2
treat economics as based in a richly debated history. In this chapter, we emphasize the role the
Amerindians play in Smith’s work. Reading Smith against the theme of “savagery” allows us:
(1) to focus on an often neglected intellectual influence on Smith—the Jesuit Father Lafitau; (2)
to critically examine the comparative ethnological strategy that Smith uses to develop a theory of
human progress and insulate a commercial society from moral critique; and, perhaps most
fruitfully, (3) to recover potential ethical resources that help us assess the present state of global
capitalism.
Linking comparative ethnology and Adam Smith may seem surprising, since neither
Smith nor any of the key Scottish social thinkers made the voyage to the New World.
Nonetheless, their encounters with the Indians were no less profound than those of earlier
adventurers, missionaries, and scholars whose reports they inherited. It was in and through these
reports that the Scots journeyed. Their travels were, as Anthony Padgen has put it, “cognitive,” a
“travel in the mind’s eye.”
4
And, in their constructions of the Indian’s place in human history,
the Scots identified the Indians as travelers on a common human path. In the minds of Smith and
his fellow Scots, the Indians were embarked on a great journey towards Europe – that is, towards
Europe’s present.
The need to chart the location of the Indians had a long prior history. Since the
‘discovery’ of the Americas, Europeans had struggled to make sense of continents and peoples
both unfamiliar and difficult to digest within the confines of scriptural and classical authority.
5
Many viewed the physical and social distance of the peoples of the New World from the singular
“Adam Smith and the Liberal Tradition in International Relations,” Review of International Studies 22:1 (1996), pp.
5-28.
4
Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993), p. 30.
Convention