. It is consistent with this approach that he was critical of corporate power, combination and monopoly, fearing that manipulation of the market would exploit workers and buyers. Nonetheless there is an often forgotten element of cruelty in Smith's work, which Hill and Montag identify as producing necro-economics. An economic system that depends on threat and injury. The providence of the market requires the motivation of fear. Smith in investigating the market helps produce the market but the market to exist must promise death.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments contains numerous references to punishment including execution. To make the market work requires fear, unless individuals fear starvation they may be too ill motivated and lazy to work perhaps. The free workings of the market require Homo Sacer, the category of individual who cannot be killed but can be allowed to die. Homo Sacer explains the British government’s response to the Irish famine, to provide food would disrupt the market because fear of famine motivated work and participation in the market. Such necro-economics is a core topic in The Other Adam Smith, the ongoing attempts to discipline the Greek economy using austerity is consistent with such necro-economics. In the recent UK budget the economic liberalism of the Conservative government has seen 30% cuts in welfare benefits for those too sick or disabled to work. Hardly a day goes by without news of the death of disabled, sick or unemployed individual who has died as a result of benefit sanctions.
Smith suggests that workers may resist the division of labour with a saunter, Hill and Montag illustrate that at the margins of his work the author of The Wealth of Nations, acknowledges the resistance of workers to work place discipline. In short the investigations of Smith whether in wider philosophy or the market, produce contradictions and silences that erode his work. Smith constructs his own weaknesses. His texts helped summon up the market system that he tries to describe, so he helps produce the contradictions and gaps in the evolving market system which he examines.
This is not an easy book, some of the formulations could have been clearer, yet Adam Smith is a much more difficult and sophisticated thinker than is often supposed. His reputation as the father of economics can hide the fact that his interest in economics is a part of a much wider series of investigations. His work was undertaken in the context of widespread social conflict and uncertainty, as an attempt to construct a field of knowledge linked implicitly to social control. The free market right wing Smith is challenged by his awareness of the dangers of markets being manipulated and monopolised. In turn, the benign market that serves humanity with efficiency and grace when it is left to its 'natural' devices, is a myth. The market requires continued threat to survive. The challenge to austerity and other elements of contemporary cruelty, which suggest that both human life and ecological diversity are worthless compared to the majesty of the market, demand actions not just at the level of the street and the ballot box. From the Latin American left to, perhaps surprisingly, the interventions of Pope Francis against capitalism, to the struggles of Syriza and the Greek people, have a material effect. Theory too has a material effect and Hill and Montag move us beyond interesting but limited binary debates to show that the, apparently, marginal focus on cruelty in Smith's work, has helped justify a political-economy of neo-liberal necro-economics. This is, in summary, a tough but rewarding book.
23 July 2015