In 1752 David Hume published a short essay with the unpromising title, “Of Refinement in the Arts.” Buried in it is a sentence that could serve as the epigraph for the whole Scottish Enlightenment: industry, knowledge, and humanity, Hume wrote, “are linked together by an indissoluble chain.” Prosperity, learning, and gentleness of manners rise and fall together. Pull on one link and the others move.
That sentence came to mind more than once while I was talking with Samuel Gregg on this week’s Acton Line. Sam is president of the American Institute for Economic Research and an affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute, and his new book, The Civilization of Commerce: Invisible Hands and the Pursuit of Happiness (Encounter Books), is an attempt to recover exactly that chain for a generation of market defenders who have too often miss the linkages.
Sam begins by setting aside two words most of us would reach for first. Neither “capitalism” nor “liberalism” are central terms in the book. Both, he argues, carry so much accumulated baggage that they now obscure more than they reveal. In their place he substitutes a phrase and an insight.
The phrase is “commercial society,” which is what Smith, Hume, and Francis Hutcheson actually called the thing they were describing. The insight is Hayek’s: that civilization rests on cooperation among people who do not know one another, drawing on knowledge dispersed across millions of minds that no planner could ever assemble. A market is not just an allocation mechanism. It is the institutional form that this cooperation takes, and the Scots understood it as a transformation of the whole of human life, moral and intellectual as well as material.
Hayek, Sam notes, wrote for scholars. The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty are not beach reading. The civilizational argument Hayek made in those books never found the popular form that The Road to Serfdom and its Reader’s Digest abridgement gave his warning against central planning.
That is the gap Sam wants to fill, and it is a gap with consequences. Contemporary libertarians and classical liberals, he observes, have grown fluent in the language of efficiency, growth, and policy design while losing the older vocabulary of virtue, flourishing, and community. The result is a defense of markets that sounds technocratic, even when it is correct, but that leaves the moral high ground to the critics.
Those critics come, in Sam’s taxonomy, in two varieties. The rationalists, from John Rawls to the central planner, look at commercial society and see inequality to be corrected from above. The romantics, descending from Rousseau through today’s economic nationalists and postliberals, look at it and see community, solidarity, and identity dissolved by exchange.
What I found most illuminating in our conversation was Sam’s point about where these two camps end up. Their diagnoses are opposed, but their prescriptions converge: some form of corporatism, some variant of state direction, some arrangement in which the rule of law bends to the preferences of whoever holds the levers. Rationalist and romantic alike are prepared to trade a measure of liberty for the promise of order, and both discover too late that the order is not as orderly as advertised.
Sam locates the high-water mark of commercial civilization in the decades between roughly 1840 and 1914. What made that period work, on his reading, was not a set of economic policies alone but a whole package: constitutionalism, moral reform movements, and liberties written into institutions that outlasted any particular government.
By contrast the market revival of the 1980s and 1990s, for all its achievements under Reagan, Thatcher, and Friedman, drew its strength from the collapse of the Keynesian consensus rather than from a renewed civilizational narrative. It won the argument about means without reopening the argument about ends. That, Sam suggests, is why its gains have proved so easy to erode.
We closed on a question Sam says he is still working through: whether commercial civilization can take root in places like India and China that do not share the Scottish Enlightenment’s lineage, and what cultural and moral foundations such a transplant would require. His answer is tentative but premise firm. A free economy does not sustain itself. It depends on habits, institutions, and beliefs that must be cultivated with as much care as the economy itself.
Which is only to say what Hume said. Industry, knowledge, and humanity are linked by an indissoluble chain. The error of our moment is to imagine that one link can be polished while the others are left to corrode. Sam Gregg’s book is a timely reminder that the chain holds together, or not at all.
Listen to the full conversation on Acton Line: