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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Classic Thinkers series
- Sprache: Englisch
Almost everyone has heard of Adam Smith, founding father of modern economics and author of Wealth of Nations. There is, however, much more to him than this. This new introduction gives a crystal clear overview of the entirety of Smith's thought. It demonstrates how Smith's economic theories fit into a larger system of thought that encompasses moral philosophy, philosophy of science, legal and political theory, and aesthetics. Examining the central arguments of his major works, ranging from The Theory of Moral Sentiments to his lectures on jurisprudence and beyond, Smith's thought is explained in its full intellectual and historical context. As the book unfolds, the long-standing caricature of Adam Smith as an uncritical defender of capitalism red in tooth and claw is systematically challenged, revealing a far more complex and nuanced figure whose rich legacy remains highly relevant today. Comprehensive yet concise, this book will be the leading introduction to Adam Smith's ideas for generations of students, scholars and general readers, relevant to areas ranging from philosophy and the history of economic thought to political theory.
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Contents
Series title
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations for Smith’s Works
1 Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment
Life
The Scottish Enlightenment
Newton
Hume
Notes
2 Science and System
Science
Wonder, Surprise, and Admiration
Systems
Rhetoric
Conjectural History
Social Change
Notes
3 Morality and Sympathy
Sympathy
Sociability
Propriety
General Rules
Custom
The Impartial Spectator
The Limits of Sympathy
Self-command
Notes
4 Justice and Virtue
Justice
Benevolence
Police
Religion
Moral Corruption
The Invisible Hand
The Implications of Inequality
Notes
5 Jurisprudence
Stadial Theory
Property
Government
Warfare
The Fall of Feudalism
Modern Liberty
Notes
6 The Nature of Wealth
The Division of Labour
Trade
Markets
Wages
Capital
Saving
Productive and Unproductive Labour
Banking and Money
Notes
7 Government and the Market
The Mercantile System
Mercantile Policy
Empire
The Agricultural System
Defence
Justice
Publick Works and Institutions
Education
Taxation
Notes
8 Legacy and Influence
‘Das Adam Smith-Problem’
Moral Sentiments
The Famous Dr Smith
Classical Political Economy
Marxism
The New Right
Contemporary Political Economy
Smith Studies
Adam Smith Problems
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment
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Series title
Classic Thinkers series
Richard T. W. Arthur,
Leibniz
Terrell Carver,
Marx
Daniel E. Flage,
Berkeley
J. M. Fritzman,
Hegel
Bernard Gert,
Hobbes
Thomas Kemple,
Simmel
Dale E. Miller,
J. S. Mill
Joanne Paul,
Thomas More
A. J. Pyle,
Locke
James T. Schleifer,
Tocqueville
Craig Smith,
Adam Smith
Céline Spector,
Rousseau
Andrew Ward,
Kant
Adam Smith
Craig Smith
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Craig Smith 2020
The right of Craig Smith to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1822-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1823-4 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smith, Craig, 1977- author.
Title: Adam Smith / Craig Smith.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Series: Classic thinkers series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Craig Smith’s new crystal-clear introduction reveals a far more complex and nuanced figure whose rich legacy remains highly relevant today”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019033302 (print) | LCCN 2019033303 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509518227 | ISBN 9781509518234 (pb) | ISBN 9781509518265 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Smith, Adam, 1723-1790. | Economists--Great Britain--Biography.
Classification: LCC HB103.S6 E36 2020 (print) | LCC HB103.S6 (ebook) | DDC 330.15/3092 [B]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033302
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033303
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The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
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Acknowledgements
When I was first approached to contribute a volume on Adam Smith to the Polity Classic Thinkers series, I decided that I would attempt to produce a work that both introduced readers to the whole of Smith’s body of thought and, at the same time, made the case for reading that body of thought as a consistent and coherent intellectual project. In writing the book, I have received much valued support and guidance from the editorial team at Polity, particularly George Owers and Julia Davies, and from the comments of three anonymous readers. Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli, and Kate Spence kindly agreed to read the draft manuscript and offered helpful constructive criticism. The book is a result of fifteen years teaching Adam Smith to undergraduate and postgraduate students. My position as Adam Smith Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow has allowed me to teach Smith to an interdisciplinary group of students drawn from Politics, Sociology, History, and Philosophy. Many of the formulations and examples included here first sprang from that classroom experience. As a result, this book is dedicated to the students of my courses on the Scottish Enlightenment and the Wealth of Nations at the University of Glasgow.
Abbreviations for Smith’s Works
All references to Smith’s works will be to the standard scholarly edition, the Glasgow Edition published by Oxford University Press, and will refer to the volume by title and page. Other notes will direct the reader to helpful secondary material listed in the bibliography that further explores the issues at hand.
Ancient Physics: ‘The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of the Ancient Physics’, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 [1795], pp. 106–17.
Astronomy: ‘The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy’, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 [1795], pp. 31–105.
