Adam Smith’s homo economicus was culturally specific, not a natural universal type

Evidence

In his opening address at the inaugural MPS Conference, the Swiss economist and diplomat William Rappard depicted his colleagues as the inheritors of both Adam Smith’s economic science and his liberal politics. What Smith did not realise, this well-travelled diplomat argued, was that the ‘economic man’ underpinning his science was ‘like Smith himself, a Scotchman who preferred to work and to save rather than idly to enjoy idleness’. Rappard contrasted this ‘Scotch brand of homo economicus’, for whom work was a virtue and saving a characteristic trait, with the Algerian Arabs he had witnessed in Algiers five years earlier, shunning work and enjoying themselves by sitting idly on the pavements. Had Smith been ‘reared among the sun-baked race of Arabs who prefer leisure to work’ and equality to liberty, he speculated, ‘would his semi-tropical economic man not have led him quite consistently to preach a very different doctrine?’ Smith’s liberal economics, Rappard believed, could only thrive in conditions inhabited by a very distinctive subject. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 86

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on homo economicus as a constructed/idealized figure and colonial racial hierarchies in liberal economics (e.g. McCloskey, Tuck, or the anticolonial critique of liberalism). — connects to: Supply-side economics descends directly from Smith’s saving-drives-investment theory — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 296; Smith grounded capitalism in a natural human disposition to save rather than spend — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 298; Adam Smith’s economic man arises from language, reason, and interdependence, not naked self-interest. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 185 (+5 more)
• CANDY: The image of Smith’s ‘economic man’ as specifically a thrifty Scotchman, contrasted with idle Algerian Arabs, is a vivid, quotable tidbit. But it needs context to land, so borderline.

Broader Connections

• Adam Smith’s economic man arises from language, reason, and interdependence, not naked self-interest. #corroborates (0.90) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 185
• A German economist rejected homo economicus in favor of a culturally embedded homo institutionalis #expands (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 329
• Economic abstractions are historically determined, not universal or extra-historical #expands (0.85)
• Homo economicus is a grid of intelligibility, not a full anthropology, enabling governability #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1317
• Economists equated the bourgeoisie with homo economicus to naturalize class society #corroborates (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1128
• Early ethnography arose from a project to define humanity as naturally industrious #expands (0.75) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 345