Clemson University Establishes a Think Tank Devoted to Studying the Moral Basis of Capitalism

In what surely would have brought a smile to Adam Smith, Clemson University has launched an institute to study the moral foundations of capitalism.

The Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism is "the only university-related think tank in the country devoted to exploring the moral foundations of capitalism," the institute's executive director, C. Bradley Thompson, told The New York Sun. "We hope to be the beginning of a new trend in higher education."

The South Carolina school's board of trustees approved the establishment of the institute in October 2005, and it was launched with a donation of $1.4 million from the Branch Banking & Trust, the eighth-largest bank in the country.

A number of think tanks argue that capitalism is best because it is the most efficient and productive, Mr. Thompson said. "Most conservative intellectuals argue that capitalism is good because it works. We think capitalism works because it's moral and just," he said.

"We're going to foster the world's best conversation on capitalism and to that end, we're going to bring different viewpoints to the table," Mr. Thompson, who is also a professor of political science at Clemson, told the Sun.

Mr. Thompson has assembled an academic advisory council and an advisory board for the institute, which has a promotional brochure that features pictures of John Locke, Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand, among others. The academic advisory council includes the Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker of the University of Chicago and Vernon Smith of George Mason University, as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood of Brown University and a Harvard professor, Harvey Mansfield.

The institute will provide a public forum for exploring the institutions and underlying principles of capitalism, such as individual rights, contracts, rule of law, private property, free trade, voluntary associations, entrepreneurship, and limited government, Mr. Thompson said.

Describing briefly the moral foundation of capitalism, he said, "Capitalism is made possible by a limited government that has as its primary purpose the protection of individual rights, which in turn takes the sovereignty of the individual as a moral absolute."

Asked at the December 2005 meeting of the eastern division of the American Philosophical Association about the institute and the moral foundation of capitalism, a Princeton University professor, Cornel West, said Adam Smith was "anti-imperialist," which he said was something that those on the right generally "don't want to appropriate."

"Capitalism is thoroughly immoral and has no moral foundation," said Kirkpatrick Sale, the director of the Middlebury Institute, a think tank that studies separatism and self-determination. "In fact, it celebrates all of what we know of as the seven deadly sins except for sloth."

"All fundamental human rights have material and institutional conditions," a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, Martha Nussbaum, said. "There would be no such thing as private property, for example, without government protection of property from trespass and other damages. There would be no freedom of travel if government did not maintain the highways in a safe condition, enforce traffic regulations, and so forth."

She added, "Early capitalists thought parents should be free to use their children for labor; we now think that government must require all children to go to school, no matter what the parents want. The story of the 20th century has been the story of the gradual rejection of the idea of minimal government in favor of a capitalism that protects ‘human capabilities,' meaning the ability of people to live a decent life and enjoy their rights on a basis of equality with others."

The Canadian-born Mr. Thompson said that from a young age he "loved everything American." When he was 8 years old, the book "The How and Why Wonder Book of the American Revolution" made a deep impression on him, he said. He is now working on a book, tentatively titled "The Ideological Origins of American Constitutionalism."

The Clemson institute, Mr. Thompson said, faces what he calls an "anti-capitalist bias" among most of the intellectual elite in America. "It began in the last the quarter of the 19th century and picked up steam," he said. "For well over 100 years, the cultural elite in universities have been opposed to capitalism and have set the terms of this debate, which is why the Republican Party in general and conservative intellectuals in particular have not been able to defend capitalism on moral grounds."

Still, the director of Manhattan Institute's Center for the American University, James Piereson, wrote in the Weekly Standard in October 2005, "Perhaps the most promising development on campus in recent years has been the creation of various centers and programs dedicated to the study of political liberty and the history of free institutions — for example, the James Madison Program on American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton, the Gerst Program at Duke, the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College, the Political Theory Project at Brown, and the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization at Colgate."

"We have great ambitions for this program," Mr. Thompson said. "We want to be the Hoover Institution of the South."