機械と身体

経済学的言説におけるレトリックとメタファー

抄録

It has often been said that Adam Smith adapted his idea of the mechanism of the self-regulating market from physics. The regulating principle of natural price in his theory has the same explanatory role as the concept of gravitation has in Newtonian system. This view has been reinforced by the fact that young Smith wrote a serious study on the history of astronomy and, based on his methodological viewpoint, discussed the development of the science from the ancient to Newton. Contrary to this familiar notion however, he employed two kinds of metaphor in The Wealth of Nations, the one is of the machine, and the other is of the human body. Recent years have seen renewed interest in nature, and the function of metaphor has been seen in various domains of science and philosophy. The studies based on the method of cognitive sciences, especially of cognitive linguistics, are worth mentioning among the literature treating the subject, for they have persuasively demonstrated that metaphor must have been regarded not only as a form of figurative statement but also as an indispensable tool of the human cognitive process. Smith's usage of scientific metaphor in The Wealth of Nations could be well interpreted from this point of view. It has been observed in the literature on metaphor that the employment of metaphor endowed political discourse with persuasive power. It also has effectively been argued that metaphor was essential in a creative cognitive process in the way that it helped to reveal the unknown order of the subject of investigation, though it is still not certain that which of the explanations of its function, suggested by scholars in several different ways, is really working in the process.
Smith and Steuart seemed to agree that the machine was the adequate symbol of both the natural and political entity created by God. Explaining the property of the political body that attracted people's attention, Adam Smith frequently used the word “machine.” This symbolism seems to have been intended to represent visually the perfection of the complex mechanism of political institutions. James Steuart adopted this symbolism on several occasions. Along with the metaphor of machine, though, the image of the “body natural”, the human body, has played an important role in economic literature, representing the order of the economic system. Medicine provided metaphor, in a comparison of society to the human body, to the pioneers of economics, such as William Petty, Nicholas Barbon, John Locke, and François Quesnay, who were physicians as well. The metaphors depending on anatomy, circulation, reproduction, harmony, balance, symmetry, and the equilibrium of elements which constitute the natural body, the self-healing power of organism, etc., have been continuously employed in the history of economics up to the present by many economists, including Josiah Tucker and Adam Smith himself, who were not physicians. Thus, both metaphors contributed to the development of economic science and probably increased the persuasive power of economic writings at the same time.