Correspondence:Correspondence of Adam Smith, eds Ernest Campbell Mossner & Ian Simpson Ross, rev. edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Imitative Arts: ‘Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts’, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 [1795], pp. 176–213.
Jurisprudence:Lectures on Jurisprudence, eds R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, & P. G. Stein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Moral Sentiments:The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds D. D. Raphael & A. L. Macfie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1759].
Rhetoric:Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Wealth of Nations:An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols, eds R. H. Campbell & A. S. Skinner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1776].
1Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment
Adam Smith (1723–90) is unusual among philosophers from over two hundred years ago. He is unusual because his work is still widely read and discussed today. But more significant than this, his name is still widely known by the general public. Smith has become one of the few world historical figures who have entered into the common intellectual landscape of our culture. Unfortunately the ‘Adam Smith’ that exists in the popular imagination is somewhat different from the Adam Smith who lived and wrote in eighteenth-century Scotland.
Smith and his thought have become the focus of increasing interest among scholars since the publication of a critical edition of his writings in the late 1970s. Part of the aim of this scholarship has been to dispel the mythology and correct the caricature that has arisen around Smith. Adam Smith the first economist, the father of capitalism, the defender of laissez-faire economics, the advocate of selfishness, and the prophet of the invisible hand of the market has been seized upon by both advocates of free market economics and critics of capitalism. Smith has been set up as both the hero of the libertarian right and the villain of neo-liberalism. This caricature is something that Smith scholars have sought to correct by careful study of what he actually wrote. While such views are commonplace among the general public, those who read Smith’s two great books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, quickly see that there is much more to the man and his thought. That said, many of those who do this are then struck by the apparent tension between the discussion of sympathy in the former and the analysis of self-interest in the latter. This seeming contrast between a description of humans as benevolent in one book and selfish in the other led some of Smith’s nineteenth-century German readers to regard his thought as self-contradictory. As we will see, the so-called ‘Adam Smith Problem’ has been dismissed by Smith scholars, but its residue lingers on in the popular imagination.
The present volume is intended to be a contribution to these tasks of dispelling a caricature and dismissing an accusation of inconsistency. Its aim is to present a reading of the whole of Smith’s work, to indicate the systematic and interconnected nature of his writings on topics as diverse as economics, moral philosophy, science, and literature. In so doing, it will present a reading of Smith that is unified by his consistent application of a particular methodology, a way of doing philosophy or science, which acts as a powerful tool when applied across a range of what are now distinct academic disciplines. In addition to providing an argument that focuses on Smith’s texts, we will trace his intellectual context and explain why he was interested in the particular ideas and subjects that he discussed.
Understanding where Smith came from, how he was educated, whom he interacted with, and what he hoped to achieve, will illuminate his thought. Showing that Smith was a man of his time helps to dispel the contemporary caricature, but it will also show the reader that he remains an enduringly relevant thinker, one who should not be confined to history. The basis of this argument will be two-fold: it will stress the relevance of Smith’s understanding of the nature of what we now call the social sciences, and drawing on that it will emphasize the centrality of his attempts to explain the unintended consequences of human action. Taken together, these two aspects of his thinking open up a Smithian way of understanding the world that lies at the heart of this book.
Life
Adam Smith was born in the small Scottish port town of Kirkcaldy in the county of Fife in 1723. His family, whose background lay in a mixture of minor gentry and farming, was connected by patronage to many of the powerful families of eighteenth-century Scotland. His father, also Adam Smith, died before he was born. Smith senior was a comptroller of customs at Kirkcaldy and a writer to the signet (solicitor) who was attached to the Whig and Presbyterian cause that formed the backbone of the new Scottish establishment that arose after the Union of Parliaments between Scotland and England in 1707 and the Hanoverian succession to the throne after the death of Queen Anne. Smith’s father served a number of influential politicians, including the Earl of Loudon, who were supporters of the Union. Smith senior played an active role in opposing the first Jacobite rising, an attempt to restore the Stuart family to the British throne in 1715, and his reward for this was a steady advancement through the patronage network of government positions that dominated life in Scotland.
Smith’s mother, Margaret Smith, née Douglas, was related to several of the most prominent families in Fife, so the young Adam was born into a very particular set of social and political connections. The death of his father left him in his mother’s care, and this seems to have built a particularly strong bond between them that lasted until Margaret’s death a mere six years before his own.
Kirkcaldy had developed as a port which traded with the Baltic States and the Low Countries. In addition to fishing, it depended on coal and salt production. Both of these had begun to decline by the time Smith was born, and there was a significant level of smuggling along the Fife coast – an activity that Smith’s father was expected to help to police. Smith was born into a respectable, but by no means wealthy, family and received a first-rate education at the Burgh school in Kirkcaldy. Here the forward-thinking school master, David Miller, taught the young Smith the usual mixture of Latin, arithmetic, geometry, and rhetoric that passed for the standard Scottish curriculum, but he did so in a manner that stressed the practical value of the often abstract knowledge. One of Miller’s key innovations was his stress on polite learning and public speaking. Pupils like Smith were required to read a passage, often from The Spectator (a popular collection of ‘polite’ essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele), and then present its content in their own words. The exercise was designed to aid both comprehension and rhetorical skill. Smith was a gifted student and he seems to have thrived in an environment that sought to produce confident and articulate young men able to occupy the leading places in society.
