Thursday, May 11, 2006

Um citação de Adam Smith

Quem conheça este blog não deve estar à espera de encontrar cá citações de "A Riqueza das Nações", de Adam Smith, mas vou postar esta passagem:

"In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become (...)"

"It is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are commonly called, of hunters, of shepherds, and even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry which precedes the improvement of manufactures and the extension of foreign commerce. In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity which, in a civilised society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people (...)"

Fonte: "What do bosses do?"[pdf], de Stephen Marglin, publicado, em 1974, na Review of Radical Political Economics.

2 comments:

Bruno Gouveia Gonçalves said...

Estou surpreendido... ;)

Anonymous said...

para ser sincero, não me surpreende ver aqui citações de adam smith.
era um tipo lucido.
e na sua obra, existem outras citações interessantes.