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Adam Smith and the Spanish Inquisition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Scott Meikle
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Spain in the Eighteenth century was in two minds about the economic thought of the Enlightenment reaching it from other parts of Europe. The first half of the century has been aptly characterised as a period of ‘ideological hesitancy’, but in the second half the hesitancy came to an end. The liberal cause, and its main instruments the Sociedades Economicas de los Amigos del Pais, made great strides. Political economy, then a brand new science, was welcomed by the liberal statesmen like Jovellanos and Campomanes who flourished under Carlos III. Their primary concern was that Spain might lose heavily if she were too slow getting into the new international market economy, and they regarded works like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as important guides to the industrial and commercial policies Spain should pursue.

Others were more cautious. Intellectuals trained in the Aristotelian tradition were often more concerned about the moral quality of the new economics, and about the moral costs of pursuing the kind of policies that flowed from it. These are concerns which today, after a further two hundred years experience of market economy, are even more alive now than they were then. It is worth reflecting on whether these critics were entirely the reactionary flat-earthers they are customarily dismissed as being. History is written by the victors, and the Enlightenment won this engagement, so it is only to be expected that in our standard accounts the Aristotelian opponents of the Enlightenment come out badly.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 76 , Issue 890 , February 1995 , pp. 70 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 McClelland, I. L, Ideological Hesitancy in Spain 1700–1750 (Liverpool, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I should like to thank Ivy McClelland, Nicholas Round, Fede Basafiez, and Christopher Martin for much helpful discussion, and to acknowledge the assistance of the Anglo–Spanish Acciones Integradas scheme in supporting the research.

2 Jovellanos typically wrote in an Informe of 1785: ‘The greatness of nations will no longer rest, as in other times, on the splendor of its triumphs, in the martial spirit of its sons…Commerce, industry, and the wealth which springs from both, are, and probably will be for a long time to come, the only foundations of the preponderance of a nation; and it is necessary to make these the objects of our attentions or condemn ourselves to an eternal and shameful dependency, while our neighbours speed their prosperity upon our neglect’, cited by Smith, Robert Sidney, 'The Wealth of Nations in Spain and Hispanic America, 1780–1830', The Journal of Political Economy 65 (1957). p. 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Robert Sidney Smith, op. cit., pp. 104–25.

4 Pelayo, Marcelino Menendez, Hisloria de los Helerodoxos Espaňoles (Madrid, 1956)Google Scholar.

5 Sarrailh, Jean, l'Espagne éclairée de la seconde moitié XVllle siècle (Paris, 1954)Google Scholar. Herr, Richard, The Eighteenth Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, 1958)Google Scholar.

6 See Keenan, James F. S.J., “The Casuistry of John Major, Nominalist Professor of Paris (1506–1531)', The Annual of the Society for Christian Ethics (1993), pp. 206–221Google Scholar.

7 See my ‘Aristotle on Money’, Phronesis, 39/1 (1994), and ‘Aristotle on Business’, Classical Quarterly, forthcoming (1995). The issues are examined in greater detail in my Aristotle's Economic Thought forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 1995.

8 All three reports are given in full by Lasarte, J., ‘Adam Smith ante le Inquisition y la Academia de la Historia’, Hacienda Publico Espanola, vol. 33–4 (1975), pp. 201–242Google Scholar.

9 Herr, op. cit., p.218.

10 The problem of value in economics is to explain how some amount of one article can stand in a relation of equality with some amount of some other, e.g. how it is possible that ‘5 yards of linen = 1 cwt. of coal’. Aristotle realizes that only things that are already commensurable (summetra) can stand in such a relation, and this implies a property which both articles share (NE., V, 5). ‘Exchange value’ is the name given to this property, whatever it is. Samuel Bailey, however, considers that ‘Value denotes nothing positive or intrinsic, but merely a relation in which two objects stand to each other as exchangeable commodities’, as if a property can be a relation; A Critical Dissertation on the Nature. Measures, and Causes of Value (London, 1825), pp. 4–5. Modern authors often follow Bailey in this, as Joseph Schumpeter does, see Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy ((London, 1952), p. 23Google Scholar n. 2.

11 Menendez Palayo, Heterodoxas, vol. II, p. 381.

12 Robbins, Lionel, The Nature and Significance of Economic Science' (London 1932), p. 132Google Scholar.

13 Sen, A., On Ethics and Economics, (Blackwell, Oxford, 1987), pp. 1–2Google Scholar.

14 J. S. Mill confuses the two by defining wealth as ‘all useful and agreeable things, which possess exchangeable value’, Principles of Political Economy (New York, 1969), p. 9Google Scholar. W. S. Jevons wanted, confusedly, to turn usefulness from a qualitative concept into a quantitative one like exchange value, and he thought he found a way; The Theory of Political Economy (London, 1879)Google Scholar, pp. vii–viii. Marshall simply says use value is of no importance and dismisses it out of hand; Principles of Economics' (London, 1898), p. 8Google Scholar.

15 The Collected Writings of J. M. Keynes (London, 1973), vol. 29, p. 81Google Scholar.