With the support of his father’s political and family connections, Smith was accepted into the University of Glasgow in 1737 at the age of 14. Glasgow was just beginning its spectacular growth into one of the industrial powerhouses of Britain. At this time it was small, relatively quiet in political terms, and had a reputation of being a safe, Protestant, and Hanoverian city. But more than that, it was beginning to develop a reputation as one of the most innovative centres of learning in Europe. Glasgow had recently reformed its teaching practices to abandon the regenting system, where students were taught all subjects by one generalist tutor, in favour of a system of specialist professors. Among these were Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Smith’s beloved teacher of moral philosophy, who was central in encouraging the practice of teaching in English rather than Latin, and in introducing modern philosophical texts to the classroom. Another was Robert Simson (1687–1768), whose classes on mathematics and geometry quickly became a favourite of Smith’s.1
Smith’s early education had provided him with a level of skill in Latin that allowed him to bypass the remedial first year and move directly into the higher-level classes in Latin, Greek, Natural Philosophy, Logic, and Moral Philosophy. He spent the next three years proving himself to be a brilliant student and was able to secure a Snell Exhibition to fund further study at Balliol College, Oxford. We know very little about how Smith spent his six years at Oxford, but we do know that he found the unreformed nature of the colleges and the lack of attention to teaching to be a sore disappointment after the rigour of his early training at Glasgow. Most accounts suggest that he spent his time in private reading and research and continued to develop a broad range of interests across the arts and sciences. It was also likely that this period saw Smith first come across the work of the man who would later be his closest intellectual friend, David Hume (1711–76). Indeed, Smith’s poor health at this time, which he attributed to excessive study, paralleled the experience of his friend Hume in the composition of his Treatise of Human Nature (1739/40): a book whose arguments clearly shaped much of Smith’s thinking from this time onwards.
Smith was safely, if (given anti-Scottish prejudice) uneasily, ensconced at Oxford during the political upheavals of 1745–6, which saw the final attempt to restore the Stuart family, led by Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) at the head of a force largely drawn from the clans of Highland Scotland. The defeat of this uprising at Culloden in 1746 marked the end of the Stuart cause as a serious threat to the political stability of the new Great Britain, but it also reinforced the fragility of the political institutions with which Smith and his family identified themselves. If the city of Edinburgh itself could fall to a poorly armed clan uprising, then nothing was certain. Smith returned to Scotland, and his mother’s home in Kirkcaldy, in 1746. As the political situation stabilized, he began to cast about for a suitable career. The Snell Exhibition had originally been intended for those training to become priests in the Episcopalian Church, but this condition had lapsed by Smith’s time and it seems that he never seriously entertained an ecclesiastical career.
In 1748, Smith began his professional career as an academic. Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), the acerbic doyen of Edinburgh society, arranged for him to give a series of freelance lectures in Edinburgh. The lectures proved to be highly successful and he repeated them in the following two years. Kames hoped that Smith’s erudition and eloquence, honed during his time at Glasgow and Oxford, would find a ready audience among the emergent public intellectuals of polite Edinburgh society. Smith took as his topics rhetoric and jurisprudence and delivered his lectures in competition to those of the University of Edinburgh. That said, the material that he covered and the way in which he covered it meant that it was unlike anything then taught at the University. His theories of rhetoric and law, which we will cover later in this volume, have their genesis at this time.
The popularity of the lectures led to Smith being appointed to the Chair of Logic at the University of Glasgow in 1751. His inaugural address, De Origine Idearum (On the Origin of Ideas), does not survive, but the title is intriguing as it points us towards the theory of ideas, which would become central to his conceptions of how the human mind operates. On arriving at Glasgow, Smith revised the curriculum to make it more to his own taste. The old medieval logic syllabus was discarded in favour of one that centred on rhetoric, or, to be more accurate, argument and speech in modern English. The focus on plain ordinary language is a key feature of Smith’s thinking.
In 1752, soon after his employment at Glasgow, Smith was faced with something of a professional and personal dilemma. The death of the Professor of Moral Philosophy prompted him to move from the Chair of Logic to that newly vacant post, and the idea was mooted that David Hume should be considered for the Logic Chair. This proved too controversial an appointment for many, as Hume’s supposedly radical anti-religious views did not sit well with the rest of the faculty. Smith was forced to admit that, though he would have loved to have Hume as a colleague, his appointment would have been too contentious and may have harmed the institution. Smith’s earliest publications, including a letter to the short-lived Edinburgh Review of 1755–6, appear at this period.
Smith was a popular professor who took his educational role very seriously. Many of the personal reminiscences that his contemporaries have about him suggest that he approached the stereotype of the absent-minded professor: talking to himself, wandering out of doors in his nightgown, accidentally trying to make tea from rolled-up pieces of bread. While these images are endearing, they sit in more than a little tension with the reality of Smith as a gifted and professional teacher and a skilled university administrator whose roles included complicated tasks involving the finances of the University and the development of the library. In addition to his university duties, Smith was able to publish his first great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in 1759.
As his reputation grew, Smith was able to attract students from as far afield as Russia, Geneva, and the American colonies. Among those who attended Smith’s classes were the future biographer James Boswell (1740–95) and the gifted legal scholar John Millar (1735–1801), who would himself become a Glasgow Professor and later educate Smith’s heir David Douglas (1769–1819). Smith’s reputation attracted the attention of the politician and future Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend (1725–67). Townshend was the stepfather to the young Henry Scott, the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch (1746–1812), one of the wealthiest landowners in Scotland. Townshend persuaded Smith to resign his position at Glasgow after 13 years and become a travelling tutor to the young Duke. Though initially reluctant to leave his professorship at Glasgow, Smith was persuaded by the fact that the position would not only allow him to travel to the Continent, but would also come with a lifetime pension that would allow him to devote himself to study and writing.
Smith spent the years 1764–6 chiefly in France, basing himself in Toulouse and then Paris. He met many of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, the so-called ‘philosophes’. Among these were Voltaire (1694–1778), Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–81), François Quesnay (1694–1774), and several of the French economic thinkers known as the Physiocrats. Smith’s time in France was cut short by the tragic death of the Duke’s younger brother, and he returned to London with his pupil. Smith remained in London in 1766 and 1767 and used the time to produce a revised third edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He would remain close to Buccleuch throughout his life and acted as an adviser on the Duke’s financial matters and on his improvements to his vast estates.
Returning to Scotland in 1768, Smith retired to Kirkcaldy and began work on what was to become his most famous book, the Wealth of Nations. His friend Hume complained of his infrequent visits to Edinburgh during this period, but Smith assured him that he was making progress with his studies away from the distractions of the city. Smith travelled to London in 1773 and remained there until 1776, when the Wealth of Nations was published to great acclaim, and was soon followed by a second edition in 1778 and a third, significantly revised edition in 1784. The London of the 1770s was dominated by the dispute with the American colonies, and this context surely shaped Smith’s thinking on international trade (as we will see below). But 1776 also brought a personal blow with the death of Hume. Smith penned a memorial to his friend that was published along with Hume’s own autobiographical essay. He was later to observe that this memorial caused more personal attacks on him than the far more, as he saw it, controversial economic arguments of the Wealth of Nations. There is a certain irony in this as Smith had informed Hume that he was uncomfortable in acting as his literary executor as it would involve publishing the highly controversial, and now classic, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779). The Dialogues is a sustained attack on many of the most popular philosophical arguments for belief in God, and Smith clearly feared this would attract the ire of the religious. In the end, Hume’s essay was published, but to little abuse, while Smith’s memorial produced sustained criticism.
In 1778, Smith’s influential political contacts secured him a position as one of Commissioners of Customs for Scotland and he moved his mother and cousin, Janet Douglas, to Edinburgh and his new residence at Panmure House in the Canongate. By all accounts, Smith was as assiduous in his customs office duties as he had been in his professorial duties. One anecdote from the time tells how he read the list of smuggled goods, realized that he owned many of them himself, and promptly burned these to avoid any accusation of impropriety. He soon became a well-known figure walking up the High Street of Edinburgh from his home to the Customs House opposite St Giles’ Cathedral. One of the very few images we have of Smith is a sketch by the artist John Kay (1742–1826) of him walking up the street holding a posy of flowers to his nose to block out the stench of eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Smith also became an integral part of the Edinburgh social scene and was a leading light in the Oyster Club, a group that met for intellectual debate in a tavern in the Grassmarket. In addition, he hosted Sunday evening dinners for close friends and visitors to the city.
Smith was troubled by poor health in his later years and shaken by the death of his mother in 1784 and by that of his cousin and housekeeper Janet Douglas in 1788. He had never married, and we have almost no evidence of him having any kind of romantic engagement. So his household was gradually reduced to a few loyal servants and the son of his cousin, the young David Douglas, whose education Smith was directing and who would become his heir.
Smith’s late career as a civil servant was complemented by his growing reputation as a policy adviser to government. The success of the Wealth of Nations meant that his ideas were taken seriously at the highest levels. His opinion was sought on the American crisis, on free trade with Ireland, and on the changes to banking regulations. During a trip to London in 1787, many of the leading figures of the government, including the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806), attended a dinner in his honour where Smith’s influence on economic policy and free trade was acknowledged. Also in 1787, Smith was elected Rector of Glasgow University. He was particularly delighted by the honour as it reflected the good opinion in which the students at his old university held him. He travelled to Glasgow with his friend the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–97) for the installation ceremony and gave a talk on the Imitative Arts which he intimated elsewhere was part of an unfinished new book.
