The Wealth of Nations_ Books 4-5 - Adam Smith [20]
A great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures in which labour is most subdivided, were originally the invention of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it.144
But Smith is now suggesting that the flow of invention and of technical change associated with the division of labour in production may be adversely affected by it.
Smith’s account of the consequences of ‘mental mutilation’145helps to explain the decline in martial spirit in advanced societies, and also serves to suggest that the division of labour may adversely affect man’s capacity for moral judgement:
The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.146
The link with the analysis of the ‘means by which’ we form judgements concerning what is fit and proper to be done or avoided, as elaborated in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is obvious. So too is Smith’s judgement that economic development may contribute to limit our capacity for moral judgement, especially as it affects the man of ‘low condition’.147
While he remains in a country village his conduct may be attended to, and he may be obliged to attend to it himself. In this situation, and in this situation only, he may have what is called a character to lose. But as soon as he comes into a great city, he is sunk in obscurity and darkness.148
To offset these tendencies, Smith modified his earlier treatment of productive and unproductive labour in suggesting that the state should encourage ‘all those who for their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing; by all sorts of dramatic representations and exhibitions’.149It was in this context that he also advocated military education,150and other forms of instruction. He believed that ‘the most essential parts of education… to read, write and account, can be acquired at so early a period of life, that the greater part even of those who are to be bred to the lowest occupations, have time to acquire them.’151He added:
The public can impose upon almost the whole body of the people the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education, by obliging every man to undergo an examination or probation in them before he can obtain the freedom in any corporation, or be allowed to set up any trade either in a village or town corporate.152
Smith advocated that the poor should be encouraged to act in this way since they typically lack either incentive or inclination to provide an education for their children. The poor, he observed, have little time to spare for education; as soon as children ‘are able to work, they must apply to some trade by which they can earn their subsistence’.153In a telling passage in his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Smith noted that ‘a boy of six or seven years of age at Birmingham can gain this threepence or sixpence a day, and parents find it to be in their interest to set them soon to work. Thus their education is neglected.’154The problem is again, in part, one of market failure.
Smith also confirmed the importance of an educated middling and higher rank, on the grounds that their influence would contribute to ensure a degree of social stability in a context where the lower orders might well be subject to the delusions of superstition and enthusiasm. For Smith, an important remedy was to be found in
the study of science and philosophy, which the state might render almost universal among all people of middling or more than middling rank and fortune… by instituting some sort of probation, even in the higher and more difficult sciences,