The Anthropology of Liberalism: Smith and Us

Is liberalism premised on an unrealistically individualist anthropology? In one regularly told story about modernity, the earliest liberals grounded their arguments for political liberty in a picture of human nature that centered on our moral autonomy, perhaps epitomized best in Kantian thought. However, a range of critics have now compellingly argued that such accounts of our agency are descriptively inaccurate, and that normative social projects beginning from such flawed foundations are thus unstable. While this paper accepts this criticism of individualist anthropologies, it proposes that this need not identify a problem with liberalism overall. To make this case, this paper turns to Adam Smith, who grounded his early advocacy of liberalism in an anthropology grounded in natural theology that depicts us as morally interconnected, rather than as autonomous, and as always morally impressionable. As it will explain, Smith presumed an account of character as integrally related to and influenced by the agent’s social context, for both better and worse. Furthermore, he wove his attentiveness to this complex interaction between the agent and their context into both his economic analyses and political proposals. Smith’s social vision thus illustrates how a strong regard for individual liberty is fully compatible with a sophisticated anthropology that recognizes our malleability as moral agents – and even with political proposals that capitalize upon this malleability. Smith’s thought thus offers useful resources for contemporary proponents of liberalism who wish to value the dignity of individuals without basing that valuation in unrealistic abstractions, or ignoring the responsibilities engendered by the fact of our ongoing moral formation by our social contexts.