Conclusions

To conclude, we highlight a final connection between JSM and Adam Smith, this time in the latter’s concept of the “vanity of the philosopher.” This is the idea that we are all born equal and that differences between people mostly arise from their education, upbringing and life experiences—and that if looking at a less noble workingman the phi­losopher does not realize this intuition, it must be due to his vanity

In his Autobiography, JSM defines Benthamism not as a school but rather as the approach of a group of people, mostly surrounding his father, who shared a combi­nation of Bentham’s point of view with that of classical political economy.

Perhaps not by chance Smith, too, when recognizing the drawbacks of an extended division of labor, identified education as a main corrective. The similarities between the two thinkers are not limited to the political centrality they attribute to education: they extend to how education should be organized. It is here, we would argue, that their treat­ment diverges from our and Roncaglia’s convictions.¹²

With an aim to preserving variety and experimentation, JSM followed Smith in thinking that

if the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. [.] A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another [.].

Yet again, this classical liberal approach, minimalist as it may be, still falls short of sev­eral much more extreme and dangerous positions upheld by contemporary neoliberals.

In the Italian context, they argue for a complete liberalization of the whole education and training sectors, abolishing State quality and contents requirements on schools and universities as well as renouncing any legal value for educational attainments. Such calls, which undoubtedly resonate with certain economic interests, cannot be based on any notion of liberty. AsJSM notes, “[a]ll attempts by the State to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects, are evil; but it may very properly offer to ascertain and certify that

a person possesses the knowledge requisite to make his conclusions, on any given subject, worth attending to” (OL, 303).

As JSM highlights, it is one thing to prevent the state from exercising an improper influence over opinion, and it is a completely different thing to have the state certify that an opinion was acquired after due study. To safeguard this distinction,JSM notes, the knowledge required for passing an examination—which would then lead to a legally valid certification—should always be confined only to facts and “positive science.”

This, of course, is much more complicated in fields, such as the social sciences, in which even the definition, conceptualization and analysis of “social facts” may be dis­puted. But this competition of points of view does not prevent the objective assessment of a student’s (or a colleague’s) competence in the social field. Rather, to properly eval­uate one’s competence, it is necessary to turn to the history of thought: “[t]he exami­nations on religion, politics, or other disputed topics, should not turn on the truth or falsehoods of opinions, but on the matter of fact that such and such an opinion is held, on such grounds, by such authors, or schools, or churches” (OL, 303).

More than in formalization and empirical applications, it is in the history of thought that economics and the other social sciences can most properly be the object of teaching and can look for “facts”—notwithstanding what several “scientific-minded” colleagues think. Alessandro Roncaglia has explained this to generations of statistics students, and we plan to do the same.