THE WEALTH OF NATIONS REQUIRES THE MORAL SENTIMENTS:

Ultimately, the final purpose of political communities -- to live well -- cannot be attained simply by the exchange of goods or services; they can only be attained by strengthening this interlaced web of love and affection. "[F]riendship would seem to hold cities together," Aristotle observes in the Ethics. Though he was writing with reference to small, homogeneous city-states, it would be even more imperative for larger, heterogeneous political communities -- such as the United States -- to retain this element of friendship.

In other words, the economic is not the core of the political; rather, the economic is best understood as serving more fundamental sources of the common good.

That Burke accepted this Aristotelian premise is evident throughout his writing, but it appears most powerfully in the Reflections on the Revolution in France. Resisting fashionable conceptions of social-contract theory that penetrated elite circles in late-18th-century England and France, Burke refined the idea of the contract into a "fixed compact" that spanned many generations, as opposed to a short-lived arrangement that depended on mere consent. This insight is often applied to his critique of the French Revolution's attempt to break free from the traditions and customs of France's past, but it also holds eminent relevance to his notion of political economy. As he famously writes in the Reflections:

Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure -- but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature.

"Subordinate contracts" in the commercial economy are fleeting and contingent arrangements that spur the flow of goods, but they also can be dissolved at the discretion of the transacting parties. Here we can detect undertones of Aristotle's notion of a political community that transcends economic activity. Men and women, like non-rational animals, require food and shelter to survive. But this need for self-preservation -- things of a "temporary and perishable nature" -- do not distinguish people, or societies, from brutish creatures.

In Burke's judgment, rather, society is a moral pact that threads together the social attachments, ethical and institutional traditions, and religious sentiments from prior generations and weaves them into the texture of current generations, which can then pass them on to -- and reform them when necessary for -- future generations. Society, he famously writes, "becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." This pact is not temporary and perishable in its nature, but rather carries a lasting quality that resists the sudden and transient demands of short-term social, economic, and political arrangements.

Such comments appear at odds with Burke's endorsement of a free grain market and the competitive price system in Thoughts and Details, which was published five years after the Reflections, and in his other speeches and writings. On the one hand, Burke is praising transactional exchange, but on the other, he is denouncing it. How can we reconcile these two positions? Given Burke's steady advocacy of commercial liberty throughout his public life -- before and during the French Revolution -- it would make little sense to claim that Burke in the Reflections is arguing to eliminate, or drastically regulate, the flow of goods. Rather, the crucial point to recognize about Burke's economic thought is that it observed society through a wide lens, one that suppressed the temptation to isolate commercial, religious, and political activities into segregated spheres. Burke thus believed such activities could be integrated and harmonized into a delicate balance that preserves their virtues while mitigating their flaws.

Commerce is one such activity. Economic activity, and the competitive price system, can steer scarce resources to consumers with efficiency and regularity. But applying the principles of market exchange -- voluntary contracts, temporary arrangements, quid pro quo deals -- to all aspects of a commonwealth threatens to disrupt the wider social order and corrode the underlying social and institutional attachments that tie together men and women of all ranks.

Therefore, as J. G. A. Pocock presciently observed years ago, Burke modified, if not reversed, the argument about the causal connection between commerce and ethics that had become trendy among public intellectuals in the 18th century and that continues to hold much resonance today: Rather than commerce serving as the instrument for the growth in civility, civility (as manifested by the religious and moral traditions of Christian Europe prior to the Enlightenment) laid the foundation for the spread of exchange economies. Much like modern letters had owed their origin to "antient manners," Burke contends in the Reflections, so too had "commerce, and trade, and manufacture," which "certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished" prior to modern commercial activity.

This shade of learning was fostered by the nobility and the clergy, who built up a sturdy code of manners that tamed man's passions and polished his behavior. "[O]ur manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization," he writes, "have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion." Burke does not claim that manners and civilization depended on economic transactions and commercial activity, but rather on the inherited traditions of moral conduct, patronage, and religion furnished by these two orders prior to the arrival of mass commerce. That Europe was in a flourishing state on the cusp of the French Revolution suggested that ancient manners had something to do with this state: "How much of that prosperous state was owing to the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we must presume, that, on the whole, their operation was beneficial." In short, the modern commercial economy did not facilitate civilized behavior, but civilized behavior may have facilitated the modern commercial economy.

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