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6 - The Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

David L. Blaney
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Political Science, Macalester College, USA
Naeem Inayatullah
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Politics, Ithaca College, USA
Beate Jahn
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Summary

Indian kinship economics, which, I … understand not as pre-capitalist but as anticapitalist, constitute a powerful and continuing critique of the waste of an expansive, acquisitive capitalism that … [Europe] could not afford to entertain. The loss in social vision was, and is, incalculable.

Eric Cheyfitz

In the standard literature in International Political Economy (IPE), Adam Smith serves as a marker for a ‘classical liberal school of economics’. This ‘economics’ derives from Smith a ‘shared and coherent set of assumptions’ about the drive to truck and barter as the impetus to inevitable and inexorable human material improvement and the existence of ‘inviolable laws’ of economic life that mandate free markets internally and free trade internationally. Others within IPE and International Relations (IR) have complicated this view even if their efforts have failed to dislodge the standard reading. Additional readings may be useful for those who embed economics within 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 to: (1) focus on an often neglected intellectual influence on Smith – the Jesuit Father Lafitau; (2) critically examine the comparative ethnology that Smith uses to develop a theory of human progress and insulate commercial society from moral critique; and, perhaps most fruitfully, (3) recover potential ethical resources that help us assess the present state of global capitalism.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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