Sagar has a second reason to conduct such a fine-grained reading of Smith’s work. By repudiating the notion that Smith saw commercial societies as resting on presumably problematic grounds—vanity, amour propre, the desire for superior status—Sagar shows that Smith’s primary concern was not with the morality of commercial society but with its politics. For Smith, commercial societies were uniquely capable of fostering relations of mutual exchange and economic growth, but they were also uniquely vulnerable to new forms of capture and domination.
“Civil government,” Smith writes in Book V of The Wealth of Nations, “so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” Like many passages in The Wealth of Nations quoted without context, this is one that can easily catch a reader off guard or reinforce preconceived notions of what Smith believes. But for Sagar, the quotation illustrates one of the central features of Smith’s political thought: The nature of politics is marked by persistent conflict between the haves and the have-nots, and its gravitational pull is not toward moral consensus and justice but toward a reconfiguration of wealth and power that enables the “renewed domination of the weak by the powerful.”
In Sagar’s reading of Smith, history—not a priori reasoning or moral consensus—provides the material for the analysis of modern politics. History informs theory and the establishment of economic principles. It is also primarily about power and domination. The politics of Europe was never the result of a slow, peaceful extension and evolution of the ancient republics in Greece and Italy, but the legacy of the more immediate experiences of repeated Gothic invasion and histories of plunder. War, not commerce, was the motor of political change, and politics was an arena of domination in almost all societies (not just in Europe) for most of human history. Moreover, opulence often followed violent domination. Tartar shepherding societies and their Eurasian descendants were characterized by vast inequalities in property (livestock, for example), a near absence of laws (or, if laws existed, they the were used as instruments of oppression), and what Sagar calls the “extensive domination of the many by the few.” The persistence of slavery even in rich and culturally polished nations illustrates how the history of economic growth and freedom was also “synonymous with the violent mass subjugation of huge numbers of people,” something Smith found ethically abhorrent and economically nonsensical.
