| classic expression of the labor theory of value was part of an extensive argument against long apprenticeships, corporations, guilds, and other restrictions on the development of a free market in labor: |
 | | | The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbor, is a plain violation of this most sacred property. It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman, and of those who might be disposed to employ him. As it hinders the one from working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the other from employing whom they think proper. To judge whether he is fit to be employed, may surely be trusted to the discretion of the employers whose interest it so much concerns. 45 |
| Now constituted by the division of labor and organized by markets, civil society transforms the voluntary exchanges of free individuals into the substance of a fully civilized life. The interactions of interest-pursuing individuals are translated by market mechanisms into a new social order consisting of landlords, wage-earners, and capitalists. The old social estates are gone from Smith's presentation, replaced by the three characteristically modern social classes organized around agriculture, manufacture, and trade. Three components of production constitute civil societyland, labor, and capitaland they yield three forms of reward: rent, wages, and profits. Smith's complex tripartite analysis revealed the anatomy of "the wealth of nations." Hobbes had identified human appetite as the motor of civil society's economic activity and social motion, but it was Smith who supplied a precise explanation. Civil society does not originate in consciousness, decisions, ingenuity, or reason; like Ferguson, Smith had no need of contract theory. The law of unintended consequences is incorporated in his famous description of the origin of civil society: |
| | | This division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility: the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.46 |
| It didn't matter to Smith whether this "propensity" was innate to human nature or resulted from our capacity for reason and speech. Whatever its |
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