Interviews with Butcher, Baker, and Brewer: A New Look at Smith’s Most Famous Phrases
“Give us this day our daily bread.” Adam Smith was an indifferent Kirk of Scotland man, but he was well aware of these words that Jesus spoke to his followers in the Sermon on the Mount. The Lord’s Prayer addresses one of the fundamental questions of human survival. How will we be fed? Where does the next food come from?
These questions were important to Smith. His answer to them comes from what Samuel Fleischacker has called “the most famous phrase.” [Smith] who ever wrote,” in the first chapters of the book The Treasure of Nations: “It is not from the goodness of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from looking out for their own interests. We speak of ourselves, not of their humanity but of their self-love, and we never speak to them of our needs but of their benefits” (WN 1.27).
Much separates Jesus’ prayer from Smith’s political economy. First, the Scotsman of the eighteenth century imagines a more delicious meal than the Jew of the first century, which accompanies our daily bread and beef and beer. However, I would like to suggest that they are more similar than we usually see. For Smith, as for Jesus, the important thing about getting food is that we need to ask for it.
Smith’s famous phrases about the butcher, the brewer, and the baker are often taken to place interest (often tacitly translated as “self-interest”) at the root of human activity. Gregory Mankiw’s widely used introductory economics book puts it this way: “Smith says that economic participants are motivated by selfishness.” Smith would have said this. His famous lines could read “The butcher, the maker and the baker give us dinner not out of compassion, but out of self-interest.
But this is not what Smith wrote. Actions of judgment and reflection (“wait,” “look”), and persuasive communication (“address,” “speak”) distinguish Smith’s actual argument from the simple one I have just given, as well as Mankiw’s words. For Smith, having dinner means talking to people, especially “about their benefits.” These acts of communication are not vain; rather, they reveal a larger line of thought that is implied in this passage but elaborated further in Smith’s discussion of the role of interest in stock market transactions Studies in Jurisprudence:
If we are to examine the principle in the human mind on which this trucking situation is based, it is obvious that it is a natural tendency that everyone must obey. The donation of a shilling, which seems to us to have a clear and simple meaning, actually gives an argument to persuade a person to do so and so for his benefit. Men always try to persuade others to have their opinions even if the matter is irrelevant to them. If one develops anything related to China or i the most distant moon which contradicts what you think is true, you immediately try to persuade him to change his opinion. And in this way every man practices speaking to others throughout his life… In this way they acquire a certain intelligence and speech in managing their affairs, or in other words in managing men… This is the constant employment or trade of everyone, in the same way that artisans invent simple ways to do their work, so each person will try to do this work. This is a trade-off, by which they adjust themselves according to one’s interests and rarely fail to quickly find their end. (LJ 352)
In other words: people feel a deep need to convince other people, even when the subject is far away, like China envisioned in Scotland, or even the moon (a subject that Smith actually wanted to persuade others about, in his essay, “History of the Stars.”) Money is a modern tool to save labor in doing the work of persuasion and efficiency in the Smith boiler, which celebrates the Smith valves to open the chapters of The Treasure of Nations.
Money, for Smith, “argument.” Sometimes it’s a valid argument, and sometimes it’s not. Smith gave the example of a professor who is out of his mind, but no memoirist keeps a record of him reading a paper to his baker in the hope of persuading him to give bread to the Smith family, or giving Jeremy Bentham a guinea to change his mind about dowry. Since i Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres make clear, Smith knew that effective persuasion required an awareness of genre, and he saw the principles of various persuasive methods as distinct: “Nobody ever made a deal in verse” (LRBL 137).
We thereby rob Smith’s statement about the butcher, the brewer, and the baker when we reduce it to “participants in the economy (generally) motivated by self-interest,” even though that is a claim Smith—and many others who see material interest as one among many human motives—would agree with. Smith’s principle may be more accurately described thus: “people naturally desire to persuade one another—it is a motive at least as basic as speech and thought itself—and they have found by practice and time that participants in the commercial economy of the eighteenth century can be swayed by appeals to their interest.” Seen this way, profit-based exchange between sellers and customers is not a parameter for understanding all human interactions, any more than all people use windmills or boiler valves. Rather, such negotiation is one case in a broad category of phenomena that falls under the general heading of “natural tendencies… to persuade.” It is an important case, because it promotes the beneficial effects of the division of labor, and therefore takes on an importance beyond inflation. The Treasure of Nationspart of Smith’s project that considers those effects in detail. But it is one case anyway.
Why is it important to understand one’s “trucking nature,” a well-known revised expression of “trucking tendencies, exchanges, and exchanges,” when Smith coined the book The Treasure of Nations“as a necessary result of thinking and speaking skills,” and an expression of the all-important “desire to persuade” (WN 1.20; LQ 352) There are many possible implications, but I will close with one very important comment here: Smith’s insight here provides a mirror through which scholars, researchers, and writers of all kinds can see themselves. I wrote this essay because I believe it presents a compelling reading of Smith’s thought, and therefore I wish to urge you to understand Smith as I do. Indeed, the fact that I’m writing this piece is (admittedly modest) evidence in favor of Smith’s claim—and every other piece on AdamSmithWorks. Our desire to convince one another does not diminish our pursuit of our interests in a narrow materialistic sense; rather it is a deep aspect of human nature, which we share not only with ourselves but also with the men and women on whom we depend for our sustenance. “Give us today our daily bread”: Jesus commands his followers to pray to God for sustenance. Where Smith is a globalist he strongly believes that food comes from conversation, but he suggests that we need to talk to the baker instead.
[1] Samuel Fleischacker, In Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: Philosophical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 90.
[2] Gregory Mankiw, Principles of Economicsthe 7th. (Stamford, Ct.: Cengage, 2015), 10. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 186 agrees with Fleischacker in calling these sentences “the most famous and widely quoted passage from The Treasure of Nations” and Mankiw in taking them to reduce the motivation of economic exchange for personal gain.
[3] See Pierre Force, Pleasure Before Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 129-30.
Editors’ note: In honor of the 250th anniversary of publication An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, we contain our greatest hits from it AdamSmithWorks, part of the Liberty Fund network. This piece was originally posted there.
