Abstract

The essay argues that Edmund Burke's differences from Adam Smith on government-sponsored assistance for the unemployed is rooted in their differences about the nature of government, not in their economic theories. Burke, unlike Smith, cannot free himself from the violent display of power on which he thinks political legitimacy rests. In this way, his work testifies to the insights of Michel Foucault. Smith has a different, more bourgeois ideal and a higher estimate of the "bourgeois virtues" of the common person.