A Brief History of Pin-Making

Abstract

Reduced to journalistic cliché in our own time, Adam Smith's writing made up an important part of the cultural competence of a late eighteenth or early nineteenth-century intellectual. The article follows the most important of the illustrations Smith used. It studies the variants of the pin factory, the key image of mass production, from Chamber's Cyclopaedia (1728) to its definitive incarnation in The Wealth of Nations and then as it saturates nineteenth-century representations of labour, in Godwin, Hegel, de Tocqueville, Robert Owen, Charles Babbage, and Charlotte Tonna, amongst others. It suggests that the fine variations in the image (for instance, the number of operations it is supposed to require to manufacture a pin) correspond with, and reveal, each author's specific polemical and historical contexts. Moreover, it argues that the revisions of the image in the hands of so many readers of Smith constitute a process of ideological self-reflection through which the meanings of modernity were comprehended.

Notes

1. Delaire's 1755 essay on ‘Epingles’ for the Encyclopedia is essentially a translation from Chambers (see Smith, 1937 [776], p. 5n.).

2. A concise discussion of specialization may be found in Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism (1983, pp. 24–28).

3. Harold Perkin has remarked upon the undervaluing of management in The Wealth of Nations, pointing out that ‘before specialization can complete its work, however, it has to be integrated into the finished product or service. Even Adam Smith's pin makers had to be organized to make completed pins. The ten separate operations were useless unless they came together in packets of pins ready for sale, and that required an organizer to oversee the whole enterprise. Smith refused to take the organizer's contribution seriously and argued that, even in many great works like the Carron iron foundry, his work could be left to “some principal clerk. His wages properly express the value of this labour of inspection and direction”. The more divided the labour, however, the larger the enterprise and the more complex the task of fitting all the specialized operations together’ (Perkin, 1989, p. 24).

4. The classic discussion of the ‘natural identity of interests’ that Smith posits can be found in Elie Halévy's Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1955, pp. 1–150).

5. Interestingly, Godwin's critique of exploitation finds a central place in the radical imagination of nineteenth-century Europe, while his second criticism is better addressed by American attempts to control corporate monopolies. The kind of power Godwin feared has been most nearly realized in industrially based totalitarian states, like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union—both exploitative and monopolistic.

6. This reactionary appropriation of economic discourse can be traced back to Godwin's adversaries in the 1790s, Edmund Burke and Thomas Malthus, who turned economic insight into the iron chains of necessity. Both Malthus and Burke, however, change the primal scene of labour from the pin factory to the farm, on which, as Burke writes, ‘the beast is as an informing principle to the plough and cart; the labourer is as reason to the beast; the farmer is as a thinking and presiding principle to the labourer [and thus] an attempt to break this chain of subordination in any part is equally absurd’—an authoritarian reading of division of labour, locating all mental capacity in those who organize and direct the labouring process (Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, 1800, p. 10).

7. Alasdair Clayre points out that ‘Hegel's use of the concept “machine” in the Jena lectures of 1803–5 is [determined] by a pre-industrial notion of machinery … [that is,] the account of pin-making in The Wealth of Nations’. Clayre remarks on the metaphorical burden Hegel assigns to this concept: ‘Hegel's use of the words “machine” and “mechanical” … obscures the fact that “mechanical” can be used in totally different ways … the machine-like work of the man who performs a single repetitive action [or] work at machinery as an operator [or] the work of a man who makes or maintains machinery’. As I argue, concepts of cultural understanding such as ‘commodification’ and ‘reification’ that have their source in interpretations of Hegel's philosophy rely on similar—and densely metaphorical—associations between quite different aspects of modern economic activity (1974, pp. 36–39); Georg Lukàcs points out that ‘the problem which reveals the striking parallel between Hegel's thought and the classical English economists is the problem of work as the central mode of human activity, as the chief method by which the identity of the subject-object … can be achieved … And it is highly probable that this problem emerges for the first time in the course of reading Adam Smith’ (Lukàcs, 1975, p. 172). He attributes Hegel's originality to his having exploited this ‘conception of labour derived from Adam Smith’ (p. 322). But Lukàcs never comes to term with his realization that the logic of Hegel's teleology is determined by the problematic generalization of the already problematic model of the pin factory.

8. On the impact of The Wealth of Nations on earlier German writers, see Roy Pascal's Culture and the Division of Labour (1974).

9. Philip Fisher has already recognized the importance of the pin-making example for modern aesthetics, arguing that the individually constructed work of art is opposed to the mass-produced pin. So ‘those forms of art most self-intensive dominate our definition of the work of art’ (p. 153). Because Fisher sees the pin-making example outside the extended conversation within which its meanings were determined, however, he understands its moral somewhat reductively. Even in the case of Ruskin in which Fisher's interpretation makes most sense, the opposition is not so much between individuality and collaboration, or between the artist and the factory labourer, as between labour that is expressive and that which is merely efficient—for Ruskin even a builder should avoid adopting the model of the pin factory. Moreover, Fisher sees the pin as a characteristically modern class of object (opposed to the products of the craftsman and the artist) rather than as the marker of a distinctively modern form of labour—and a sign of the pressure modernity exerts on activities both inside and outside the workplace, as well as on the labourer himself (as in Ruskin's contention that ‘men are divided’).

10. The evidence of novelists is particularly relevant here—Dickens's lawyers are notorious victims of their occupation, while Walter Scott and Jane Austen are more sanguine but equally committed to the conviction that one's character is determined, within limits, by profession; and each of these writers seems to have been very interested in the opening chapter of The Wealth of Nations (judging by their allusions to it); on the attempt to position the country gentleman outside the modern economy and modern specialization, see John Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (1992, p. 42); for a more technical, academic discussion of professionalization that nonetheless rehearses Victorian anxieties about the specialist, see Carr-Saunders and Wilson (1933, esp. p. 498).

11. Strictly speaking, Marglin argues that workshop specialization is initially driven only by the entrepreneur's interests, since ‘chronology serves to refute the explanation of proletarianization of the producers by the high cost of machinery: the transformation of the independent producer to a wage labourer took place before machinery became expensive’ (p. 26). Marglin suggests that economic modernization could well have taken a quite different course under more egalitarian circumstances, a course based around the autonomy of the worker rather than the discipline of the factory floor.

12. A good example of the mathematization of economics can be found in William Stanley Jevons's work on marginal utility. See, for example, The Theory of Political Economy. On the rise of popular philology, see Dennis Taylor, Hardy's Literary Language (1993, pp. 207–252).

13. Although the twentieth-century prominence of economists like Maynard Keynes, Gunnar Myrdal, and John Kenneth Galbraith seems to contradict this phenomenon, in addressing a popular audience these writers abandon not only their discipline's technical vocabulary but also its technical pretensions—in effect they become erudite journalists rather than specialist intellectuals. Or (depending on one's opinion of Keynes's economics) their articles tended to more academic in interest and their books directed to a general audience—unlike The Wealth of Nations which addressed the most sophisticated technical issues current without giving up on readability (for the most part).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Imraan Coovadia

* Department of English, Private Bag, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701 Email: [email protected]