5. Smith might be described as one of the first social scientists, seeking to analyze society ‘objectively’. What would be the way to defend that argument? How does he compare with Machiavelli, of which the same is often said?
The ways we derive value from people, systems, and events changes constantly through the course of history; for example, Machiavelli used a metric of power in his writing, and consequently, his stratagems revolved specifically and uniquely around the maintenance of power. Plato and Aristotle valued virtue, allowing it to function as a litmus for well-being (eudaimonia). Hence, Smith values capital. The Wealth of Nations is essentially a treatise on how states can effectively garner economic power, which is of utmost importance to him.
All of these ways of seeing the world are valid and well thought out, but what does it mean to assign objectivity to one of them over the others? It grants a determinist air to a category that is arbitrary, assigning it a common-sense status that allows it to gain control over an academic discourse. When we arbitrarily prize something like capital as the most effective measurement of human achievement, of course Smith seems "objective." This is why the entire field of economics, which is actually just an extremely narrow way of measuring the world, inherits a sense of dominance and credence.
Consider framing capital in other ways that take away this normalization. Capital, like wealth, as Marx says, is merely a measurement of social relation. In other words, it's only one of many ways that we learn to see the world through our interactions with other people. Resisting the beguiling call to normalize the accumulation of economic capital lends a new modality of looking at Smith's text, one that frames it in a matrix of methods we use to calculate and analyze the institutions around us.
ReplyDeleteThe differentiation between the categories of subjectivity and objectivity is a perpetual dilemma that has a root in the development of perception. Lacanian theory asserts the genesis of the aforementioned tension is the stade du miroir, in which the individual accommodates the presence of a reflected image that is discrete from the experience of the physical self. Thus there is a subtle conciliation, culminating in the understanding of the reflected individual as both subjective and objective. This duality afflicts the individual throughout the experience of life, as reality serves the role of the mirror for our individuality. There is a continuous blurring between the objective and subjective as we are lost in the composition of reflections. Thus the arbitrary proposition of objectivity is one that is inherently subjective.