CONCEPT
The Man of System
Adam Smith's warning from The Theory of Moral Sentiments against the planner so enamored of his ideal design that he imagines he can arrange people like pieces on a chessboard—forgetting that each person has a principle of motion of their own.
In a passage from
The Theory of Moral Sentiments that has grown more relevant with every passing decade,
Adam Smith drew a portrait of a particular kind of dangerous person. The “man of system” is “apt to be very wise in his own conceit,” so enamored of the “supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government” that he “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.” The flaw Smith identifies is precise: the pieces on a chessboard “have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them,” but in the great chessboard of human society, “every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.” People are not inert material to be optimized; they