Capitalism and the Good Society: The Original Case for and Against Commerce

Daniel Cullen ()
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Daniel Cullen: Rhodes College

Chapter Chapter 20 in Standard of Living, 2022, pp 451-463 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The contemporary debate over the morality of capitalism would benefit from attention to eighteenth-century philosophical arguments for and against commercial life. Well before Karl Marx, Jean-Jacques Rousseau condemned the emerging commercial society as incompatible with equality, freedom, and virtue. And well before Milton Friedman, Adam Smith defended commerce as a system of natural liberty that indeed fostered considerable inequality but only in the course of dramatically improving the condition of the poor. Smith shared many of Rousseau’s concerns about the negative effects of commerce and directly addressed them in his major works. Smith concluded that the benefits of commercial life outweighed the risks and contributed substantially to human progress—a possibility Rousseau vigorously denied.

Keywords: Amour-propre; Capitalism; Commerce; Dependence/Independence; Division of Labor; Equality/Inequality; Invisible Hand; System of Natural Liberty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stechp:978-3-031-06477-7_20

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-06477-7_20

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