The Market as God by Harvey Cox. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. Paperback. 320 pp. $21.00

The Market as God is not the masterpiece that The Secular City is, but (as Jacob Bernoulli said of Isaac Newton) one “can recognize the lion by his kingly paw.”  Who else in our time but Professor Harvey Cox could lead us so deftly into the buzzing, blooming chaos of our society’s response to the “dismal science.”  He presents us no abstract propositions, no deductive/coercive proofs of any assertions; he neither pretends to nor relies upon any expertise in economics or in the history thereof; instead, he draws our attention to features of our own society we had perhaps never explicitly recognized but which we now acknowledge we have always somehow known. Through an amazing selection of events, concrete examples, anecdotes, and passages from various texts, he builds up a picture in our minds of a world that we recognize as our own.  In the great tradition of the Weberian Geisteswissenschaften his discussion fully exemplifies the principle of “adequacy”:  Its empirical justification lies in its intelligibility to the people who make up the society being interpreted. By means of an analysis of the “degradation of symbols” so prevalent in our society, he very ably documents the lamentable tendency of many people to assign “ultimate significance” (Tillich) to that which properly can have no more than “preliminary significance.” Cox, in particular, provides an insightful account of the common tendency to “go after [the] strange god” known as The Market.

By way of summary (see Ch.1, esp. pp. 6-19; and Ch. 11):  The Market is invisible and yet Its order and effects pervade the whole of life and society.  It is all-powerful, providing for the survival of more than eight billion people on the earth as well as offering hope, for the first time in history, that poverty can become the exception rather than the rule of human existence.  The Market’s Wisdom is unsearchable, Its simplest precepts (“Public Benefits from Private Vices”) calling into question long-standing habits of mind and even the reliability of our seemingly most elementary observations.  The Market, indeed, is transcendent, the complexity of Its configurations beyond our conception, the mystery of Its process beyond all hope of adequate, non-symbolic expression.  There are those, nevertheless, who claim to know It, to understand somewhat of Its ways, to have some sense where It is moving.  And they call upon us to follow hard after It, to trust ourselves to That Which we cannot understand, to walk with faith where we cannot see.  They enjoin us to lives of humility, to the loyal performance of the tasks It has allotted us, in the bold confidence we will be “led by an invisible hand to promote an interest that is no part of [our] intention.”  So it is written by the Prophet Adam Smith—Praise Be His Name!—in his Holy Inquiry.

It only remains to indicate the rather strange way in which this idolatrous nonsense is a natural expression of an order in society that is actually quite real.

The whole of An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) of Adam Smith (1723-90), all nine-hundred and fifty pages of it (in the Glasgow Edition of 1976), consists of the exposition of the topic of its very first chapter, “Of the Division of Labour.”  There, among other things, we read:

Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation exceeds all computation.  The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen.

Here, in one of the most fatefully neglected passages in all of modern letters, Smith proclaims his adherence to an intellectual revolution, for he is asserting the reality and importance of what is now referred to as emergent (or spontaneous, or polycentric) order.  This is not to say that this passage is not often remarked upon, but that its vast implications are rarely grasped.  Smith invites us to “observe” the “accommodation” of the worker and then predicts, what he knows from long and bitter experience almost never happens, that the observer will also “perceive” the “joint labour of a great multitude of workmen.”  Observe the accommodation we certainly can, but not the multitude of contributors whose number “exceeds all computation,” nor, even less, the social order through which their contributions come to be “joint.”  These latter, if they are to be known to us at all, will have to be perceived, and it is Smith’s whole purpose to train the eyes of his readers’ minds to promote the possibility of such perception.  His account of the woolen coat therefore continues as follows:

The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production.  How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country!  How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many shipbuilders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world!  What a variety of labour too is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workers!

