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Observed without Sympathy: Adam Smith on Inequality and Spectatorship

Responding to socioeconomic inequality and the decline of political participation, theorists of “audience democracy” emphasize citizens’ spectatorship of political leaders but neglect how citizens experience being watched themselves. I turn to Adam Smith’s arguments about the effects of inequality on spectatorship, highlighting his criticisms of the public’s disdain for people living in poverty. By comparing Smith’s arguments about misperceptions of people living in poverty to his discussions of an innocent man accused of a crime, I show how mistaken spectators demoralize even morally judicious individuals. I also expand on an example of unjust censure that Smith suggests but does not discuss in detail: the social shame directed at a survivor of rape. I conclude by using Smith’s insights to reflect on the social and interpersonal dynamics of surveillance that render contemporary welfare programs degrading for many participants and help transform socioeconomic inequality into political inequality. A pregnant woman visits a public hospital for a prenatal exam. As a Medicaid recipient, a New York State statute requires her to “meet with a nurse/health educator, HIV counselor, nutritionist, social worker, and a financial officer” (Bridges 2011, 42). Before she can access prenatal care, she must “detail intensely personal and intimate facts about her life,” including experiences of sexual abuse or domestic violence (Bridges 2011, 58). Because she cannot afford private insurance or treatment at a private hospital or physician’s office, she has no choice but to cooperate (Bridges 2011, 64). In the past two decades, political scientists have turned their attention toward the persistent rise of socioeconomic inequality and its consequences for democracy. Scholars have been puzzled by the failure of economic inequality to inspire political participation in democracies around the world (Solt 2008) and in the United States in particular, where the rise in income inequality has mostly been among middleand higher-income people yet political participation has declined most rapidly among lower-income people (Soss and Jacobs 2009, 104). Representatives appear largely unresponsive to the policy preferences of most of their constituents, excepting the affluent (Bartels 2016, 263–68; Page and Gilens 2017, 68). Democratic theorists have used “audience democracy” to describe the representative distance between politicians and constituents, emphasizing the public’s experience of a one-sided, theatrical spectatorship of their leaders who actually exercise power (Green 2010; Manin 1997, 223, 226; Urbinati 2014, 2019). With the ability of citizens to actually influence policymaking in doubt, Jeffrey Green proposes citizens possess democratic power as spectators whose “popular gaze” may influence political leaders (2010, 9). In response, Nadia Urbinati critically confronts the decline of political participation by characterizing the same experience of spectatorship as a disempowering “subjection” to politicians (2014, 226, 232). Urbinati builds on this approach in her study of populist movements, which she argues are facilitated by socioeconomic inequality (2019, 4, 174–76). Yet the scene with which this article opens is left out of these models of audience democracy, despite being emblematic of how inequality shapes politics. Although Green seeks “to dignify the lives of everyday individuals,” his argument rests on the erroneous assumption that the people “observe the few without being observed in turn by them” (2010, 128–29). But everyday individuals are not merely either participating on the public stage or passively watching political Kristen R. Collins is a senior fellow in the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Mercatus Center, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030 (kcollins@mercatus.gmu.edu). Versions of this article were presented at the Midwestern Political Science Association 2018 Annual Meeting, the Georgetown University Political Theory Speaker Series, the Association for Political Theory’s 2018 conference, and the Graduate Student Workshop Series at the Andrea Mitchell Center for Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. I thank the organizers and participants of those events and Ruth Abbey, Richard Boyd, Joshua Cherniss, Bruce Douglass, Jeffrey Green, Benjamin McKean, Michelle Schwarze, and Virgil Storr. I also thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for the American Journal of Political Science. American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 64, No. 4, October 2020, Pp. 1034–1046 ©2020, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12544