At the Adam Smith conference in Bogota, one of the most interesting papers was by Yiftah Elazar and Michelle Schwarze--"Liberty Lost: Adam Smith on Romantic Freedom." They note that Smith identifies "opulence and freedom" as "the two greatest blessings men can possess" (LJ, 185). But then they observe that having both at the same time is often hard: in particular, Smith suggests that what they call "romantic freedom"--freedom from restless pursuit, or being "free from labour, and from care, and from all the turbulent passions which attend them, or being free from "toil and anxiety" (TMS, 32, 51, 183)--is hard for individuals to achieve in a modern affluent commercial society, where everyone seems so restless in their striving to satisfy their avaricious and ambitious desires for "bettering their condition," that they give up all leisure, all ease, and all careless security in their lives, which Smith recognized as a "loss of liberty" (TMS, 51). Here, Smith seems to accept Rousseau's criticism of the commercial society as depriving human beings of the freedom from restless pursuit that was enjoyed by the savage in the pure state of nature, which anticipates Marx's claim, in his comments on Smith's Wealth of Nations, that greed in capitalist societies drives people to a restless laboring in which they end up "completely losing all their freedom."
Elazar and Schwarze do suggest, however, that Smith points to one way to regain romantic freedom within commercial societies: the "prudent man" can resolve to "never come within the circle of ambition," so that he can "live free, fearless, and independent" (TMS, 57), because he "would prefer the undisturbed enjoyment of secure tranquility, not only to all the vain splendour of successful ambition, but to the real and solid glory of performing the greatest and most magnanimous actions" (215-216). Nevertheless, Elazar and Schwarze admit that "the prudent man's idealized approach to labor" is probably impossible for most common laboring people.
As I read their paper and listened to their presentation in Bogota, I wondered how they would respond to my thought that Smith suggests that romantic freedom from restless pursuit is best found in the philosophic life of people like Smith and Hume. In quoting from the passages on the "prudent man," they don't quote Smith's identification of the "superior prudence" of the Platonic or Aristotelian philosophers (TMS, 216). Nor do they quote Smith's explanation that in the restless pursuits of ambition and avarice there are three levels of human beings. By the "ordinary standard of human nature," most human beings are restless and anxious in their pursuit of distinction. Those few people who are free from this are either above this level of human nature or below it. Those below it show a "slothful and sottish indifference to superiority." Those above it are those "confirmed in wisdom and real philosophy" (57). The friendships of virtue among philosophers like Smith and Hume show highest perfection of "the wise and virtuous man," who is free from restless labor and striving for ambition (224-25, 247).
In the Wealth of Nations, Smith stresses the importance of philosophy as produced by the division of labor in the most commercial and civilized societies, in which one sees "philosophers or men of speculation, who trade it is, not to do anything, but to observe everything" (21, 782-84). Because they live a contemplative or theoretical life, rather than a practical life striving for wealth and rank, philosophers enjoy romantic freedom from restless striving.
As I have indicated in some previous posts (here and here), I want to show how liberal open societies provide freedom for philosophers to live the philosophic life as a challenge to the claim of Leo Strauss and the Straussians (like Joseph Cropsey) that Smith's commercial society has no place for the philosophic life. This Straussian account of liberal modernity fails to see how the liberal social order--such as that sketched in Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, Wealth of Nations, and Lectures on Jurisprudence--secures the conditions for all the lives of moral and intellectual excellence, including the intellectual friendships of philosophers like Smith and Hume.
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