Comments on: ADAM SMITH AND THE “MAN OF SYSTEM” http://knowledgeproblem.com/2005/08/08/adam_smith_and/ Commentary on Economics, Information and Human Action Fri, 01 Jun 2012 16:51:44 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: corbusier http://knowledgeproblem.com/2005/08/08/adam_smith_and/#comment-1830 Fri, 12 Aug 2005 13:07:36 +0000 http://knowledgeproblem.wordpress.com/2005/08/08/adam_smith_and/#comment-1830 It’s quite a coincidence that I come across this post while reading the chapter on the Baroque in Lewis Mumford’s epic “The City in History”. The author discusses the transition from the medieval city to the Baroque city by emphasizing the imposition of order on everything, from bureaucracy, statecraft, and finally the parceling land in the city. The wide straight boulevard was characteristic of the Baroque city, since it conveyed a dominant order and a source of control. Mumford ties this preoccupation with the rise of centralized monarchies that arose during the late renaissance that abandoned the more organic order of the medieval free cities.

As Adam Smith talks about the man of system, namely political and bureaucratic leaders of nation states of the time, I can’t help that he was really criticizing the Baroque tendency for ordering and control and quantifying everything from one point of reference. Thus was Smith and the contemporaneous American War of Independence (1776) help overturn centralized control in favor of a decentralization? Was the late eighteenth century not only the start of an Industrial Revolution but of a Decentral revolution?

http://www.architectureandmorality.blogspot.com

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