Natural Liberty and Liberal Order in the Anthropocene: Re-Reading Adam Smith

Since the birth of liberalism as a self-conscious ideology in the nineteenth century through to its repeated invocation by neoliberals over the last half century or more, Adam Smith's concept of natural liberty has been regarded as a central tenet of classical liberal thought since it first appeared in the pages of The Wealth of Nations in 1776, implicitly and explicitly providing a baseline for ongoing discussions around the "social contract" in liberal societies. Today, however, as geopolitics exposes ever more nakedly the imperialist foundations of the global economy, and its attendant social and environmental costs become increasingly pressing, the so-called "free trade" order that Smith's concept is taken to designate has deservedly been the object of growing criticism. This paper takes the Anthropocene – read both as a conceptual lever, and as a growing set of material changes – as demanding a reassessment of this foundational concept of liberal political and economic discourse. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith famously presents a system of political economy in which market coordination and individual freedom are closely intertwined, yet the connection between these is more contingent and nuanced than later interpretations have often suggested.  Building on the now decades of specialist scholarship on Smith that has transformed understandings of his work, the paper explores how Smith’s view of liberty rests not only on a particular conception of human nature but also on a historically emergent relationship between human societies and the nonhuman world.  Reconsidering this in light of the increasingly unstable conceptual and material separation between nature and society, it suggests, offers a way of thinking afresh about the relation between market freedom and liberal democracy in an era in which humanity has become a planetary agent.