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.The most powerful of hispolitical writings, about individual rights, about public instruction, andabout the freedom of thought and discussion, reflect an explicit and poi-gnant response to the destruction of Revolutionary principles under thedespotism of 1791 1793.In several matters of economic policy, Smith and Condorcet, con-fronted with similar questions, provided different answers.Fiscal reformwas one such matter, and Condorcet s only serious criticism of Smith wasover his support in the Wealth of Nations for the indirect taxation (oncarriages and other luxuries) which Condorcet, Turgot, and Dupont deNemours regarded as a purgatory of vexation.16 Smith was in general farless impetuous than Condorcet with respect to commercial, fiscal, and le-gal reform.Like Condorcet, Smith regarded Turgot and his reform edictsof 1776 with veneration.17 But he was skeptical of many projects of institu-tional reform, especially toward the end of his life.The competition to in-vent a new, simple legal form for the transfer of property rights establishedin the 1780s by Joseph Windisch-Grätz the Austrian count who trans-lated Aufklärung as populorum cultura provides a good illustration.Condorcet was an enthusiastic supporter of the project, which combinedthe late eighteenth-century passions for universal (or at least for Euro-pean) reform, for rational jurisprudence, for the security of propertyrights, and for literary competitions.Smith s eventual suggestion, after aprotracted and inconclusive correspondence, was that Windisch-Grätzshould confine his efforts to improving the style books used by lawyersin various countries, and in Austria in particular: These collections, whichare the produce of the wisdom and experience of many successive genera-tions, I believe to be, with all their faults (and the best that I have seen areCopyright © 2001 The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeExam Copy A Fatherless World 223223not without many faults) much more perfect than anything which, eitherany single man or any single Society of men are capable of inventing. 18UNCERTAINTY AND IRRESOLUTIONThere are other respects in which Smith s and Condorcet s economic andphilosophical thought is far more similar; they have been the principal sub-ject of this book.The most evident of these similar inquiries these similarways of thinking has to do with the freedom of commerce.Freedom inone s economic life is an end in itself, for Smith as for Condorcet.It maywell be good as a means to the end of increasing general (or individual)welfare; it is also good in itself. It is but equity, besides, as Smith said ofthe liberal reward of labor which is the consequence of freedom from reg-ulation of the price of work.19 Or as Condorcet said, more portentously, inhis Vie de M.Turgot, there is a more noble justification for the freedom ofcommerce than its utility, however extensive that may be. 20 Economic lifeis difficult or impossible to distinguish from the rest of life, and one s free-dom to buy or sell or lend or travel or work is difficult to distinguish fromthe rest of one s freedom.Smith s and Condorcet s descriptions of inter-ference with the freedom of commerce are sometimes extraordinarily con-crete.The laborer or the artisan wishes to carry something along a certainroad, and he finds it blocked by subaltern officials; he wishes to enter a cer-tain room, and he finds it closed to him, because he is not a member of acertain guild; he wishes to live in a certain village, and he is seized by theservants of churchwardens and removed to the village in which he wasborn; he wishes to live quietly in his own home, and the servants of cus-toms and excise officers enter to search his house.Smith, like Condorcet, refers frequently to freedom of trade, libertyof trade, natural liberty. But the distinctness of economic freedom the sense in which there is a special, innocuous kind of freedom, a freedomwhich, in the words of the friends of Coleridge s shipowner, was neces-sary to the prosperity of Trade and Commerce, a necessary Evil in the pro-cess of moneygetting was an innovation of the 1790s, as was seen inChapter 2.21 So too was the abstractness of economic freedom; its distinct-ness from all the concrete details of political and personal oppression.Both Smith and Condorcet were exceptional, even in the setting of thepre-Revolutionary world, in their preoccupation with the personal detailsof freedom of commerce.There is very little about the sentiments ofbrewers and seamstresses in the writings of Quesnay, for example, or ofCopyright © 2001 The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeExam Copy 224 Economic Sentiments224Dupont de Nemours.In the later setting of the post-Revolutionary recon-struction, Smith s and Condorcet s sense of freedom was seen as confus-ing, and subversive.Condorcet s writings on the freedom of commercewere of virtually no interest in the period of Say s or George Pryme sredefinition of political economy as the science concerned with wealth ;Smith was seen as the last theorist of an earlier, confused time, in which itwas not yet understood that the scientific principles of political economywere applicable alike to a despotism and to a democracy. 22The second preoccupation which is common to Smith and to Condor-cet is with economic sentiments.Economic life is full of vexations, of visi-tations, of the concrete details of oppression.It is also full of emotions.Individuals decide to become common sailors, in Smith s description, be-cause they are disposed to like adventure, and because they are influencedby the sight of the ships and the conversation of seaport towns: The dis-tant prospect of hazards.is not disagreeable to us. Dealers in malt andhops dislike trouble, vexation, and oppression, and though vexation isnot, strictly speaking, expence, it is certainly equivalent to the expence atwhich every man would be willing to redeem himself from it. 23 Condor-cet, writing to Necker in the pseudonymous person of a laborer of Picardy,says that the obligation to make declarations to a judicial tribunal aboutthe destination of one s corn will be enough to make one disgusted withthis commerce. Do you think we will risk [our] savings, he asks, in or-der to be exposed to having quarrels with the petty officials of your legis-lation, to be held to ransom by your secret agents? 24 The popular odiumattached to corn dealers, in both Condorcet s and Smith s description, issuch as to attract only men without character, or for whom the prospectof public dislike is only a modest disincentive.25Smith s system of moral sentiments exercised a profound influenceon Condorcet s moral thought, both in his early exchanges with Turgotabout Helvétius, and, most directly, in his last writings of the 1790s aboutpublic instruction and the future society of the Tenth Epoch. As thenineteenth-century scholar Mathurin Gillet wrote, in a study of Condor-cet s utopia, Condorcet is the servile disciple of no master, althoughhis inclination of preference is to the sentimentalism of Adam Smith. 26Economic relationships, like moral relationships, are for Condorcet suf-fused with sentiments.The essential disposition of moral life, for Condor-cet as for Smith, is to think oneself into the feelings of other people; to feelsympathy.This is similar, in its reflexiveness, to the disposition of eco-nomic life
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