I.2. Division of the Science of Government: High Politics and Political Economy

The science of government divides into two great branches, according to the means it employs to attain the general felicity that is its end. Man is a mixed being who feels moral and physical needs, and his happiness likewise consists of physical and moral conditions. The moral happiness of man, so far as it can be the work of his government, is closely bound up with his improvement, and it is the aim of high politics, which must extend over every class of the nation the happy influence of liberty, enlightenment, virtue and hope. High politics must teach how to give nations a constitution which, through liberty, raises and ennobles the souls of citizens; an education which forms their hearts to virtue and opens their minds to enlightenment; a religion which holds out to them the hopes of another life, to compensate them for the sufferings of this one. It must seek, not what suits one man or one class of men, but what can make all the men subject to its laws happier by making them better.

The physical well-being of man, so far as it can be the work of his government, is the object of political economy. All the physical needs of man for which he depends on his fellows are satisfied by means of wealth. It is wealth that commands labour, that buys care, that procures everything man has accumulated for his use and his pleasures. Through it health is preserved, life is sustained, childhood and old age are provided with necessaries; food, clothing and shelter are brought within reach of all men. Wealth may therefore be regarded as representing everything that men can do for one another’s physical well-being; and the science that teaches government the true system of administering the national wealth is by that very fact an important branch of the science of national happiness.

Government is instituted for the advantage of all the men subject to it; it must therefore have the advantage of all constantly in view. Just as through high politics it must extend to all citizens the blessings of liberty, virtue and enlightenment, so too through political economy it must secure for all the advantages of the national fortune. It must seek the order that will assure to the poor as to the rich a share in the comfort, the pleasures and the repose of life; the order that will leave no one in the nation in suffering, no one anxious about the morrow, no one unable to procure by his labour the food, clothing and lodging necessary to him and his family, so that life may be an enjoyment and not a burden. The accumulation of wealth in the state is not, in the abstract, the aim of government; its aim is the participation of all citizens in the enjoyments of physical life that wealth represents. The depositary of the power of society is called to second the work of Providence, to increase the sum of happiness on earth, and to encourage the multiplication of the men who live under its laws only so far as it can multiply their chances of felicity.

Wealth and population are not, in fact, signs of the prosperity of states in an absolute way; they are so only in their relation to each other. Wealth is a good when it spreads comfort through every class; population is an advantage when every man is sure of finding an honest living by his labour. But a state may be wretched even though a few individuals accumulate colossal fortunes in it; and if its population, like that of China, is always greater than its means of subsistence, if it is content to live on the refuse of animals, if it is constantly threatened by famine, this numerous population, far from being an object of envy or a means of power, is a calamity.

A perfected social order is in general advantageous to the poor as well as to the rich, and political economy teaches how to preserve that order by correcting it, not how to overthrow it. It is a beneficent Providence that has given human nature both needs and sufferings, for it has made them the goads that must rouse our activity and drive us to develop our whole being. If we succeeded in banishing pain from this world we should banish virtue too; and likewise, if we could drive out need, we should drive out industry as well. It is not, then, equality of conditions but happiness in every condition that the legislator must have in view. It is not by dividing property that he procures this happiness, for he would thereby destroy the ardour for labour, which alone must create all property and which can find a stimulus only in the very inequalities that labour constantly renews; it is, on the contrary, by always guaranteeing to all labour its reward; by keeping alive the activity of the soul and hope; by enabling the poor as well as the rich to find an assured subsistence, and to taste the pleasures of life in the accomplishment of their task.

The title Adam Smith gave his immortal work on this second branch of the science of government, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, is at the same time its most precise definition. It gives a far more exact idea of it than the name now adopted, political economy. That name at least must be taken in the modern sense of the word economy, which we have made a synonym of saving, and not in its etymological sense of the law of the household. Today we call economy the careful and preserving administration of a fortune; and it is because we say, with a kind of tautology, domestic economy for the administration of a private fortune, that we have been able to say political economy for the administration of the national fortune.