Adam Smith Dead End

Here is the claim that makes Michéa unclassifiable, and it is the spine of the book. Liberalism, he argues, is not the political tradition of the right against a socialist left. It is a single project with two faces. There is an economic liberalism — free markets, private property, minimal interference — usually coded as right-wing. And there is a cultural or political liberalism — individual rights, tolerance, the steady removal of any collective moral authority — usually coded as left-wing. Michéa's provocation is that these are not opposites. They are the same operation applied to two domains.

Both begin from the same founding refusal: the conviction that a society must never impose a shared vision of the good life. After the religious wars of early modern Europe, this looked like wisdom, even like peace. If people slaughter each other over rival conceptions of the good, then build institutions that stay silent on the good altogether. Let the market arbitrate the economy; let neutral law and individual choice arbitrate everything else. Nobody is asked to agree on what a decent life is. They are only asked to follow the rules.

What does a society organized entirely around exchange actually feel like from inside? Michéa's answer is that it feels, increasingly, like a place where nothing is owed and everything is negotiated. The relations that used to run on obligation, gift, and mutual recognition are steadily rewritten as transactions. This is not a moral panic about consumerism. It is a structural point: once you decide that no shared idea of the good may govern public life, the only remaining coordinator is the contract, and the only universal language is money.

Smith's wager assumed a stock of inherited morality it did not have to produce. The grocer who serves us for profit still, in Smith's world, refrained from poisoning the flour — not because the contract forbade it, but because he was raised in a community with shared expectations of honesty. Liberal society, Michéa argues, spends this inheritance without replenishing it. It treats moral capital as a free-standing resource, drawing it down generation after generation while dismantling the very forms of life — trades, neighborhoods, churches, unions, families of a certain kind — that once renewed it.

If the dead end is real, Michéa needs something to point to that is not simply nostalgia. He finds it in a phrase he borrows from George Orwell: common decency. Orwell, writing about the English working class, kept returning to an ordinary, unheroic morality — the reflex that makes people help a neighbor, share what little they have, keep their word, and feel disgust at cruelty and greed. Not a philosophy, not a doctrine, but a set of instincts carried by ordinary people who never read a book of ethics. Michéa builds his positive case on it.

Common decency matters to his argument because it is exactly what liberalism cannot generate and does not know how to value. It comes from below, from shared life and inherited practice, not from contracts or declarations of rights. It assumes precisely the things liberalism forbids public institutions to assume: a common sense of what is owed, a shared idea, however rough, of a good person. Where the market sees preferences to be satisfied and the liberal state sees rights to be protected, common decency sees obligations that no one signed and everyone recognizes.

Two hundred and fifty years after The Wealth of Nations, we still argue about Adam Smith as if the only question were how much market to allow. Michéa's reading changes the register of the argument. Smith mattered not because he loved markets but because he formulated, with unusual clarity, a bargain that Western societies then spent centuries carrying out: hold people together through exchange and rules, and stay silent on the good. The right kept the economic half of that bargain, the left kept the cultural half, and both mistook their shared premise for a quarrel.