XII

Conclusion

THE AIM OF THIS ESSAY has been to try to explain why the distinction between capitalism and commercial society is worth making. The concept of capitalism began as a term that was used to refer to the private ownership of capital. It was, in short, a property theory; and, because it was a property theory, it could refer as much to individuals and individual ownership as to collectivities and common ownership, including types of ownership that could be said to be negative as much as positive. The concept of a commercial society on the other hand presupposed something more than property and ownership, irrespective of whether the property in question was individual or collective and whether the type of ownership was negative or positive. It presupposed the division of labour. Unlike property, it is not usual, at least in the first instance, to associate the idea of the division of labour with individual activity because the idea of the division of labour calls, minimally, for more than one individual. Robinson Crusoe might well, as Marx pointed out, have been the prototype of proprietary capitalism and the foresight and ingenuity that came with it, but his island existence was a long way away from the division of labour.¹ The division of labour carried out by a single individual is usually called multitasking.

The concept of a commercial society was not, therefore, a property theory. It was instead, and as its name implies, a theory of society. As Smith and Marx both recognised, it was a theory of a society in which individuals are radically dependent upon one another because this, ultimately, is what the division of labour can do. In this respect, the watchwords of a commercial society can be found in the famous first lines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract of 1762. “Man,” he wrote “is born free, but is everywhere in chains. Those who believe themselves to be masters of others are still greater slaves than those they rule. How did this change occur? I do not know. If I [were] to be asked, however, what can make it legitimate, I believe that I am able to answer this question.”²

Rousseau’s answer supplied many of the ideas and concepts discussed in this essay. It is conceivable that it also supplied Smith with the starting point of his never-to-be-completed discussion of how the subjects of justice and expediency—or justice and utility—could both be fundamental to a single political society. This is because the second part of Rousseau’s description of how freedom had turned into slavery did not involve turning slavery back into freedom but simply asserted instead that it was possible to make the change legitimate. Quite a lot, in the light of this acknowledgement, hangs on the word “legitimate,” and part of the point of this essay has been to provide a very schematic indication of the scale of the ground that has had to be covered to get within sight of what legitimacy can involve. As should be clear by now, the ground in question was not only a matter of government, states, and the law, or even, as Rousseau put it, an inquiry into the nature of the social contract, but was also made up as much of the law and legal policy, money and monetary policy, commerce and commercial policy as it was made up of the myriads of ordinary arrangements of civil society and the fiscal and financial institutions of the state. The positive side of this level of complexity is its complexity. So too, sadly, is its negative side.

Complexity, however, calls for thought and for trying to work out the many different things that complicated things actually entail. This is why it is worth finding out more about the early nineteenth-century interest in administration, money, and fiscal policy together with the types of social and political arrangements that could house them. Seen in context, these were the subjects that were once taken to form the basis of a now-forgotten set of answers to the problem of the division of labour. They did so not because any one of them could supply something ready-made but because, together, they were taken to be able to provide the concepts and the information that made thinking about politics and policy in a commercial society possible. In simple systems, if something goes wrong, everything can go wrong. In complicated systems, small changes in one part can either be restricted to that single part, or can have positive effects in other parts, or can be circumvented or neutralised by the addition of further parts. Capitalism, in older renditions, had a built-in capacity for catastrophe. Part of the point of this essay has been to suggest that the division of labour is worse. This is because capitalism, and not only in Marx’s rendition, really does house the possibility of alternatives to capitalism. Even if the expropriators have not all been expropriated, and need and use have not really come back into their own, property and ownership, including the ownership of capital, really do change. It is less clear that there can be any equivalent change to the division of labour because all the many variations on the idea of collective multitasking—from decentralisation to federalisation to multiple organisational units to vertical and horizontal integration to flexible specialisation—look suspiciously like the division of labour in a different guise. The name may change, but the thing itself looks as if it is here to stay.

There have been many alternatives to capitalism, but, as both Ricardo and Hegel recognised, it is far from clear that there is any alternative to the division of labour, other than, simply, its absence. The archaic term “commercial society,” with its now bleakly ambiguous eighteenth-century undertones of doux commerce, is, it seems, more firmly entrenched than its apparently more modern equivalent, capitalism. The many ramifications of the division of labour that commercial societies have come to house are, consequently, more intricate, deep-seated, and complicated than even the surprisingly capacious idea of property seems to have been able to accommodate. As Lorenz von Stein recognised, the concept of social democracy, with its connotations of political inclusiveness and social justice, refers as much to the idea of the division of labour as it does to the noun and the adjective contained in its name. In the nineteenth century, before the idea of a commercial society came to be largely swallowed up by the concept of capitalism, a great deal of careful, imaginative, and creative thought went into trying to work out what to do about both the positive and the negative sides of the division of labour. The question of how to reconcile the two sides gave rise to many, now largely forgotten, discussions of private international law, currency and customs unions, tariff and trade regimes, and, more broadly, of the origins and nature of the type of dual political system that was once associated with the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. It was not hard, in a world made up of sovereign states, to identify a gap between the local purchase of government policies and the global reach of the division of labour. It was also not hard, even in a world made up of sovereign states, to think about how to bridge that gap by examining the causal properties of the types of fiscal and financial policies, legal arrangements, and political institutions that were once taken to be compatible with the distinctions between markets and politics, expediency and justice, and civil society and the state that were once associated with the concept of a commercial society. Some of that thought, but only a very small part of it, has formed the subject matter of this book. Quite a lot more will be required for what could come next.