udice in favor of low wages, Smith defended high wages, on the grounds that "a person who can acquire no property can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible." The hope of improving his condition, on the other hand, would encourage the working man to spend his income on "things more durable" than the "hospitality" and "festivals" preferred by the wealthy, and the accumulated effect of this kind of expenditure, even though it might reflect a "base and selfish disposition," maintained a whole nation of industrious workers, not just a few servants and useless retainers.

A positive appraisal of the social effects of self-gratification made it possible for interpreters of the new order to exempt modern society, in effect, from the judgment of time—the judgment previously believed, by Christians and pagans alike, to hang like a sword over all man's works. Because the new science of political economy appeared to deliver the modern world from the "doom of threatened societies," in Richard Niebuhr's wonderfully resonant phrase, it is to Adam Smith and his immediate predecessors, rather than to those second-rate thinkers more conventionally associated with the idea of progress—Fontenelle, Condorcet, Godwin, Comte, Spencer—that we should look for the inner meaning of progressive ideology. Compared to Smith's incisive analysis of the social implications of desire, vaporous tributes to the power of reason and to the progress of the arts and sciences, speculations about a perfect state of society in the future, and the various schemes of historical stages that traced social development from the simple to the complex contributed very little to a plausible theory of progress. Human ingenuity, as evidenced by the steady improvement of useful arts, had elicited the qualified admiration even of Augustine. The ancient world was fully acquainted with the achievements of reason; nor was the eighteenth-century world so besotted with those achievements that it overlooked reason's limits. As for the idea of historical stages, equally familiar to the ancients, it led to a theory of progress only when social theorists ceased to model those stages on the biological life cycle, in which growth and maturity led inevitably to senescence and death. Smith's work, especially The Wealth of Nations, implicitly repudiated this biological conception of history and the self-denying morality with which it had been associated. The stoic critique of appetite lost much of its force in the face of Smith's contention that insatiable appetites led not to corruption

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