“The Improper Arts”: Sex in Classical Political Economy
Author(s)
Stabile, Donald
Abstract
This article will add to Smith’s ranking as a social economist by looking at his views on wages. In The Wealth of Nations (WN) Smith held that the first objective of political economy was “to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves.” In the market economy that Smith described, a “subsistence for the people” would depend on their wages or what he called the natural price of labor. As will be indicated, analysts of Smith have contended, in Jeffrey T. Young’s words, that “Smith’s concept of natural price is in fact a descendant of the scholastics’ just price.” This article will concentrate on Smith’s secular definition of the natural wage as having a correspondence to the medieval religious notion of a just wage. The natural wage of labor meant to Smith, as the just wage had to medieval thinkers, that society should be concerned when labor markets did not provide a subsistence that was “plentiful.” Smith’s study of wages was a significant advance over his predecessors, who emphasized prices.
