In order to support the officials whose business it is to make the laws, to apply them, to see that they are carried out, and to defend the nation against foreign enemies, the State must impose pecuniary charges on the citizens and injure their economic interests, at least in a relative and temporary manner. Further the State can set itself to protect the economic interests of the citizens against competition from outside, and, within, to protect the economic interests of any particular class. . . . [I]n 1776, in his Wealth of Nations . . . Adam Smith tried to solve the economic problem by taking his stand on the principle of utility.

. . . [Adam Smith's] fundamental thesis, of which all [of his] other theses . . . are corollaries . . . is the thesis of the natural identity of interests, or . . . the spontaneous harmony of egoisms.

. . . Smith considers man as exclusively, or at least fundamentally, egoistic. . . .

Passages abound, in the Wealth of Nations, in which Adam Smith interprets historical events from this point of view--when he shows, for instance, how the egoistic passions, the love of lucre, the love of luxury, directed by an 'invisible hand', necessarly unite to realise the general interest either of a society or of civilisation as a whole, without the wisdom of the legislator having any effect on the matter. But all these explanations of detail rest on the fundamental theory . . . of the division of labour.

. . . [For Smith,] it is the division of labour which increases . . . [its] productivity and differentiates barbarian from civilised society. The division of labour increases the dexterity of each worker, specialised as he is in a single occupation. It is the cause, much more than the result, of men's having different aptitudes; it involves a saving of time which, without the division of labour, would be lost in passing from one occupation to another; and lastly it has brought about the invention of 'machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many'. . . . [For Smith this shows] that the general good is not the conscious object but a kind of automatic product of particular wills. For the division of labour and the general wealth which is derived from it is not the effect of a calculation on the part of human "prudence" or "wisdom." "It is the necessary . . . 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." This propensity . . . [is] unknown to all animals and common to all men: and it brings about the immediate reconciliation of the general interest and private interests.

Exchange [according to Smith] is the simplest and the most typical of all social phenomena: it is the original cause of the harmony of egoisms. . . . All exchange is essentially exchange not of an object with an object, but of a pain with a pleasure, of the pain of parting with a useful object with the pleasure of acquiring a more useful object: economic value resides essentially in this equivalent. . . . [Smith argued that:] "The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wishes to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. . . . Labour was the first price, the original purchase money that was payed for all things. It was not by gold or silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased." To produce is to labour, to exchange a pain with a pleasure; to exchange is to labour again, to produce a definite object with the view of obtaining another. . . . The natural price of an object is the total value of the labour which must be expended in bringing it to the market. . . .

The "natural" measure of value results, according to Adam Smith, from the comparison made between the amount of pain suffered, or . . . of pleasure sacrificed, to produce the object, and the amount of pleasure which is expected to result from the acquisition of the object, whether this acquisition occurs directly through labour or indrectly through labour followed by exchange. . . . For labour to be effective, [Smith argued that] the good of the renumeration [for it] must more than outweigh the pain of the labour [involved in acquiring it]. . . . Smith, then, with a view to a thorough-going valuation of wages, has a moral arithmetic . . . [which] takes place spontaneously. . . . [N]ature works for justice and the satisfaction of all . . . individual interests, without the interference of the legislator.

[Nineteenth-century English liberalism ultimately] consisted of the combined doctrines of Adam Smith and [Jeremy] Bentham.

[Its basic principle was that pleasures], in so far as they are pleasures, are capable of being compared with each other as regards their quantity: a calculus of pleasures and pains is possible. The end pursued by morals and legislation is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or . . . the identification of the interest of all with the interest of each. . . .

It was this idea of utility and not the idea of liberty or intellectual emancipation which was fundamental in Adam Smith, and above all in Bentham. . . . They [thus] endowed the Liberal movement which was carrying everything before it in Europe with a Utilitarian formula peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon world.

Further, although the principle of utility is the common principle in Bentham's juridical philosophy of utility and Adam Smith's economic philosophy . . . [while for both the] object of society is the identity of interests . . . [for Bentham,] the identity of interests is not realised spontaneously: therefore in order to establish it the law must intervene. . . .