Let’s go back to that quote again:

The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life….
That doesn’t seem to me to be an accurate picture of the moral condition of the typical industrial worker.

Maybe, but that’s not what Smith is trying to describe. What he is trying to describe is the condition of the typical industrial worker “unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”

I can easily see how one could argue (as he apparently does in your quote in #46) that, divided or not, the essence of government is the same: coercion, exercising power of one group over another; the difference being only in the degree and the contents of these groups.

Of course, clearly, someone else could also (convincingly) argue that point is in finding compromises between the groups and individuals, yet it doesn’t make the anti-government angle logically unsound. I suspect most people would subscribe to the view of government as a “necessary evil”, so a guy looking for ways to make it un-necessary doesn’t strike me as totally unreasonable.

But it seems that Kropotkin doesn’t say anything about “divided government” either. Bleh.

Um, Kropotkin did write a lot of stuff, but “government” is always a Borg-like entity. In What is Property?, for example:

“But what was monarchy? The sovereignty of one man. What is democracy? The sovereignty of the nation, or, rather, of the national majority.”

Oh, so it’s either a small Borg, or a big Borg. But “government” can only a Borg, and let’s forget that the idea of “divided government” ever existed.

Later some of their one-liners became symbols the whole body of their works, thus we often hear “invisible hand”, “proletarians of the world, unite”, “property is theft”, etc. But obviously Adam Smith had much-much more to say than just “invisible hand”, otherwise he would’ve only needed to produce a single-page pamphlet or even a fortune cookie.

“What, you find concepts like ‘statism’, ‘individualism’ or ‘collectivism’ completely useless because they are too general?”

I do, actually—they’re even worse than “government”. (I mean, if a word like “collectivism” can refer to anything from out-and-out fascism to Bakunin’s anarchism to social democratic liberalism, how can it not be useless?)

“Can’t abstraction be useful to some extent?”

Yes, as long as they’re not simplistic to the point of being wrong. “Government” isn’t some sort of undifferentiated Borg-like mass of oppressors, just as Smith’s “invisible hand” isn’t just a soulless entity that gives you exactly what you want every time.

What, you find concepts like ‘statism’, ‘individualism’ or ‘collectivism’ completely useless because they are too general? Can’t abstraction be useful to some extent?

In the first chapter of Capital when Marx characterizes what it will be like ‘when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations’..”

I think Marx was overconfident. He was writing before electric fridges. I understand how fridges and freezers work, but they still strike me as fundamentally cheating.

More generally, if we are to understand everything in our economy or in the 19th century economy (“perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations”) we would need not merely a political revolution but a massive increase in the speed in which information can be passed from one head to another.

“they’re subjects of the evil Chinese conspirators.”—Brett Bellmore

Ahem.

There are no wages in News from Nowhere, and most people have completely lost the knowledge of the concept. I enjoyed thouroughly this comparison of Smith and Marx.

Kropotkin didn’t know from industrial agriculture.