An Archaeology of Adam Smith's Epistemic Context

Abstract

Adam Smith played a key role in Foucault's archaeology of political economy. This archaeology, which Foucault accomplished in The Order of Things, is the focus of this article. Foucault may have disagreed with the writings of the classical political economists but he widens our perspective through new possibilities of understanding. It is very illuminating to understand Smith's thinking as following a discursive practice that economic thought shared with the knowledge of living beings (natural history) and language (grammar). Foucault's archaeology highlights some ontological and epistemological conditions that shed light on some of the pillars of Smith's thinking: the centrality of exchange, the division of labour and the labour theory of value. The proximity between Newton and Smith is also examined in ontological and epistemological terms which can be understood through an investigation of that interdiscursivity practice. Beyond testing Foucault's considerations, our aim is to demonstrate their potential for the current scholarship of Smith's works. Foucault's archaeology of knowledge offers a range of elements that warrants greater analysis by historians of economic thought.

Keywords:

• Adam Smith
• archaeology
• Foucault
• interdiscursive practice
• Newtonian method
• ontological and epistemological conditions

JEL Codes:

• B31
• B41

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹Foucault also referred to Smith during interviews and lectures. Our analysis focuses on The Order of Things since this is the main work where Foucault developed his archaeology of political economy. Foucault investigated Smith's writings in this book not only when he was developing the archaeology of political economy. He used Smith's writings to support his argument that the theory of language could be taken as an exemplar to comprehend that configuration of thought. In particular, Foucault carefully analysed and frequently used Smith's Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages as a reference to understand the system of thought of that age.

²Foucault (1970b) described some methodological principles that he intended to follow in investigations. Although these were written after publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge and Foucault declared that he would follow those methodological principles in his subsequent works, we contend that they are strategies which guided his work even before being explicitly articulated. He mentioned four main principles: reversal, discontinuity, specificity and exteriority (see Lima 2010, pp. 30–32).

³Usually ‘representation has the meaning of ‘correspond to. In the philosophical sense, as defined by Lalande (1999, p. 953), representation is ‘what is present to the spirit: what someone “represents to him / herself”; what makes the concrete content of an act of thinking‘. It could have originated from Leibniz's writings to the extent that he used the term to designate ‘correspondence. O'Farrell (1996) has a definition for representation equivalent in meaning to that given by Foucault in The Order of Things. O'Farrell sees representation as the interrelation amongst ‘the rules governing language, the rules governing imagination and thought and the rules governing material existence. This is the meaning of representation that Foucault employs as his central notion in The Order of Things.

⁴It was Kant's ‘Copernican turn‘, the inquiry into the conditions of possibility of reason, that questioned representation, particularly when he raised those three fundamental questions—What can I know? What must I do? What am I permitted to hope?—adding in his Logic one other: Was ist der Mensch? (‘What is man?—Foucault 1970 [1966], p. 341). Kant's critique led to the emergence of epistemology, the theory of knowledge, and much of philosophy since has come to think about whether and how it is possible for man to know. Subsequent developments in philosophy led to thinking about the importance of language. Is it possible for the mind to see reality and explore it without language? Language, for philosophers, is not only an expression of thoughts but it is also the device, the apparatus that makes thought possible.

⁵Foucault's archaeology has striking similarities to Kuhn's work on the structure of scientific revolutions. The similarities have been noticed within the fields of philosophy and the history of ideas since the 1966 publication of The Order of Things. The Kuhnian concept of ‘paradigm and the notion of ‘episteme refer to a fundamental arrangement of what is produced in terms of knowledge. It is clear, however, that beyond their similarities, the notion of episteme is at a deeper level in respect to the concept of paradigm (see Lima 2010, ch. 5).