The forms of labor in Adam Smith and his readers

Adam Smith's writing made up an important part of the cultural competence of a nineteenth-century intellectual. Writers drew on a range of Smith's illustrations including the description of the pin factory from The Wealth of Nations , the assault on systematic reform condensed by The Theory of Moral Sentiments into the parable of a chessboard, and the sweeping concept of division of labor with which Smith identifies what is distinctive about a modern society. By calling upon, and revising, such descriptive particles, writers as disparate as William Hazlitt, Walter Scott, and Karl Marx could simultaneously invoke and contest what Jean-François Lyotard has called modernity's “grand narratives.” Allusions to Smith accurately record the ever-shifting contours of nineteenth-century social imagination: its preoccupation with work and large-scale economic organization, its interest in the causes and consequences of specialization, and its economistic models of social phenomena (friendship for Charles Dickens, a picnic for Herbert Spenser) that lay beyond the economy proper. Nineteenth-century revisions of Smith can be oblique—Hazlitt, for example, answers Smith's pin factory with a troupe of jugglers—but they go to the heart of the period's concerns, helping us to reconsider problems already well-defined in the academic literature, issues such as the character of highly specialized labor, the relationship between sociological thought and the multiplot Victorian novel, and the status of art and the artist in an advanced culture. The dissertation seeks to renew our sense of the nuances of nineteenth-century political language, too quickly dismissed as ideology: both the pressures that language exerts upon thought and the ways in which it substantially extends comprehension, the possibilities of tactical affirmation and denial it confers upon its users, and its peculiar location somewhere between mere stock phrasing and received wisdom. I argue that Smith's greatest impact was as a writer, a describer of work and society, and that his effect was felt most keenly by other imaginative writers—indeed the most perceptive corrections and rejoinders to Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations come not from sociologists or students of politics but from novelists like George Eliot and poets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning.