“Give us this day our daily bread.” Although Adam Smith was at best an indifferent member of the Kirk of Scotland, he would have been familiar with the words Jesus preached to his followers in the Sermon on the Mount. The Lord’s Prayer speaks to one of the most fundamental questions of human survival. How will we be fed? Where will your next meal come from?
These questions were important to Smith. His answers to them appear in what Samuel Fleischacker called “his most famous sentence.” [Smith] “It is not out of the benevolence of the butcher, brewer, or baker that we expect our dinner, but out of consideration for their own interests,” he writes in the opening chapter of The Wealth of Nations. “We speak to ourselves toward their self-love rather than their humanity; and we never speak to them about their advantages rather than about their needs” (WN 1.27).
There is a big difference between the Jesus Prayer and Smith’s political economy. First, 18th-century Scots imagine a more sumptuous dinner than 1st-century Jews, with their daily bread accompanied by beef and beer. But what I’m saying is that they’re more similar than we often realize. For both Smith and Jesus, the important thing about getting food is that you need to ask for it.
Smith’s famous passage about the butcher, the brewer, and the baker has been interpreted as placing interest (often silently modified as “selfish”) at the root of human activity. Gregory Mankiw’s widely used introductory economics textbook explains exactly this. “Smith is saying that participants in the economy are motivated by self-interest.” Smith might have said this. His famous sentence may have been: “The butcher, the brewer, and the baker serve us dinner, not out of good will, but out of self-interest. They act not out of humanity, but out of self-love, and pursue their own interests.”
But this is not what Smith wrote. Verbs of judgment and deliberation (‘expect’, ‘consider’), and persuasive communication (‘address’, ‘speak’) distinguish Smith’s actual argument from the simpler alternatives I have just listed and from Mankiw’s paraphrase. For Smith, having dinner means talking to people, especially about “their strengths.” These communication verbs are not empty flourishes. Rather, they reveal larger ideas that are merely implied in this text but elaborated in more detail in Smith’s discussion of the role of profits in retail market transactions in his law lectures.
If we are to explore the principles of the human mind on which this nature of trucking is based, it is clearly a natural tendency that everyone must come to terms with. To us, an offering of one shilling seems to have a very obvious and simple meaning, but in reality we are providing an argument to persuade a person that it is for his own benefit. Men always try to persuade others to conform to their opinion, even if it is not important to them. If you make a claim that contradicts what you believe to be true about China or the more distant Moon, you will immediately try to persuade him to change his opinion. And in this way everyone will practice their oratory against others throughout their lives…In this way they will acquire a certain dexterity and manner of dealing in managing their own affairs, that is, in managing human beings…This is the constant employment and trade of every human being, and just as craftsmen invent easy ways to do their work, so each one here will strive to do this work in the simplest way. This is a barter, by which they act in the self-interest of the other party, and it is unlikely that they will not be able to quickly achieve their goals. (LJ352)
In other words, people feel a deep need to persuade others, even about distant topics such as China or the Moon as seen from Scotland (Smith actually tried to persuade others about this topic in his essay “The History of Astronomy”). Money is a modern labor-saving device for performing the task of persuasion, akin to the windmill or automatic boiler valve whose efficiency Smith praises at the beginning of The Wealth of Nations.
For Smith, money is an “argument.” Sometimes that’s a valid argument, sometimes it’s not. Although Smith embodied the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, there is no record in his memoirs that he ever read a paper to a baker to persuade him to provide the Smith family with bread, or that he offered Jeremy Bentham a guinea to change his mind about usury. As his Lectures on Rhetoric and Berletre make clear, Smith knew that effective persuasion required an awareness of genre, and he saw the conventions of different methods of persuasion as distinct. “No one ever traded in poetry” (LRBL 137).
Thus, if we reduce Smith’s statement about the butcher, the brewer, and the baker to “the participants in the economy (of the ten) are motivated by self-interest,” we are making the argument weaker, but it is a claim with which Smith, and many others who see material gain as one of multiple human motives, would agree. Smith’s principle may be more accurately rephrased as follows: “Humans naturally desire to persuade each other, an impulse at least as basic as speech or reason itself, but through practice and over time, 18 Participants in the century’s commercial economy found that they could be persuaded by appealing to their own interests.”Seen this way, self-interest-based exchanges between vendors and customers are no more a paradigm for understanding all human interactions than all human beings use windmills or boiler valves. Rather, such interactions are one case in a broader class of phenomena that fall under the more general heading of “the natural tendency to persuade.” This is an important case because it promotes the beneficial effects of the division of labor, and it therefore plays a very important role in The Wealth of Nations, which is part of Smith’s project to examine those effects in detail. But still it’s a single case.
Why is it important to understand human beings’ “trucking disposition” (an expression Smith modified when he compiled The Wealth of Nations to the more famous “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange”) as an “inevitable consequence of our faculty of reason and language” and as an expression of a more fundamental “desire to persuade” (WN 1.20; LQ 352)? There are many possible implications, but I will end with one that is particularly relevant. Smith’s insights here provide a mirror through which scholars, researchers, and writers of all kinds can look at themselves. I wrote this essay because I believe it presents a convincing interpretation of Smith’s thought, and I therefore hope that you will understand Smith as much as I do. In fact, the fact that I’m writing this article is (admittedly modest) evidence in support of Smith’s claim. So are all other AdamSmithWorks articles. Our desire to persuade each other is not reducible to the pursuit of self-interest in a narrow material sense. It is rather a deep feature of human nature that we share not only with each other, but also with the men and women on whom we depend for food. “Give us this day our daily bread”: Jesus instructed his followers to pray to God for food. The more worldly Smith similarly believes that food comes from words, but suggests that we need to talk to the baker instead.
[1] Samuel Fleischacker, On the Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion to Adam Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 90.
[2] Gregory Mankiw, Principles of Economics, 7th edition (Stamford, CT: Cengage, 2015), 10. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 186, agrees with both Fleischacker, who calls these passages “the most famous and widely quoted passages from the Wealth of Nations,” and Mankiw, who sees them as reducing the motives of economic exchange to self-interest.
[3] See Pierre Force, Self-Interest Before Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 129–30.
Editor’s Note: To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication of Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, we are featuring some of the biggest hits from AdamSmithWorks, part of the Freedom Fund network. This piece was originally posted there.