By 1790, ill health had set in while Smith was working to produce a final revised edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Although he managed this task, he did not manage to complete unfinished books on jurisprudence and on the arts and asked his executors, the scientist Joseph Black (1728–99) and the geologist James Hutton (1726–97), to help him destroy his papers. On his death, the bulk of Smith’s estate passed to David Douglas, later Lord Reston, an influential judge. Smith left small bequests to his friends and gave significant amounts to charitable causes. All of the evidence we have of his character is that he was a modest and unassuming man who was a loyal friend. Beyond that he seems to have been a very private man who sought to avoid public controversy. Indeed, the care with which he revised his two great books suggests that he wanted them, rather than any details of his personal life, to stand as his reputation to posterity.2
The Scottish Enlightenment
While the details of Smith’s life give us some insight into the connection between his biography and the content of his ideas, we are limited in what we can build upon this as he was a poor correspondent and ultimately a very private man. We actually gain considerably more insight by examining the intellectual climate in which he lived, the so-called ‘Scottish Enlightenment’.3
The Scottish Enlightenment was an outpouring of intellectual achievement that occurred during the middle years of the eighteenth century (roughly 1740–90). It forms a subset of the wider phenomenon of the European Enlightenment. The ‘Century of Light’ or ‘Age of Reason’ was a time when many of the features of the modern world came into focus. Ideas of science, academic freedom, progress, and civil liberty became increasingly popular amongst a newly emerging class of public intellectuals. The idea that the darkness of superstition was being replaced by science and reason as part of a movement of cosmopolitan intellectuals, ‘daring to know’, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) would later describe it, and refusing to accept truths set down by authority, has become central to understanding the intellectual history of the eighteenth century. This idea of thinking for oneself as enlightenment takes a very particular form in Scotland.
At first glance, eighteenth-century Scotland might seem a surprising place for a world-changing flood of science and philosophy. At the time, many considered the country to be a poor, isolated, and war-ridden backwater, more notable for its warring clans, religious fanatics, and wild landscapes than for intellectual achievement. But a combination of historical circumstances, together with a generation of remarkably talented men (and they were all men – it is worth observing that the Scottish Enlightenment, unlike the French Enlightenment, was a remarkably masculine movement), put Scotland at the forefront of the Enlightenment. Some have conjectured that it was precisely a sense of shame at the country’s supposed backwardness that proved to be the spur for this group to pursue Enlightenment in its particular Scottish form.
The history of the time also gives us good reason to understand why the emerging Scottish middle class were so attracted to the idea of Enlightenment. Seventeenth-century Scotland had been torn apart by a series of civil and religious wars. The Church of Scotland (the Kirk) had developed a particularly rigorous form of Presbyterian Calvinism that stressed strict discipline and punished heresy with excommunication and even, in the infamous case of the student Thomas Aikenhead in 1697, with execution. Beyond the religious and political situation, things were not much better. A series of famines had ravaged the country in the 1690s and the failed attempt to found a colony in Central America had virtually bankrupted Scotland’s leading families by 1702. In this setting, the fraught negotiations for the Union of Parliaments in the early years of the century, in which Smith’s father played a minor supporting role, represent the emergence of a social grouping who saw themselves as forward thinking and modernizing.
As we noted above, the Union of Parliaments with England in 1707 and the defeat of the final Jacobite rebellion in 1745–6, ushered in a long period of relative civil and political security as part of the new Great Britain. This stability came with access to new markets in England and its American colonies and this led in turn to unprecedented economic growth in the second half of the century. Scotland became a place of development and growth. Industries such as linen, glass, and tobacco boomed. Glasgow became the centre of the global tobacco trade as the short journey times to Virginia gave it a comparative edge over other British ports. Tobacco ‘Lords’ such as William Cunninghame (1731–99), Alexander Spiers (1714–82), and John Glassford (1715–83) began to diversify and develop other industries in the city. The growth of Glasgow’s economy at this time saw the beginnings of industrialization and the concomitant development of a particularly advanced banking system to encourage the circulation of capital for investment in new industries. The small city that Smith knew as a student was subject to growing urbanization, with its population growing from 13,000 in 1707 to 77,000 in 1801, to over 200,000 by the end of the nineteenth century.
Stable government and economic growth allowed the already fertile soil of native Scottish institutions to thrive. This was particularly true of the school and university systems. Scotland had one of the most developed education systems of its time. During the Reformation, the spread of Calvinism, with its focus on reading the Bible, encouraged a desire for literacy and led to the creation of an extensive network of Burgh schools. Scotland was also well served for higher education, with its five universities outnumbering England’s two. This meant that the structures were in place for a group of young men to take advantage of this education system and launch themselves on professional careers in the universities, the law, and the church. And that, indeed, is precisely what did happen. A new class of public intellectuals, a gentleman class, arose and transformed the nature of Scottish society over the course of the century.
Smith was at the centre of this milieu. He saw the changes in Scotland, and had a first-hand view of the investment and development in Glasgow. He socialized with many of the merchants and was able to draw on this experience in his economic thinking. The changes that he saw at this time were generally regarded as a good thing: as an example of that most central of Scottish Enlightenment concerns, ‘improvement’. In many respects, this was a self-conscious movement. The Enlightenment belief in science and progress took on a very practical and applied meaning in Scotland. The lessons of science were to be heeded and deliberately applied to improve the state of the country. Some of these, such as the development of scientific agriculture and the reform of landholding, were uncontroversial, while others had a darker side, including the suppression of Highland dress and language.
The upheaval of the Jacobite rebellions convinced the new establishment of the need to civilize Scotland’s northern fringe. The military suppression of the clans was followed by attempts to encourage development in the Highlands through agricultural reform and by opening up the area with new roads and the imposition of a uniform system of justice. The proceeds of the estates confiscated from the Jacobite leaders were used to fund these investments and to encourage a series of planned villages which sought to offer employment to the Highlanders. Towns such as Ullapool and villages like Luss provided modern homes and the promise of employment. The old clan chiefs lost their civil and political power and the century saw movements of people from the Highlands to the towns and cities and to the colonies.
Scotland saw enormous social change in the eighteenth century, and in the circumstances of a rapidly changing country it is little surprise that its intellectual class, the so-called ‘literati’, became preoccupied with an attempt to understand social and historical change. The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment gathered in the cities could see the beginnings of urban commercial society and modern agriculture in the Lowlands, but they could also look north to the Highlands and see a much older form of clan-based subsistence economy. The difference fascinated them and posed the question of how the Highlands might be ‘improved’. If we look at Smith’s writings, the Wealth of Nations in particular is filled with Scottish examples. It is no surprise that Smith was interested in society and in economics because he had around about him a living laboratory of rapid social development. But like his fellow literati, his interests were not parochial: he believed that the attempt to generalize from the experience of a particular country would allow for the understanding of universal features of human social life.
Smith’s friends, his fellow literati, were a close-knit group of people from remarkably similar backgrounds. None came from particularly ancient or wealthy families: they were the sons of church ministers, minor landowners, and lawyers and they were making their way in Hanoverian Britain as members of a newly emerging middle class. What they shared in common was a similar educational background and a desire to improve their country. Many of these thinkers became leading figures in their respective disciplines. For example, Smith’s teacher the Irish-born Francis Hutcheson, sometimes referred to as the ‘father’ of the Scottish Enlightenment, developed the style of philosophical education that became the backbone of the Scottish universities during this period. Hutcheson’s success as a lecturer popularized the reconstructed version of the moral philosophy curriculum that became the shared basis of education in the Scottish universities. All students had to take moral philosophy, and the subject, which covered what we now think of as ethics, jurisprudence, aesthetics, politics, sociology, and philosophy of religion, formed a shared background to the thinking of the time. Hutcheson’s desire was to provide a system of moral philosophy that contributed to our knowledge of social life, through a natural jurisprudence and a theory of a moral sense (the innate sense in the human mind that allows us to identify the right thing to do). But more than anything, Hutcheson saw his primary role as the education of virtuous citizens and good Christians. Enlightened education had a social as well as an intellectual function, and this notion deeply influenced Adam Smith’s understanding of what was expected of him in his role at the University of Glasgow.
Hutcheson’s role as a father figure to the Scottish Enlightenment in Glasgow is paralleled by the role of Henry Home, Lord Kames, in Edinburgh. As we saw above, Kames was a senior judge, but he was also a philosopher and legal theorist who produced works of literary criticism and history. Kames sat at the centre of Edinburgh intellectual life, and his reputation as a sarcastic and combative thinker does not detract from his energy in promoting the careers of the younger members of the literati. Kames also acquired a significant estate through marriage and set out to apply the latest scientific knowledge to agricultural improvement, with his book The Gentleman Farmer (1776) intended to be a practical guide to improving land by the introduction of crop rotation and new crops such as the potato.
Another figure who applied himself to amateur scientific agriculture was Adam Ferguson (1723–1816). The long-serving Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, who was the only member of the group born in the Highlands, kept a farm at Hallyards in Lothian, where he would experiment with the latest agricultural methods. Ferguson’s fame was built on An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), which has earned him the reputation as one of the founders of sociology. Ferguson’s book was intended to trace the development of human social life through history, and it is a clear example of what we will see as the Scottish Enlightenment’s fascination with social change. Ferguson was interested in the details of the descriptions of different types of society that were being collected by explorers. These suggested that the divergence between the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland was merely a particular case of a more general division between savage, barbarian, and civilized societies. The interest in types of society became the characteristic feature of Scottish thinking about society and history. Like his fellow literati, Ferguson attempted to explain how a universal human nature adapted to different circumstances to produce diverse social institutions. Ferguson’s history of civilization was accompanied by his History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783), which sought to trace the social changes that led Rome to move from republic to empire. Ferguson, like Hutcheson, was keen to draw a moral lesson from his work, and both the Essay and the History are characterized by an interest in the dangers of moral corruption that face commercial societies.
