Harold J. Laski

Once it is admitted that the object of the State is the achievement of the good life, the final canon of politics is bound to be a moral one.

For even when the psychological inadequacies of Smith's attitude are put aside, we can judge his theory in the light of the experience it summarizes.

A population each element of which was active and alert to its economic problems could not escape the achievement of greatness.

Where each man cautiously pursued the good as he saw it, the realization was bound, in his view, to be splendid.

Adam Smith is the supreme representative of a tradition which saw that release effected by individual effort.

No poison is more subtly destructive of the democratic State than paternalism; and the release of the creative impulses of men must always be the coping-stone of public policy.

In all this, as in the foundation with which Adam Smith provided it, we must not miss the element of truth that it contains.

The iron law of wages, the assumed transition of every energetic worker to the ranks of wealth, the danger lest the natural ability of the worker to better his condition be sapped by giving to him that which his self-respect can better…

Life is made a struggle beneficent, indeed, but deriving its ultimate meaning from the misery incident to it.

The poor were consigned to a God whose dictates were by definition beneficent; and if they failed to understand the curious incidence of his rewards that was because his ways were inscrutable.

The manufacturers were the State; and the whole intellectual strength of economics was massed to prove the rightness of the equation.

That men can organize to improve their lot was denied with emphasis, so that until Francis Place even the workers themselves were half-convinced.

Nothing is more striking in the half-century after Adam Smith than the optimism of the economist and the business man in contrast to the hopeless despair of labor.

The State, in short, ceased to concern itself with justice save insofar as the administration of a judicial code spelled the protection of the new industrial system.

Even national education was regarded as likely to destroy initiative; or, as a pauper's dole which men of self-respect would regard with due abhorrence.

Regulation became anathema even when the evils it attempted to restrain were those which made the mass of the people incapable of citizenship.

What was remembered then was the side of Adam Smith which looked upon enlightened selfishness as the key to social good.

Freedom from restraint came ultimately to mean a judgment upon national well-being in terms of the volume of trade.

But whereas he had in mind a happy and contented people, the economics of Ricardo and Malthus seized upon a single element in human nature as that which alone the State must serve.

Therein, it is clear, all individualistic theories of the state miss the true essence of the social bond.

What he did not see is the way in which the logical outcome of the system he describes may well be the attainment of great wealth at a price in human cost that is beyond its worth.

Rather the note of the book is a quiet optimism, impressed by the possibilities of constant improvement which lie imbedded in the human impulse to better itself.

The things that the poor have absent from their lives, that concept of a national minimum below which no State can hope to fulfil even the meanest of its aims, of these he has no conception.

What he was trying to do was less to emphasize that men care above all things for the pursuit of wealth than that no institutional modifications are able to destroy the power of that motive to labor.

Obviously enough, this attitude runs the grave risk of seeming to abstract a single motive--the desire for wealth--from the confused welter of human impulses and to make it dominant at the expense of human nature itself.