Free Vintage Reading by Robert Kanigel

leaves workers at the mercy of impersonal market forces, this is not the only time Smith seems to sympathize with them. During Smith’s day, workers labored under “combination laws” that barred them from forming trade unions or going out on strike. Ideally, worker and master negotiated as between free equals,Smith felt. But he was hardly blind to the reality of it. “It is not... difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage,” he wrote, citing the combination laws and the employer’s superior resources. “Masters,” he wrote, “are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination” to keep wages down. And sometimes even “to sink the wages of labor” through agreements “conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy.”
    Some things never change. Then, as now, men were moved to buy and sell by the same impulse to personal gain, and greed. And it is for insight into this uncanny constancy of human nature that we read Adam Smith today.

An Essay on the Principle of Population
    ____________
    By Thomas Malthus
First published in 1798
    Man is consigned to bleak subsistence, because population, left unchecked, grows faster than the food supply needed to feed it.
    This is the essential “Malthusian” idea—and yet it does not quite represent Thomas Malthus fairly. For in the inevitable and unremitting human desperation it suggests, it lays the stress in a way he, I think, never intended. The English philosopher and critic Anthony Flew was right when he said that “what Malthus himself actually advocated differs in important ways from what has become associated with his name.”
    A clue to how Malthus became intellectual history’s Gloomy Gus may lie in his famous essay’s full title: “On the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other Writers.”
    Condorcet was the author of A History of the Progress of the Human Spirit , which has been called “the most sublimely confident book... ever written.” It declared, among other things, that “there is no limit set to the perfecting of the powers of man; that human perfectibility is in reality indefinite.”
    Meanwhile, Godwin—who like his French counterpart was aflame with the new utopian ideas coming out of the French Revolution—envisioned a society in which “there will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice, as it is called, and no government. Besides this, there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment. Every man will seek, with ineffable ardor, the good of all.”
    Well, then, set against such sentiments as these, Malthus may indeed be reckoned a reactionary, a negativist, an apologist for the misery and injustice in the world—but only against such a backdrop.
    In fact, Malthus’s essay is full of brighter visions and cheerier insights. At one point, he outlines a hierarchy of human needs similar to that advanced by modern psychologists of the humanistic school. At another, he denies the inferiority of sensual pleasures as compared to intellectual, cautioning only moderation in their enjoyment. (“Intemperance,” he writes, “defeats its own purpose. A walk in the finest day through the most beautiful country, if pursued too far, ends in pain and fatigue.”)
    Malthus does point out that nature’s “infinite variety” includes a darker side. But this, he writes, gives “spirit, life, and prominence to her exuberant beauties, and those roughnesses and inequalities, those inferior parts that support the superior, though they sometimes offend the fastidious microscopic eye of short-sighted man, contribute to the symmetry, grace, and fair proportion of the whole.”
    Are these the bilious outpourings of a misanthrope?
    Malthus argues that the lower classes are doomed to bare subsistence. But he leaves open the possibility that future