Adam Smith’s economic man arises from language, reason, and interdependence, not naked self-interest.

Evidence

However, if we take our cue from Foucault’s appreciation of polyvalent discourses and heterogeneous histories, the emergence of homo oeconomicus may not mean that homo politicus vanishes or even becomes subordinate. Indeed, if we return to Smith, we can see that when he first introduces our trucking and bartering propensities, he is careful to stipulate marketeering as but one quality of being human. Nor is it primary and unmediated. Rather, Smith rests this quality in our capacity for language, deliberation, calculation, and a certain self-sovereignty in an intensely interdependent world. Immediately after introducing the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange, Smith says that it is less likely an “original principle” of human nature than “the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech” and of our complex and singular species interdependence. Language and calculation facilitate deal making, itself animated by our intense need for one another. We bargain, he says, to provide advantage to others in meeting our own needs, something neither required nor possible from the more autarkic creatures of the animal world, something dependent upon a degree of knowledge, calculation, and relationality unavailable to other animals. In short, while homo oeconomicus certainly operates according to interest for Smith, the form of interest is neither primordial nor unhistorical. Arising from need amid interdependence, interest is facilitated by language and reason and generates relations of mutual benefit through exchange. Far from a creature of naked interest, Adam Smith’s homo oeconomicus is premised on and saturated with deliberation, self-direction, and restraint, all basic ingredients of sovereignty. Moreover, as readers of his Theory of Moral Sentiments know well, self-interest is hardly an exclusive or even central node in his account of human nature. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 185

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes precisely what homo oeconomicus meant in Smith’s original account — reason-and-speech-grounded exchange, not primitive interest — which is the baseline against which Brown measures neoliberalism’s rupture.
• XREF: Connects to standard readings of Smith in classical political economy and to Foucault’s lectures that Brown is arguing against. — connects to: Supply-side economics descends directly from Smith’s saving-drives-investment theory — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 296; Adam Smith’s homo economicus was culturally specific, not a natural universal type — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 86; Adam Smith held that people pursue wealth for social regard, not necessity. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of…, 437 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Adam Smith held that people pursue wealth for social regard, not necessity. #expands (0.85) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 437
• Smith grounded capitalism in a natural human disposition to save rather than spend #contradicts (0.80) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 298
• Adam Smith himself warned that fellow traders habitually conspire against the public #qualifies (0.80) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 775
• For Smith, corporations are legal state-created bodies distinct from entrepreneurs #corroborates (0.75) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 377