Thomas Reid (1710–96), who succeeded Smith at Glasgow when he left for the tour with the Duke of Buccleuch, was the founder of the ‘common sense’ school of philosophy and a critic of some aspects of the work of Hume and Smith. Reid, like Ferguson, was also a Minister of the Kirk and shows the intimate relationships that existed between the various institutions of Scotland at the time. Another prime example of this is Hugh Blair (1718–1800), who was Minister of the High Kirk of St Giles in Edinburgh, and perhaps the most famous pulpit orator of his generation, while also holding the post of Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University, a position which is often regarded as the first university chair in English Literature. Before his appointment to Edinburgh, Blair succeeded Smith in giving the public lectures on rhetoric in the city and closely followed Smith’s model for a modern rhetorical education.
William Robertson (1721–93) also maintained a parallel career as Kirk Minister and Edinburgh Professor. He was a Professor and later the Principal of Edinburgh University, the leader of the Moderate faction in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Moderator of the Kirk, and Historiographer Royal for Scotland. The Moderate faction within the Kirk was the main political manifestation of the Scottish Enlightenment. Under Robertson’s leadership, the literati were able to advance their Enlightenment project in the face of opposition from the evangelical traditionalists of the Popular faction. The Moderates were active in protecting thinkers like Hume and Kames from prosecution for heresy. They were also able to place sympathetic Ministers in the most influential parishes and to promote a form of religion that was far milder than the rigid Calvinism of the traditional Kirk. The decline in the enforcement of social conformity through the Kirk was accompanied by a shift in focus from strict adherence to the literal word of the Bible to a form of teaching that stressed conscience and good moral behaviour. In a period of less than fifty years, Scotland had moved from a near theocracy where heresy was punishable by death to a more liberal society where David Hume’s heterodox views on religion were met with social disapproval rather than prosecution.
Another interesting feature of this group was their tendency to move around the Scottish universities. For example, Smith’s friend and executor Joseph Black was a Professor at Glasgow and then Edinburgh. Black’s fame rests on isolating carbon dioxide and conducting ground-breaking experiments on latent heat. The other executor of Smith’s estate, James Hutton, studied chemistry and made a fortune by perfecting the production of ammonium chloride. Hutton’s true interest was geology and he travelled around Scotland observing rock formations, eventually producing his Theory of the Earth in 1795, the first modern account of geology. Black was also a physician and acted as doctor to several of the leading members of the Scottish Enlightenment. Scotland became famous for producing some of the leading medical men of the century. John Gregory (1724–73), William Cullen (1710–90), and the brothers John (1728–93) and William Hunter (1718–83) were pioneers of modern medicine. They built the reputation of the Scottish universities as the most advanced centres of medical training in the world.
True to the interest in applying scientific knowledge, the Scottish Enlightenment also produced some of the most successful engineers of the century. James Watt (1736–1819) worked as instrument maker at the University of Glasgow while Smith was a professor there. He went on to develop the separate condenser for the Newcomen steam engine, an innovation that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution. Thomas Telford (1757–1834) was a gifted civil engineer whose work on the Caledonian Canal helped to open the Highlands to commerce and, together with the Forth and Clyde Canal, facilitated water transport in the Scottish mainland.
Smith’s childhood friends from Kirkcaldy included the architect Robert Adam (1728–92), whose Palladian style and neo-classicism dominated architecture at the time and helped to shape the most obvious physical symbol of the Scottish Enlightenment, the New Town of Edinburgh, whose Georgian elegance stands in contrast to the medieval old town. The building of the new town also involved the significant engineering feat of the draining of the Nor Loch and its replacement with Princes Street Gardens.
Adam was among the leading figures in the arts who emerged from Scotland at this time. Others include the portraitists Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823) and Allan Ramsay (1713–84), who painted many of the central figures of the period, the historical landscape artist Gavin Hamilton (1723–98), and the cartoonist and caricaturist John Kay, who provided amusing sketches of Edinburgh life. Two great pioneers of the English-language novel, Tobias Smollett (1721–71) and Henry MacKenzie (1745–1831), are also of note, as is a tradition of poets, including Robert Fergusson (1750–74) and Robert Burns (1759–96), who sought to preserve the Scots language and traditional songs from a fashion for Anglicization. The century also saw the foundations of fine art schools and printing presses, notably by the Foulis brothers in Glasgow.
These individuals formed a tight-knit group who met in the clubs of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen: clubs like the Select Society, the Poker Club, the Oyster Club, the Aberdeen Wise Club, the Glasgow Literary Society, and the Political Economy Club, where they heard papers and discussed the latest publications in philosophy and science. Many of these clubs, like the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and Agriculture, which later became the Royal Society of Edinburgh, were set up to apply scientific knowledge to practical improvement.