Perhaps this is enough of Smith’s account of the “accommodation”—There is a great deal more of it!—to suggest something of the mystery to which he is attempting to draw our attention.  He refers us beyond the simple woolen coat, which we could always observe, to the inexhaustible abundance, which he hopes we can begin to perceive, of knowledge divided between thousands of workers and managers unknown to us, largely unknown even among themselves, yet somehow joined together to produce not only the simple woolen coat but everything necessary for human survival and well-being in a “civilized and thriving country.”

The “nexus” (A. N. Whitehead) of relations from which the “accommodation” has emerged is itself emergent.  In the famous phrase of Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), this order is one of those “establishments” upon which nations “stumble,” “which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”  Smith concurs in describing the on-going specialization of labor:

This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion.  It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.

Each step in the centuries-long process of division is intelligible as the action of a person who notices a concrete opportunity for improved efficiency in some branch of manufacture without the least necessity to perceive much at all of the whole order or of any of the ultimate products to which he thus becomes an unwitting contributor.  And the mystery only deepens in the realization that the emergence of marker order from as early as the Upper Paleolithicum into quite recent times has proceeded without anyone directing it or even being reflectively aware of it.

But what happens when there come to be those who are, to some degree, reflectively aware of it?  What happens when there are those who not only observe market results but also begin to perceive the order of market process which produces them?  The progressive intensification of the division of labor, Smith claims, “is not originally the effect of any human wisdom,” but the significance cannot be overstated of the event through which, subsequently, market process comes to conscious awareness of itself in the minds of a multitude of its participants.  It is in this respect that the “prophetic” authority of Adam Smith may be said to lie.  As J. A. Schumpeter notes, in his magisterial History of Economic Analysis (1954), the Inquiry displays very little of economic principle that was original to Smith, and even less, we may add, that survived the “marginal revolution” of the early 1870’s.  Of theoretical/analytical ambitions, however, Smith partook very little;

in fact [like most of his Scottish colleagues], he disliked whatever went beyond plain common sense.  He never moved above the heads of even the dullest readers.  He led them on gently, encouraging them by trivialities and homely observations, making them feel comfortable all along.  While the professional of his time found enough to command his intellectual respect, the ‘educated reader’ was able to assure himself that, yes, this was so, he too had always thought so….

Of the maxims and habits of mind handed down through generations of workers and managers alike, some were discarded, others strengthened, sharpened and connected; expectations of the always-unknowable future became somewhat more rational; new forms of commercial organization and exchange proliferated; levels of prosperity were attained, along with a range of social mobility, undreamt of in all previous history.  Ultimately, according to Schumpeter, “from about 1790 on, Smith became the teacher not of the beginner or the public but of the professionals, especially the professors,” but the Inquiry remains principally an event in the history of the market itself, one of the privileged events in which the logos of its process is revealed and realized in the human thoughts and actions that constitute its fabric, and by which, accordingly, both market configuration and process are raised to qualitatively higher levels of sophistication.

Perhaps it is now easier, if not to condone, then at least to understand how predicates of Divinity might so easily be misapplied to the deep mysteries of market process.  As the great mathematician Laplace said to Napoleon, however, we certainly have “no need of that hypothesis.”  For Adam Smith’s painstaking account of “the natural order of liberty” is no more mystical or mystifying than that of Harvey Cox himself.  Just as Professor Cox’s discussion is an event in the same society he is discussing, lending it, we confidently hope, greater coherence through dispelling somewhat of his readers’ confusion, Smith satisfied the same standard of “adequacy,” promoting among many thousands of his readers a differentiated awareness of the order in which they already lived.  He therefore transformed the order, multiplying its force and extent many-fold.  Adam Smith, indeed, transformed the modern world, unleashing a power in society both wonderful and terrifying, a power of which we have, as yet, very little understanding.  The Market as God helps us on our way, but there is still much to do, and the day is already far advanced.

M. W. Sinnett (Ph.D., University of Cambridge) is a Tutor Emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. A mathematician and Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA), his current research focuses on the idea of “emergent order” in the Scottish Enlightenment.