Readings include selections from the 1690 work of John Locke: The Second Treatise of Government, and from the 1776 work of Adam Smith: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. There are also a few comments on them, meant to put these thoughts in a bit of historical context. Readings in section B continue that commentary.
        These notes are very long so that we can all get started in the same direction. Many conceptual links lead from Locke and Smith into the rest of modern social thought in the West, which, as you will see, may either extend or refute their understandings. There are particular reasons why you are being asked to read Locke and Smith in this anthropology course.

WHAT LOCKE SAYS

      Locke's book is generally considered to be the first great work of the Modern Western Liberal political tradition. It argues against monarchy and in favour of the idea that the power and legitimacy of a state flow up  from the people, not (for example) from God down to the state and then down upon the people. Therefore the people can withdraw their support from the state if it acts against their will: Locke provides a justification for popular revolution against the state.

        Today, most people who are called either "liberal" or "conservative" in our political system are political liberals in this sense. Some "conservatives", however, do not agree with Locke's extreme individualism. And socialists, generally, reject both the individualism and its pro-capitalist intent.

        Locke's argument emphasizes two ideas: individual liberty -- or individual "rights" -- and the equality of individuals to each other.

            1) Rights, liberties, freedoms are qualities of persons, not of states or other political\social entities. So, a government can legitimately limit the rights of people only if they agree to let it. According to Locke, in the earliest days of human life there was no political organization. Instead, each person looked out for himself (sic). But people eventually found that this was not a good way of life, because there was no authority to appeal to if someone took from you, injured you, etc. Everyone was on their own. They therefore got together and decided that they would each give up some of their individual liberty to a political institution that would guarantee to protect the rest of their rights. This agreement is called "the social contract".  Since it was the people who originally brought the government into existence (in order to guarantee their rights), they could also withdraw their support, or rebel.

                      For Locke, the key individual right that government must protect is private property. Above all, Locke's philosophy is a philosophy of private property. He spoke for the incipient capitalist class: mostly large-scale farmers: the "improvers".

                      Some of you will recognize that this is the rhetoric of the American Revolution of the 1770's, and of much political debate in the United States today. In fact, however, political liberalism is probably the norm throughout the "West", and most of you believe in individual rights and in government that is dependent upon the people for its power and legitimacy. There's nothing peculiarly "American" about it. For example, it is also the rhetoric adopted by parts of the French Revolution, which began in 1789. The many rebellions justified by liberal thought are often called "bourgeois revolutions", because they support the right of private property, which is the basis of capitalism.

                      It is the emphasis on personal "liberty" which gives "liberalism" its name.

            2)  Locke says that "all men are created equal". They are equal, that is, in principle: in their reason and their inherent rights. But they may differ in their personal capacity to exercise those rights: in their ability to use their "reason".

                     He recognizes two sorts of people:  we might call them "choosers" and "learners"¹. Choosers are people who are wise and experienced enough to judge what is in their own best interest, and therefore to make decisions for themselves. No one has the inherent right to decide for them. Learners, however, will make choices against their own interest if left to decide for themselves: they are still learning what's good for them. (The obvious example is children or others who are mentally inadequate, but this argument opens the way for subsequent Liberals to claim, for example, that native people need to be protected from themselves by "civilized" leaders who know what's best and can act like fathers to them: colonialist paternalism. The same sort of argument is repeatedly made about other categories of people: the poor, women, other "races", and so on.)
 

        For our purposes, the most important move that Locke makes (he wasn't the first) is this: he presents the individual as the true location of reality and of value: individuals are natural, with God-given qualities. Political society, on the other hand, is artificially brought into existence by agreement through the use of reason. It exists in order to achieve a purpose conceived by people: it is created because of its function. In an important sense, society (or major pieces of it) is not natural and therefore not as "real" as individuals are.  Philosophers know this as "methodological individualism": individuals are primary, and collectivities are secondary, utilitarian, and ephemeral. And since society is artificially created in order to do something in particular, it can be changed when it fails to achieve its purpose or when collective goals change: a new "contract".

