The Scottish Enlightenment and public governance of the economic system

Abstract

It is by now well-known that an important part of Scottish enlightenment philosophy, starting from Adam Smith, fed the idea that an honestly ruled society must conform to the system of rules elaborated by natural freedoms. On more strictly economic and social grounds, this translates into the conception of free economic system whose rules naturally push individuals towards wealth and freedom: the interest of everybody to pursue his own happiness changes into general wellbeing and consequently into the stability of the whole society. In this essay, the author analyses the notion of natural system of liberty, highlighting ambiguousness and incoherencies which make it appear as an “artificial” product. Besides the “power” of individual interest, in society a whole series of other tendencies acts, and which are conflicting among themselves and which, for this reason, place themselves between the achievement of social and economic balance. In such a way we can find that, in light of the experience and of that which has been highlighted by other scholars in the last decades, true wishful thinking, generated by the most eminent Scottish Enlightenment followers in order to support their ideal of society, is hidden behind the natural system of liberty. More generally, this demonstrates that the rules (including those which regulate free trade) are the fruit of a social friction: they do not assert themselves ex nihilo, on the contrary they are produced by man, who affirms them according to thoughts, tradition and juridical culture of a given society within a given historical context.