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Hisown proposal is for the competition of two or three hundred, or perhaps.as many thousand small sects, as had been favored in England towardthe end of the Civil War; a plan of ecclesiastical government, or moreproperly of no ecclesiastical government. 125The interdependence of commerce and government, in this setting ofregulated markets and interested officials, is at the heart of Smith s theoryof economic reform, as it was for Turgot and for Condorcet.Manufac-turers are churchwardens and aldermen and the counsellors of legislators,as well as people who buy wool and sell coats; whenever the legislatureCopyright © 2001 The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeExam Copy Economic Dispositions 3333attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen,its counsellors are always the masters, Smith says.126 Condorcet made aneffort, both in the Réflexions sur le commerce des blés and in his Vie de M.Turgot, to distinguish between true and political entrepreneurs: between true merchants and accredited traders, who pursue their own inter-ests by conniving in government regulations, thereby avoiding the com-petition of traders who are not rich enough to have patrons. 127 But thechoice for the merchant, in general, was between different, more or lessregulated markets, and between different, more or less political strate-gies for pursuing his interests.Even his interests were political as well aseconomic, and political influence was itself a form of consumption.AsCondorcet wrote, arguing against the taxes on luxury consumption whichSmith supported, Instead of buying horses, people will buy hangers-onand positions; for expenditures on taste.they will substitute expendi-tures on intrigue. 128The idea of vexation, which was of such central importance to Smith s,Turgot s, and Condorcet s descriptions of the sentiments of economic life,is similarly important to their theories of the state and of political oppres-sion.Vexation is indeed a particular, personal form of the abuse of power,characteristic of the enforcement of commercial and fiscal rules.There areother (and worse) abuses: when Smith says of religious incorporations thatthey use the fear of eternal misery, or all the terrors of religion, to protecttheir own interest, then he is talking about the abuse of spiritual power;when Condorcet speaks of the inequality of rights within families aninequality, in his words, between the two sexes then he is talking, as heexplains, about the abuse of force. 129 But the particular circumstances ofvexation arise because of the interrelatedness of political and economiclife, of the dominions of government and of commerce.Economic life isnot a distinct universe, a side of life.People have the same personalities,or the same sentiments, in their economic lives (their lives as merchantsor customs officers) as in the rest of their lives.They bring their fearsand their enmities with them, from one side of their social relationships tothe next.The most oppressive of all institutions, for Smith and Turgot, are theincorporations and communities of civil society.The mastership and ap-prenticeship guilds were considered to be little hells of vexation.They pro-vided a propitious setting for the abuse of personal power; they were pri-vate associations, protected by the inexact and arbitrary force of publiclaw.Turgot s edict for the suppression of the mastership guilds, in 1776,described the regulations of the guilds as bizarre, tyrannical, and contraryCopyright © 2001 The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeExam Copy 34 Economic Sentiments34to humanity and morality. For the advocate-general Séguier, as for Burkein 1790, the effect of reform would be to undermine (rather than to repair ) the ancient foundations of the state, or the very edifice ofthe political constitution. The communities were like little republics within the state, Séguier said, in which each worked for the good of all,and without which no artisan would be more than an isolated being. 130But it is just this power, of a republic within the republic, that was forSmith so insidious.The apprenticeship guilds, in Smith s description, wereenclosed worlds of oppression, whose bylaws were supported by the pub-lic law of the kingdom. 131 They were places of fluctuating jurisprudenceand unpredictably enforced laws.The institutions which flourished in thecommon dominions of states and markets, that is to say, were no morefree, and no more enlightened, than the institutions of the political edi-fice itself.INDULGENCE AND INDIFFERENCEThe distinction between the enemies and the enthusiasts of enlightenmentis itself unfamiliar, in these disorderly times.It is different and less constantthan it came to seem in the post-Revolutionary world.The sense of theenlightenment as a society or sect was conspicuous, as has been seen, inthe polemics of the 1790s.It is also at the heart of one of the most pro-found charges against enlightenment thought.The philosophers and theeconomists were telling a great lie, in the view of their critics, when theysaid that they were concerned with the dispositions, or the spirit, of mil-lions of men and women.They were in truth concerned with no morethan their own dispositions, and their own schemes.They wanted a peoplewho would obey their own, tutelary authority.They were a sect, and theypretended to be the theorists of a new world of public understanding.This is the charge, at its most coruscating, of duplicity in the sight ofeternity: Lamennais s charge, against Voltaire, of a double indifference, inwhich religion is an amusement for men of letters, and necessary only forthe people.132 It is Tocqueville s charge, against the Économistes, againstQuesnay and Letrosne and Mercier, of wishing to reconstruct the spirit ofindividuals to fit their own model of essential order, or their own imaginary society. The role of the state, for the Économistes, was inTocqueville s description not only to command the nation, but to shapeit in a certain way ; to form the spirit of the citizens, to imbue themwith the ideas and sentiments which the state itself deems necessary: It does not simply reform men, it transforms them. 133Copyright © 2001 The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeExam Copy Economic Dispositions 3535One crime of the enlightenment, in the view of its early critics, was tohave led other people into sin, in a frivolous, sometimes demonic uncon-cern with the consequences of one s own policies. I sent some books tomy binder, among others the Systême de la Nature, Madame La Baronnewrites at the outset of the abbé Barruel s anti-philosophical novel LesHelviennes, published shortly before the Revolution.The binder s appren-tice spent the night leafing through these books, and took some libertieswith his master s daughter, to whom he said confidently that there wasno hell, and he had just read it in one of Madame La Baronne s books. 134The advocate-general Séguier, in his oration in defense of the jurandes,imagined that Paris would be overwhelmed by a crowd of apprentices es-caped from the workshops, in whom the spirit of subordination will belost. Of Turgot s (and Louis XVI s) description of guild regulations as bi-zarre and contrary to morality, he said that he could not repeat it without a sort of trembling
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