        Forty years before Locke, Thomas Hobbes had adopted an individualist position in presenting an argument in favour of monarchy. He said that "the life of man in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Locke's state of nature is less bleak, but people are still first of all solitary. That they clump together is a secondary fact about them.

        Please notice how strange this argument is, even though it's a big part of our public "common sense". In most cultures, it's assumed that what you are as a person is first of all because of the relationships you have with the people around you. You are shaped by your society, community, family, rather than making a contract with others (you rational devil you) to bring social relations into existence. Mostly, solitary people die, they don't produce or reproduce.
 

WHAT DOES LOCKE HAVE TO DO WITH ANTHROPOLOGY?
 

        Nothing like sociocultural anthropology existed when Locke was writing. Under the name "ethnology", it became recognized as a special field of study during the last half of the 1800's. The first English-language university position dedicated to the field was created nearly 200 years after Locke, in the 1880's.

        But most of the writers (apart from Marx) of, say, 1750 to 1900, whose works flowed together to create modern sociocultural anthropology, were political liberals in their own world (though they were often paternalistic and racist --stressing inherent inequality-- in their ideas about Others). As liberals, they were committed to values, ideas, and emphases in their view of human nature which are often to be found already in Locke. This point speaks to the question: What assumptions, perspectives, and preconceptions does the anthropologist bring to the attempt to understand other societies, their patterns, and their rationales?

        A central concern of the anthropology of the last 100 years has been "ethnocentrism": the tendency we all have to assume that our own ways of life and ways of thinking are the best, or even the only sensible ones. Much Twentieth Century anthropology said: "Fight ethnocentrism. Try to put away your own preconceptions so that you are open to understanding other ways and other people." But how are we to become conscious of what our preconceptions are? There are two obvious ways:  1) To do "fieldwork": actually to live for an extended period of time in some place and among some people in an especially self-conscious, attentive, and questioning way. That's not open to us here.  2) Or, we may uncover the shape of some of our preconceptions, the unconscious assumptions that may blind us, by looking at aspects of our own history, at the social forces and ideas which have made us as we are. Part of that project could be reading Locke and Smith critically.

        This course begins with the proposition that when we speak of "the Modern West" we mean some particular (though changing and often contradictory) things, and that examining some of those things will help us to see ourselves more clearly. Among other things --and central to the constitution of the social sciences (which are themselves distinctive and representative of the Western tradition)--, the Modern West is politically liberal (e.g., Locke), and economically liberal and capitalist (e.g., Adam Smith). It is also committed to the notion of progress (often now called "development"), which appears in much of what you'll read.
 

WHAT SMITH SAYS

      Philosophers of the Enlightenment are associated especially with two places: the France of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, etc., and the Scotland of Hume, Robertson, Kames, Smith, etc. If there's a foundational figure for our world, it must be Adam Smith. His Wealth of Nations is the text which finally does away with the existing ideas about political economy (mercantilism) and outlines what the nineteenth century calls "capitalist" thinking, or "classical liberal economics".

        Among other things, mercantilists had thought that wealth could not be increased (just ripped off, or transferred from one country to another: pirates, warfare, trade restrictions) whereas Smith begins with the observation that wealth has increased, through a change in the organization of producers' work: namely, the division of labour.

        The selections you'll read express some of his claims, but don't include his most obvious contribution to modern economics: the theory of a "natural" dynamic relation between supply, demand, and price: the "law of supply and demand". The late anthropologist Louis Dumont pointed out that Smith's most significant move is to finally establish "the economy" as a separate and unique sector of social life, subject to its own "laws". The very idea that the supply/demand relation is "natural" and law-following ("scientific") implies that Society has separate sectors within which separate laws apply. Specifically, Smith argued that the political realm (the state) should interfere as little as possible in the economy (we now call this a "conservative" political position or "neo-liberal" economic argument). Contemporary neoliberal economics and politics is far more anti-government than Smith was, however. Believing in self-interest as the spring of each person's action, Smith also saw the state as a sometimes necessary counterbalance to the inherent tendencies of capitalist enterprise: toward monopoly, for example.

