European Journal of Industrial Relations

Adam Smith and Karl Marx are commonly viewed as opposites, both in terms of their approaches to political economy and their ideological outlooks: Smith as a champion of individual self-interest and unfettered capitalist development; Marx as the harsh critic of the injustice and irrationality of capitalist commodity production. Marx was, however, in many important methodological and theoretical dimensions, in fact, a “Smithian”. In this paper we explore Smith’s influence on Marx in several dimensions. The most important in our view is Marx’s adoption of Smith’s “long-period reasoning” as the framework for his theories of value, surplus value, allocation of labor and exploitation. Marx instinctively shared many other Smithian views, including Smith’s rejection of diminishing returns to specialization as a limiting factor in capital accumulation, the factors underlying demographics, the role and potential of technical change, and the theory of money. Marx’s “vision” diverged sharply from Smith on the question of the universality of capitalist social relations of commodity production, and the possibility of socialist alternatives to capitalist commodity production as a framework for organizing the division of labor. This paper surveys the areas where Marx found substantial common ground with Smith, as well as the questions on which Marx parted company with Smith through a careful exegesis of Marx’s own discussion and evaluation of Smith’s ideas. This clarifies the ways in which Marx worked from his understanding of Smith as a base to develop his critique of political economy.

Abstract The paper examines evolutionary elements in Adam Smith’s social theory, connecting them to an earlier contribution to natural history by George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. It then compares Smith’s analysis with those of Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter, who were fascinated by Darwinian evolutionary biology. This comparison demonstrates that while developing evolutionary approaches to the social sciences suitable for their respective subject matter, Marx and Schumpeter drew heavily on Smith’s insights. All three authors aimed to unveil the forces shaping the “process of civilization”, or society’s “law of motion,” along with its associated hazards. They pondered whether this process inherently led to rising living standards, along with “equality, liberty, and justice”, and whether it could derail, ending in a tailspin.

Abstract In recent decades, scholarly work on Adam Smith clarified important aspects of his multi-faceted account of human agency. However, the relevance of his view of knowledge and agency for political economy as science of the legislator has not been clarified sufficiently. It is contended here that Smith’s view of human agency in socio-economic contexts is linked to a kind of pragmatic pluralism, emphasizing the role of the knowledge made available by scientific “systems”, but also their limitations and incompleteness. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, his discussions of the mercantile system and honesty in commerce are considered as examples of pragmatic pluralism reflecting such limitations, while opening up horizons of reasonable disagreement and problem-responsive reform avoiding technocratic fallacies and reckless experimentation.

This paper discusses the relationship of the two models of man presented by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations—and the working of the invisible hand. There appears to be an inherent conflict of the market solution and the working of the price mechanism with “sympathy,” the key concept proposed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the source of social evaluation, self-evaluation and individual action—and the impartial spectator controlling individual action. We will give an extended explanation for this incongruence and, given this background, elaborate on Smith’s social program of educating the common people. References to John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, Ken Binmore’s evolutionary theory of fairness, and Karl Polanyi’s critical comments in The Great Transformation on the emergence of the market society demonstrate that Smith does not give us a moral theory but a tool kit for moral behavior, on the one hand, and conditions and implications of a market economy, on the other—exemplified by the two models of man which he applies.

This paper discusses the use Adam Smith made in the Wealth of Nations (WN) of physiocratic concepts and ideas. Notwithstanding his critique of the ‘Agricultural system’, Smith endorsed many distinctively physiocratic ideas and in his analyses of value and distribution, of the reproduction and accumulation of capital, and of development and growth adopted (and adapted) several physiocratic concepts. In particular, the paper argues that Smith adopted the ‘material expenses’ approach of the Physiocrats and sought to use it side by side with his tentative proposal of a labour-based approach to the theory of value, and draws attention to inconsistencies and tensions which arise from the simultaneous presence of the two different approaches to the theory of value in the WN. By adopting physiocratic ideas on the relationship between corn prices and money wages, Smith is also seen to have provided the key elements for David Ricardo’s ‘corn ratio reasoning’ in his early theory of profits.

