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On Tue, 15 Jul 1997 08:45:20 -0500 (EST) Mary Schweitzer 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote: 
 
> Anthony Brewer wrote: 
[snip] 
> > That said, can I bring a bit of the history of economic ideas into the 
> > discussion (on the HES list!)? Hume and Smith would have agreed with 
> > Polanyi, to a degree. [rest snipped] 
> 
> Of course they would have.  Because they believed in history as a series 
> of fixed stages 
[snip] 
 
Let me be a bit crabby and pedantic here. I do not think that Hume 
could be described as having a theory of fixed stages. There is 
certainly no four stages theory in his writings, and no inevitability 
either. 'Had [our neighbours] not first instructed us we should have 
been at present barbarians' (Jealousy of Trade.) He certainly thought 
things had changed, and he was right. Smith maybe has stages and a sort 
of inevitability, though there is a subtlety in his arguments that you 
miss. And a contingency - 'It is now more than two hundred years since 
the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, a period as long as the course 
of human prosperity usually endures' (WN III.iv.20). There are setbacks. 
 
[snip] 
> Why should we be surprised if Smith and Hume (and Ricardo and 
> Marx) and Polanyi believed in fixed stages of history -- even if they 
> characterized them differently?  But don't we also know that leads 
> inevitably to beliefs in western progressivism vs. other cultures 
> -- Eurocentricism, racism, sexism ... -- linearity ... 
 
This is way over the top. Sorry. But enlightenment theories of progress 
supplanted ideas about the inevitability of European superiority. 
Others were on the same track. Actually, Smith and others thought China 
was further along on the same track. America was the place that was at 
the beginning. 
 
[snip] 
> We are left inevitably obsessed with ... inevitability. 
[snip] 
 
Of course, some things may really be inevitable ... 
An argument for inevitable progress (of a sort) which is in Turgot and 
(sort of) Ferguson is the following, which I have always found rather 
impressive. Technology will always advance (albeit perhaps slowly, 
certainly at differing rates in different circumstances). Why? Because 
practically useful knowledge is not forgotten when it is used, as it 
is. And new things always come along. So the total grows. Even through 
the dark ages (Turgot). 
---------------------- 
Tony Brewer ([log in to unmask]) 
University of Bristol, Department of Economics 
8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN, England 
Phone (+44/0)117 928 8428 
Fax (+44/0)117 928 8577 
 
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