The Legacy of Adam Smith: A Conversation With Jesse Norman MP

“Smith’s answer is that human beings have a basic capacity to observe, to be aware of, and in due course to be moved by the feeling of others. He calls that sympathy.” How did Adam Smith's insights into morality and sociology transform the modern world? Do they offer answers to the deepest political challenges of the twenty-first century? Jesse Norman MP discusses his new book on Smith with Mark Pennington on the Governance Podcast.

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The Guest

Jesse Norman MP was appointed Minister of State for the Department for Transport on 12 November 2018. He was previously Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department for Transport from June 2017 to 9 November 2018. He was elected as the MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire in May 2010.

Before entering politics Jesse was a Director at Barclays, researched and taught philosophy at University College London, and ran a charitable project in Communist Eastern Europe.

His books and pamphlets include ‘The achievement of Michael Oakeshott’, ‘After Euclid’, ‘Compassionate conservatism’ and ‘The big society’. His book ‘Edmund Burke: politician, philosopher, prophet’ was listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Political Book Awards and the George Orwell Prize. He has also written regularly for the national press.

Skip Ahead

00:38: Why write a book about Adam Smith, and why now?

3:05: What is Smith’s view of human nature, and the role of empathy within it?

9:17: If you look at the Theory of Moral Sentiments, there’s the idea that moral order doesn’t need to come from a legislator [or from God] – it is a bottom-up account of how rules are developed.

12:15: One thing critics say about Smith is that he has a purely descriptive account of morality—it’s describing how people act in ways to seek others’ praise, but that doesn’t address whether the action itself is actually worthy of praise.

15:17: In the Smithian account of morals, how do morals change? If what others perceive I should do is not what I think I should do, how do I challenge that public view?

18:40: I think The Theory of Moral Sentiments can help us understand things like celebrity culture, or what goes on in social media. People looking for ‘likes’ on Facebook is very much praise and blame. But there’s a tension here: this is how moral norms are enforced, but Smith also talks about the “man within the breast,” the person who knows what is really praiseworthy.

21:35: In my view, what the invisible hand is referring to is a kind of social process, it’s an understanding that there are emergent properties in society, when people interact and then something emerges which is more than the sum of its parts and which wasn’t anticipated by its participants… it’s the unintended consequences of spontaneous order.

24:45: If you have a theory of the invisible hand, you might also have theories of how the invisible hand can break down. Economists have theories of market failure, but does Smith have a theory of moral failure?

27:45: When we’re talking about morality, yes we can point to celebrity culture as being a moral market failure, but what’s the alternative? Would the Smithian account favour a legislative response?

31:10: You’re very good at explaining that Smith is, in some ways, an egalitarian… the challenge is, and I think this is a problem that no one’s cracked—what do we do when people who acquire economic power then try to use the state to limit competition?

37:00: We know that financial markets have important information asymmetries… that’s a standard argument some people use to argue for regulation…. But equally, we know that regulation can be captured by big players. To solve a market failure, you end up with a governance failure.

40:28: One of the things I take from Smith is a scepticism about politicians… how do we constrain politicians?