Bond Snodgrass tracks the trajectory of the practice of self-interest from a noble aspiration to plain selfishness.
Every year, unwitting introductory economics students worldwide crack open their shiny new textbooks and are soon taught that self-interest powers the beating heart of economics.
This means maximising utility if you are a consumer and profit if you are a company without regard for consequences—in other words, selfishness.
Sadly, self-interest is far removed from its noble roots. When first proposed as a guidepost for economics in the Enlightenment era, it was synonymous with individual liberty. So how did this happen?
Claude Helvetius and Adam Smith
Adam Smith, of course, is widely credited with introducing “self-interest” into economics. In 1776, he penned the now-famous, widely cited passage in his classic Wealth of Nations.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
Smith, however, was not the first philosopher to engage with the idea of “self-interest;” the concept had flourished in the Enlightenment era and came to animate influential thinkers such as Claude Helvetius, Frances Hutcheson, Cesar Beccaria, Jacques Turgot and Jeremy Bentham.
The sensation of self-love is the only basis on which we can place the foundation of a useful morality.
The French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvetius was a particularly fierce advocate. In 1758, he published De l’Esprit, translated into English as Essays on the Mind. To Helvetius, self-interest (or amour propre, “love of oneself”, in the French phrasing), was a fundamental, universal principle: “If the physical universe is subject to the laws of motion,” Helvetius wrote, then “the moral universe is subject to those of interest.” Consequently, “…the sensation of self-love is the only basis on which we can place the foundation of a useful morality.”
Helvetius also influenced Adam Smith. Soon after De l’Esprit’s publication, the philosopher David Hume, one of Smith’s most important mentors, wrote to Adam Smith recommending it: “I believe I have mentioned to you already, Helvetius’ book De l’Esprit. It is worth your reading…” Hume wrote to Smith around April 1759.
Adam Smith also had the chance to discuss the idea with Helvetius himself. Around Christmas 1765, Smith journeyed to Paris for a frenzied sojourn. A year earlier, the French translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments had received a warm reception, making Smith a welcome guest at the leading literary salons of Paris. Among the most agreeable were those hosted by Helvetius and his wife, and Smith attended them contentedly.
Why Was the Idea of “Self-Interest” so Appealing?
So what was it about “self-interest” that resonated so deeply with the collective imagination of these Enlightenment-era thinkers?
Put simply, because it was the right idea for the right time.
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
From their perch in the 18th century, Helvetius, Beccaria, Turgot, Smith, Bentham, and their fellow reformers lived in an epoch when the idea of “individual liberty” barely emerged.
Recall their contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous observation in The Social Contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
Throughout Europe, the feudal vestiges of the monarchy and the church engaged in a furious rear-guard battle against the democratic ideas these thinkers together articulated.
Helvetius, for example, faced a vicious opposition. On publishing De L’Esprit, he was immediately stripped of a position he held in Louis XV’s court, saw the clergy attack his writing as subversive and contrary to all morality and religion, was obliged to recant his views formally, and then forced into a hasty, albeit temporary, exile to Prussia and England.
His book was quickly placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Banned Books. There, it joined Beccaria’s Dei Delitti e delle pene and Enlightenment-era classics by Montesquieu (De l’Esprit de Loi), Diderot (his massive Encyclopedie), Rousseau (The Social Contract), and many, many others.
A Fulcrum in Human Consciousness
We can thus see the 18th century as a sort of fulcrum in human consciousness.
Of course, this is not an original observation; it is simply a restatement of history’s essential conceptualisation of the Enlightenment era.
On one hand, stretching back to the Middle Ages, the governing ideas and associated social structures were limited and constrictive: absolutism in the form of monarchy, church, and aristocracy; imposition in the form of conquest, slavery, and battlefield savagery; and authority in the form of kingship, tradition, and dogma.
At the crest of this fulcrum, tipping it towards the ideas of secularization, rationality, toleration, equality, democracy, individual freedom, and liberty of expression were the writing of Descartes, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau and many others.
In the economic realm, certainly the 18th century saw progress in some parts of Europe in areas such as agricultural productivity and trade, mainly in France, Britain, the Netherlands. More typical of the epoch was poverty, serfdom, stifling taxation and often, starvation; famine, for example, wiped out thousands in France in 1709, Ireland in 1740, Sicily in 1763, and Germany in 1770.
“Laissez-nous faire!”
So, it is no wonder that thinkers such as Beccaria, Turgot, Smith, and Bentham found the idea of “self-interest” in economic affairs appealing.
They wanted to remove the metaphorical “chains” that Rousseau so famously cited and grant people the liberty to sell their labour at the wage they saw fit, lend their money at the interest rate they saw fit, and sell their products in the market they saw fit, at whatever price the market-determined through the free interaction of supply and demand.
In short, they advocated that workers and businesses be allowed to prioritise their self-interest over that of the king, the church, the guild, or the farm owner on whose land the peasant might labour.
Rather than representing a liberating idea, self-interest, as conceived in neoclassical economic theory, has been reduced to mere selfishness.
“Laissez-nous faire,” they demanded! Grant us the freedom to trade! Leave us free to conduct our business affairs as we see fit!
In the late 18th century, advocating for the right to pursue one’s own “self-interest” in commerce and economic affairs was thus a positively liberating, even radical, proposition.
New Ideas for the 21st Century
Yet what may have been a radical notion in the 18th century has stagnated in the 21st Century. Rather than representing a liberating idea, “self-interest,” conceived in neoclassical economic theory, has been reduced to mere selfishness.
For Bond Snodgrass’s blogs on economic morality and spirituality go to his substack.