This paper examines the connections between Isaac Newton, Robert Simson, and Adam Smith, highlighting the influence of the Newtonian scientific method. Smith, influenced by Simson’s teachings, regarded Simson as a leading mathematician of their time. Simson’s innovative application of ancient porisms to explain Newtonian fluxions challenged existing perspectives and had a profound impact on the Scottish Enlightenment, which in turn shaped Smith’s seminal work, The Wealth of Nations. This paper clarifies how Smith integrated the Newtonian method into his philosophical and economic theories, emphasizing the interconnections among these influential figures and their lasting contributions.

AbstractMany coalitional values have been introduced in the literature on cooperative games over the last decades, and especially since 2000. The multiplicity of options suggests the convenience of testing the existence of stable coalition structures, in the sense of Hart and Kurz (1983, Econometrica), when payments are made using some of these values. We recall their concept of $$\gamma$$ γ –stability and give results for the proportional partitional Shapley value, introduced by Alonso–Meijide et al (2015, Discrete Appl. Math.), which shares the utility of any coalition proportionally to the Shapley value of the involved players in the original game.

AbstractIn Italy cultural policies are often set at national level without taking into account the dualism between the Northern and the Southern regions that exists in different social and economic sectors. Our aim is to fill this lacuna and to examine the Italian theatre market from both the demand and supply side considering the four Italian macro-areas. To this end, we apply both the seemingly unrelated regression and the three stage least square estimation techniques, to identify the factors influencing theatre demand and supply. The empirical analysis is conducted using a 35-year panel data (1980–2014) at country level (20 Italian regions) and separately for the four main areas (each of them including the related regions): North West, North East, Centre, and South and Islands. At the country level, the estimated results confirm as determinants of theatre demand, price and consumer income as well as complementary good (cinema), urban agglomeration and tourism flows. Theatre supply is influenced by past ticket price, income, past attendance, urban agglomeration and public subsidies. At regional level the results provide empirical support for the existence of a strong heterogeneity from both the demand and supply sides. We find that some of the variables that influence attendance and performances at national level play a different role at the local level hence cultural policies should take into account this heterogeneity.

This paper contributes to the literature which questions the idea that the left-right axis still characterizes the political landscape, and challenges the view that the 2017 French election marked a sharp discontinuity in the development of French politics. It analyzes election outcomes using an original source of information on voters’ preferences using a method that leads to an alternative reading of the politics of the 2017 French presidential election. Firstly, the use of experimental data on approval voting enables us to provide a new narrative of the election process and outcome. Secondly, we introduce a procedure that generates an endogenous political axis, and construct indices revealing how and why the conventional approach opposing left to right is only partially relevant. In particular, the younger the voters, the less they conform to a left-right axis. However, we show that this does not represent a rejection of existing parties, as the official results would suggest, but an erosion in the voters’ minds of barriers between distinct political camps, and between traditional and populist parties.

This paper addresses how a Leviathan government taxes income if the earning potential is private information. This complements the normative analyses in the tradition of Mirrlees (1971). Taxes increase with respect to earning (potential and actual since taxation lowers observed earnings). However, accounting for the agent’s private information, average taxes (tax per income) decline for efficient types with zero marginal tax at the top. This conclusion is robust against alternative assumptions: a convex efficiency, i.e., high types are disproportionately more productive; an optimistic prior (i.e., high types are more likely), which, surprisingly, lowers the earnings of all types; and a government concerned about the welfare of its people.

Democratic politics suffers from numerous diseases such as lack of inclusiveness, time-inconsistency, short-termism, negative campaigning, lack of trust in and between governments, and many more. These diseases affect all countries, albeit to a differing extent. How can they be cured? From a politico-economic perspective, an institutional approach is required. We look at a country where these political diseases seem to play a relatively minor role: Switzerland. So far, Switzerland is renowned for its extensive direct democracy and federalism. However, its electoral system has been largely neglected. It uniquely combines proportional representation and majoritarian elections on all government levels. In contrast to the international standard, Swiss majority votes do not take place in single-member districts but in multi-member districts. We analyze how the interplay of majoritarian elections in multi-member districts and proportional representation mitigates many of the political diseases.