The latest ideas from England and Europe were absorbed and debated along with the latest Scottish ideas. The Scots corresponded with and met the leading thinkers of the time as part of a cosmopolitan intellectual environment. Enlightened visitors to Scotland such as Ireland’s Edmund Burke and America’s Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) were welcomed into a ferment of intellectual debate. Indeed, Tobias Smollett described the Scotland of this time as a hotbed of genius. Thinking about Adam Smith as moving in this context is helpful to us, as we can see the thinkers whose ideas influenced the development of his thought and those with whom he interacted in the discussion clubs of Enlightenment Scotland. Understanding Smith as a man of the Enlightenment, and particularly as a man of the Scottish Enlightenment, helps us to grasp a number of centrally important themes in his work: the most important of these being his commitment to science.
Newton
Perhaps the greatest inspiration for the Enlightenment was Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Newton’s towering achievements in the natural sciences made him the template for the successful public intellectual. Voltaire heaped praise on him as supplanting the thought of René Descartes (1596–1650), and his fame became such that he was even lauded in poetry by Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Newton’s heroic status rested on his refinement of the scientific method first mooted by Francis Bacon (1561–1626). The method was grounded on the importance of observation and the generation of simple general rules of cause and effect based on the regularities observed in nature. This method avoided the error of Descartes, whose search for first principles led him to theorize beyond what the evidence supported.
Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) popularized a new understanding of what science was and what we could expect from it. The Newtonian, or experimental, method also had a further decisive advantage over its rivals: it provided testable predictions. French expeditions to Peru in 1735 and to Lapland in 1736 appeared to confirm Newton’s description of the shape of the earth, while the reappearance of Halley’s Comet in 1758 again demonstrated the success of his ideas. Colin Maclaurin (1698–1746) popularized Newton’s work in the Scottish universities, ensuring that the young Scots whom he taught had the opportunity to experience cutting-edge science. By the time Smith was a student, the spirit of Newtonianism had become deeply embedded in the curriculum.4
Another major contributor to the modern science that Smith absorbed was John Locke (1632–1704). Locke’s writings on education and on the theory of knowledge became a staple part of the understanding of psychology during the Enlightenment. Locke argued that all knowledge was based on experience and observation. He rejected the idea that human minds came stocked with innate ideas. Instead humans arrive with a tabula rasa or clean slate, and then proceed to build the content of their minds through experience of the world. All of our ideas arise from sense perceptions or as the result of reflection on sense perceptions and come to form increasingly complex thought processes. In terms of education, this led Locke to stress the importance of socialization and the need to state ideas in as plain and straightforward a fashion as possible.
Hume
The ideas of Newton and Locke form the backdrop to the thinking of the man who is the single most important influence on Adam Smith’s thinking: David Hume. Hume came from a very similar background to Smith and, being around a decade older, had already passed through the Scottish university system and written his first great work, the Treatise of Human Nature, by the time Smith was at Oxford in the 1740s. In Hume’s hands, the logic of the experimental method and the Lockean theory of ideas were pressed inexorably to their sceptical conclusions: the idea ultimately being reached that we must accept that all human knowledge is based on conditional probabilities acquired from experience by induction. In other words, there could never be any definitive ‘proof’ or truth outside systems of human concepts such as mathematics.
Hume begins the Treatise by noting that science is plagued by excessive abstraction and dedication to systems of thought. The only response to disputes between the adherents of these different systems of thought is recourse to empirical evidence. For Hume, all science is based on human understanding, and so all science must be based on a secure understanding of how human beings understand: on what he called the science of man. In turn, the only secure basis for such a science of man is experience and observation. Like natural scientists, we must conduct experiments and generalize from them. But experiments in the science of man cannot be the same as experiments in the natural sciences: we cannot manipulate people in the same way we mix chemicals. For Hume, we must instead have recourse to the observation of human life as it is and as it has been lived by actual people. If we look for examples and then compare them, we will gradually be able to build a picture of what is universal in human experience. The evidence that this provides us with will give insight into what motivates human behaviour and how humans think. Crucially for the development of the ideas of Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, this led to the view that history was the data for a science of society.
The most controversial part of Hume’s Treatise is his deconstruction of how humans come to make connections between the ideas that they draw from experience. Perhaps the easiest way to understand his position is to trace his basic understanding of the core scientific idea of cause and effect. Hume sets out to understand how humans make connections between phenomena. His answer is to say that we attribute the relationship between two phenomena to be one of causation – that one thing causes another. Hume then breaks down the steps in how we form that sort of belief. He argues that we draw on our experience of the world to observe that the two phenomena are closely connected, that one of them precedes the other, and that they have always been found this way. In the classic example, one billiard ball strikes another and so ‘causes’ the movement of the second ball. Hume says that this leads us to form a belief that there is a ‘necessary connexion’ between the two. So far this is similar to Locke’s theory, but it is where Hume goes next that built his reputation as a sceptic. Hume argues that this form of knowledge is based on habit rather than reason.
