Tony Brewer:

"The TMS invisible hand is about the distribution of food, not goods in
general. The rich landlord has command of huge amounts of food, but cannot
eat it all himself. Instead he spends on luxuries thereby enabling his
servants and the producers of 'baubles and trinkets' to earn and eat. Smith
did not give up this argument but kept it in the final edition of TMS, long
after the writing of the WN. 

The WN repeats essentially the same argument (Glasgow ed, pp. 180-1), but
switches the phrase, 'invisible hand' to a different (but not conflicting)
argument."

 

The relevance of the example of the rich landlords is that it is part of a
discussion about the 'extensive influence of . beauty' . 'which the
appearance of utility bestows upon all the productions of art' (using 'art'
to mean the making of things) and which is more valued than the end to which
the product is made (TMS IV.i.1-11: pp 179-87).  Smith cites the parable of
the "poor man's son" and his realization of the 'deception' imposed by
ambition on him and its consequences ('cultivate the ground', build houses,
found cities and commonwealths, improve and invent all sciences and arts, to
'ennoble and embellish human life and change the face of the globe, etc.,
(TMS IV.i.10, p 183).

 

This sets up the reader to meet 'the proud and unfeeling landlords' at the
other end of the social scale and who suffers from the same deception when
viewing his extensive fields and in his imagination consumes the harvest
growing on them. But in reality ('the capacity of his belly') he cannot
consume to the 'immensity of his desires'.

 

So how does he dispose of his harvests?  This comes in two parts.  First,
there are those employed in his palaces - to 'fit it up', who 'provide and
keep in order' his 'baubles and trinkets' for his 'greatness', his luxury
and caprice' who share 'the necessaries of life' (family, guests, relatives,
retainers and their families, etc.).

 

Second they 'divide among the poor the produce of all of their
improvements', i.e., among the thousands whom they employ who labour in the
very fields that grow the harvests he admires so much.  This leads to
Smith's estimate of what this amounts to by drawing on his classical
knowledge of Rome by using the metaphor of 'an invisible hand' to judge it
to be 'nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would
have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its
inhabitants'. 

 

Interestingly, Smith notes (WN IV.vii.a.3, pp556-7) that the equality of
land distribution was enshrined in early Roman agrarian law, but subsequent
trends and events undid its chances of succeeding, because the 'course of
human affairs, by marriage, by succession, and by alienation, necessarily
deranged this original equal division, and frequently threw the lands, which
had been allotted for the maintenance of many different families into the
possession of a single person', and this law 'was either neglected and
evaded, and the inequality of fortunes went on continually increasing' (WN
pp 556-7.

 

Rich landlords benefited from the unequal distribution of land but he mocks
what happened anyway, by noting how despite their apparent triumph, the
share of the harvest that the landlords had to concede (otherwise there
would be no harvest without 'the labours of all the thousands whom they
employ') 'nearly the same' distribution of necessaries was made that would
have been produced on petty strips of land had it been shared equally.  This
is Smith's use of irony by rhetorical example. 

 

It was not the landlords' 'charity' that motivated this action (as in
Gramp's mistaken view); the labourers needed their subsistence if the rich
landlord was to have any harvest to covet. The rest he squandered on his
prodigality on 'baubles and trinkets' and on the necessary subsistence of
his retainers, courtiers, armed guards and palace artisans.

 

I think Tony Brewer, and others, may have made a restricted reading of this
chapter in TMS.

 

Gavin Kennedy