based on the universal character of reason rather than the differences among cultures.
Kant took up the core Rousseauian themes of freedom and equality, but emphasized overwhelmingly the link of each to the basic idea of the individual exercise of reason. One of the founders of the largely German philosophical school called “idealism,” he argued that secure human knowledge and morality came not from external imposition but from the inherent capacities of the human mind. Ideas, such as time and space, Kant suggested, do not come to us as material facts; they are mental categories we need in order to understand material reality.
Kant examined almost every philosophical topic, from mathematics (pure reason) to law and aesthetic judgment (different forms of practical reason). He was concerned to see reason used to settle human conflicts rather than force and imagined progress leading to an era of perpetual peace. He argued that morality needed to be achieved on the basis of human beings’ free will because we consider actions properly moral when they are chosen, not forced. This meant that morality was to be pursued by cultivating human capacity for reason rather than limiting human freedom.
Kant also pioneered what he called “critique,” a philosophical approach to examining the conditions of actual and apparent knowledge. When he wrote a “critique of pure reason,” he therefore did not attack pure reason; he asked how it was possible and urged his reader to try to grasp the underlying, most basic foundations of thought. Too much of what passed for knowledge, he thought, was merely belief accepted out of habit. We need to look critically at such beliefs in pursuit of the truth. This notion influenced all of sociology (and most of modern thought); it was also especially influential for the “critical theorists” we examine later. This notion of basic foundations for knowledge and the pursuit of pure truth became basic to modern science – as well as basic to the versions of “modernity” attacked in the late 20th century by those who sometimes called themselves “postmodernists.” It was too easy, they argued, for this idea of perfect knowledge to become the enemy of freedom, especially if it encouraged governments to develop top-down master plans for how society should be organized.
Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a central figure in what is often called the Scottish Enlightenment. Part of the broader European Enlightenment, the Scottish thinkers were distinctive in several ways. One was that they were more skeptical than Kant and most of the Germans about the capacities of unaided reason, and more attentive to the ways in which human beings – and human societies – learned from the accumulated trial and error of history. One of their greatest theorists, David Hume, had provoked Kant to take on his quest for secure foundations of knowledge by severely questioning the limits of abstract reason and arguing that for many crucial questions – such as the nature of cause and effect – we have no choice but to rely on inductions from empirical evidence that can never be entirely conclusive. Another, Adam Ferguson, helped to introduce the idea of civil society and also anticipated later evolutionary theory by holding that history revealed a pattern of improvements in social organization, reflecting among other things growth in productive capacity by which human societies sustained themselves in relation to nature and each other. Smith focused on questions of moral philosophy, arguing that humans would be bound together by natural sympathies and that human sentiments included benevolent dispositions, as well as sources of conflict. However, much more famously, he helped to create modern economics, as well as sociology, with his book The Wealth of Nations (1776). The selection printed here on the division of labor was widely influential. Smith wrote more generally about the extent to which markets created order and produced collective benefits even when the motivations of individual participants were entirely selfish. First, he suggested, markets taught sensible behavior by a kind of external conditioning: they rewarded buying cheap and selling dear and they punished the opposite. Second, markets led people with different skills or properties to cooperate through exchange, thus not only circulating goods effectively but also boosting production. Third, markets did all this without anyone being in charge and directing them. And this was the key point: markets were self-regulating. They were proof, Smith suggested, that it was not necessary to rely on kings or governments to establish all the conditions of social life. Markets could be self-regulating. This is what he meant by saying they worked as though led by an “invisible hand.” There were emergent properties of market structure and process that were not the results of any plan or intention. Studying such emergent properties of social organization has remained a key theme for sociology.
The common wealth, Smith suggested, could be better achieved by freeing individuals to compete in self-regulating markets than by central planning or restrictions on trade. Of course, markets could become imbalanced and fail in self-regulation. Smith argued that competition only worked among human individuals, not among large corporations, because the participants had to be relatively equal. And there were some things, such as national defense, that were best provided by government because they needed central authority. However, Smith’s points were not only about markets for their own sake. Markets were simply one of the best examples of social self-regulation that went on throughout society – as people found partners to marry, decided how many children to have, wrote books (for the “marketplace of ideas”), and so forth. Most of the civil society could be self-regulating, not only markets – as long as there was freedom for individuals to make their own decisions and at least substantial equality, though not perfect equality since individuals needed to learn from the decisions they made and this meant that some had to win and some had to lose.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Baumgold, Deborah. 2010. Contract Theory in Historical Context: Essays on Grotius, Hobbes and Locke. Leiden: Brill. (A nice overview of contract theory).
2 Gay, Peter 1996. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. New York: Norton, rev. ed. (Still perhaps the best overview).
3 Israel, Jonathan I. 2001. Radical Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Excellent on Descartes, Spinoza, and the early pre-Kantian Enlightenment).
4 Kuehn, Manfred 2001. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An exceptionally good biography that also introduces Kant’s theory and situates it in the Age of Enlightenment.)
5 Reisman, David A.1976. Adam Smith’s Sociological Economics. London: Croom Helm. (An excellent study showing how the sociological and economic dimensions of Smith’s work are intertwined).
6 Schmidt, James(ed.) 1996. What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Situates Kant in relation to several contemporaries asking similar questions and also shows why those remain current questions today.)
7 Shklar, Judith 1969. Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Still one of the best accounts.)
8 Winch, Donald 1978. Adam Smith’s Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A broader study than the title implies, contesting narrow readings of Smith as “just” an economist.)
Chapter 1
Of the Natural Condition and the Commonwealth [1651]
Thomas Hobbes
Of the Naturall Condition of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity, and Misery
Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret
