The moral foundations of Adam Smith’s transitional society: Reappraising Foucault’s representations of wealth and Marx’s reconstruction of value theory

Abstract

Foucault was preoccupied with Smith’s alteration of the concept of labor as a unique representation of wealth. Smith, contrary to his contemporaries, posited labor as the determining sign that represents money and exchange and designates the economic existence of all signs of wealth. Foucault stated that Smith took the incipient step from the old science of wealth to the modern political economy. However, it is equally important to discern the fact that Smith did not separate his economic content from his overall concern about morality. When transposing Foucault’s analysis of wealth onto Smith’s moral science, Foucault’s fundamental conclusion is reaffirmed: that Smith developed his theory of a moral subject, simultaneously engaged in laboring and exchanging processes, within the classical episteme. At the same time, Smith attempted to revise this episteme and gave indications about its epistemological limitations. On the one hand, Marx’s historical-critical approach underlines the ideological tensions between a text as a material product of historical social relations and the ideological appropriation and restructuring of the text by the present-day dominant class. On the other hand, it traces the inherent logical contradiction and omissions of the text. This approach demonstrates Smith’s affinities with the eighteenth-century science of man and that the transition towards capitalism determined both his value theory and his moral system.