        He argued that all individuals act in their own self-interest, but also that none of us is likely to understand the consequences of our own actions. There is, for Smith, no predictable relation between our intentions and the outcome of our actions. And that's illustrated by the fact that, though everyone had acted selfishly, the outcome in his time was an improvement in the living standards of all. We don't intend things to get better for others, but, by the magic of the competitive market ("the hidden hand"), they do. Private Vice leads to Public Virtue. Planning and intervention are foolish, generally, based on a false confidence that we know what we're doing. Because Smith is an uncompromising critic of prideful people, overconfident in their insight, he can be very entertaining to read (as, for example, in his discussion of universities).

        Outcomes have little to do with our rational intentions. They arise only from individual choices added together. Each of us makes a series of decisions in our roles as consumer or producer, and the movement of the economy is the aggregate outcome of all those decisions. This view is atomistic, in the same sense that the modern physics and chemistry arising from the scientific revolution of the 1600's are called atomistic. The characteristics of a larger whole (the economy; or a substance) are explained by discovering the characteristics of the parts which make it up (decisions made by individuals; or molecules). Many of the passages you'll read present a partial characterization of the "human nature" which propels decision-making, and that nature is always a feature of individuals. This is, again, "methodological individualism": the individual is real and has qualities, such as reason, calculation, selfishness, and laziness, and the "economy" just arises as the outcome of willful choices: it is a secondary product, an artificial (and, for Smith, unintended) outcome.
 

WHAT DOES SMITH HAVE TO DO WITH ANTHROPOLOGY?
 

        Now notice what Locke and Smith's atomistic explanation of things in terms of the motives and psychology of the individual has done to society: it has carved out of the confusion of daily life one clearly demarcated domain called "government", and another called "economy". Further, Locke was careful to show that family life was separate from political life, and both begin by distinguishing the individual from the social. Society has been separated from the individual, and then sub-divided conceptually into distinct spheres, each (perhaps) with its own appropriate parts, values, motives, dynamics, and goals. Eventually, each of these packages would also get its own "social science": psychology, sociology, economics, politics, etc: look at any University chart of the "disciplines" (where you'll also notice that "the arts", generally conceived as the imaginative products of individuals, are put in a different box). Or, look at the way in which textbooks in anthropology and sociology most commonly present their material: as a series of chapters on the "institutions" of society: the family, politics, the economy, religion, and so forth. {Louis Dumont argues that the first modern move away from the holistic view of a sacred (though fallen) God-given social life, which was the characteristic view of the European Middle Ages, was a separation of politics from the sacred whole (and thus from "relgion"). Smith then disentangled economy from politics.}

        Partly, this way of talking tries to make "society" a legitimate object of "scientific" analysis. Look: society has parts, too, and we have discovered them and can analyze each of them separately: you do politics, I'll do economy, and she'll do the family.... You can't study everything all at once, so you divide the object of study into its natural parts and try to understand each of them: this is called "analysis" and is the technique associated with modern science, which is one of the central committments of Western modernity. {Please note: not all "scientific" analyses of society are individualist, tending to explain social things by individual psychology, but right now we are looking at liberal individualism. And these are major categories of Western common sense.}

        Is there really any such identifiable thing as "an economy", and is family life or political life really separate from it, so that each can be studied as if it were self-contained and subject to its own laws? What do we misrepresent when we draw such boundaries, and why? For example, economists generally do not consider the unpaid work done in the home (or by volunteers) to be productive work whose value they need to count when estimating the productivity of "the economy". But in many societies, people think of their family life and their economic life as (at least ideally) the same thing: they work to live (not live to work), they cooperate in doing what's necessary, they share in the product, and they may therefore think of work done in and by the household as the very heart of the economy.

        What categories are anthropologists to use in comparing one society to another? Is it useful to assume that all societies have economies, and politics, and... ?