Thomas Chalmers: The Market, Moral Conduct, and Social Order

Abstract

Combining elements of Adam Smith's third-party perspective with the evangelical view of life as a trial, Thomas Chalmers argued for a market-based social order. The viability of this order would depend on the capacity to develop character in response to the choices made possible by the market itself. Character could replace administrative interventions. Chalmers saw well-intentioned administration, especially with respect to the poor laws, as both crowding out inner motivations and creating a focus for the fermenting of dissent over the terms of “legal charity.” Better, he thought, that there should be a reform in the composition of wages, abolishing all allowances, to foster the independence of workers and also then willing and productive work. The latter could be the basis of improving material and moral conditions.

Adam Smith’s Last Teachings: Dialectical Wisdom

“… 2 This concept of unity through a dialectical process was later cherished by the advocates of a clerisy (for example, Thomas Chalmers’s idea of “market as trial,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concept of social harmony as balance between two magnetic poles, and John Stuart Mill’s study of the tension between following customs and the pursuit of “higher pleasures”), who may well represent the immediate legacy of Smith’s last teachings and admonitions regarding wisdom (Knights 1978; McPherson 1982; Dickey 1986; Dixon and Wilson 2010 and 2013). …”