The Yeoman and the Limits of Moral Conscience

In Hijacked, Elizabeth Anderson uses the example of the yeoman farmer to highlight the conditional nature of Smith’s admiration for independent labor over prosperity, raising broader questions about Smith’s justice and moral conscience under practical social conditions (Anderson, 139). 

Yeoman farmers prospered not because of a superior work ethic, but because sixteenth-century legal reforms allowed them to negotiate long-term, fixed leases. These institutional arrangements empowered yeomen to benefit from additional investment and to remain independent from landlords’ arbitrary authority. Their productivity followed from independence, not the other way around. 


When these legal protections were dismantled through enclosure and consolidation, yeomen were displaced and reduced once again to precarious dependence. As Anderson emphasizes, this transformation “produced paupers, not proletarians”: workers were not empowered agents but insecure laborers subject to domination (Anderson, 140). Crucially, this outcome was not the result of individual failure or deficient work ethic. It was a consequence of greater social power structures. 


Society may have argued this was misfortune, but Smith’s account of justice shows why the Yeomen’s displacement cannot be understood as mere absence of beneficence. Smith defines justice as abstaining from injury and condemns actions that subject others to domination or arbitrary power. The contracts that guaranteed the Yaoman’s prosperity were not gifts or acts of generosity, but structural guarantees against domination. Forcing buyouts, causing enclosure and consolidation, therefore constitutes not the withholding of optional, “free” beneficence, but the infliction of injury. On Smith’s account, such injury should provoke resentment and remorse. Yet the historical outcome Anderson describes suggests that those who exercised this power were able to “look society in the face” without encountering the moral condemnation Smith expects to accompany injustice (Smith, 84). This points to a practical limit in Smith’s confidence that moral conscience, operating through the impartial spectator, can reliably direct social judgment once institutional protections against domination collapse. Instead, as Anderson argues, blame is displaced onto those who suffer misfortune, allowing structural injustice to persist.

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