Moral supervision and autonomous social order: wages and consumption in 18th-century economic thought

Abstract

Political oeconomy in the 18th century operated in the absence of the conception of an autonomous social order articulated in the later concepts of `the economy' and `society'. Without a self-sustaining mechanism oriented to stability and endogenous economic growth, national prosperity and social order were assumed to depend upon the detailed interventions in economic life that are characteristic of mercantilism and the police of the poor. Smith's theory that autonomous economic growth underpinned a stable order of social interdependencies based upon the division of labour allowed him to move beyond or modify these assumptions. It freed him from the ideas that constant interference in the relationship between agriculture and manufacturing was necessary in order to guarantee food security and that social order and national prosperity depended upon enforcing constraints upon the interests of wage earners.