Abstract
Acting partly on the principle that any paper given at a conference celebrating the bicentenary of Adam Smith’s death ought to contain at least one reference to the event and year in question, I begin with a quotation from The Times dated 16 August 1790. In this issue, published a few weeks after Smith’s death, an anonymous correspondent, adopting a supercilious English manner towards his Scottish subject, purveyed some items of biographical gossip about Smith’s life and character. Among the mixture of information and misinformation was the following:
The [Glasgow] College was torn by parties, and Dr S[mith] embraced that side which was most popular among the people of condition; that is, the rich merchants of the town, among whom he was well received, and from whose conversation, particularly that of Mr. Glasford, he learned many facts necessary for improving his Lectures; for living in a great commercial town, he had converted the chair of Moral Philosophy into a professorship of trade and finance.
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Notes
Joseph Schumpeter’s belief that ‘the garb of philosophy is removable’ from economics, and that ‘economic analysis has not been shaped at any time by the philosophical opinions that economists happened to have’, provides the rationale for his History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford Univeresity Press, 1954) (see p. 31). See also W.L. Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics; English Economic Thought, 1660–1776 (London: Methuen, 1963): ‘A subject is not opened to scientific enquiry until its technical aspect has been sundered from its moral aspect ... there can be no doubt that economic theory owes its present development to the fact that some men, in thinking of economic phenomena, forcefully suspended all judgements of theology, morality, and justice, were willing to consider the economy as nothing more than an intricate mechanism, refraining for the while from asking whether the mechanism worked for good or evil’ (pp. 147–8). Although Joyce Oldham Appleby is more interested in ideology than science, she adopts a similar position in her Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Whether seen as science or ideology, this perspective has, of course, a much longer pedigree, featuring as it does in explanations for the rise of capitalism or the emancipation of a liberal economic ideology from its moral and political integument in the work of Karl Marx and his followers, as well as that by Max Weber, Richard Tawney, Karl Polanyi, C.B. Macpherson, Louis Dumont and many others. E.P. Thompson’s version turns on the replacement of ‘moral economy’ by political economy, where the latter is ‘disinfested of intrusive moral categories’; see ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), 89–90. All such schema depend on a view of precisely when and how ‘modern’ or ‘capitalist’ society actually emerged; for an account which shows that in England at least economic individualism can be traced back to at least 1250, well before any period assumed in the above literature, see Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism; The Family, Properly and Social Transition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).
The arguments that underpin this position are considered in my Adam Smith’s Politics, Chapters 1 and 8. For recent restatements of the view that Smith cannot be considered as a political theorist see Shannon C. Stimson, ‘Republicanism and the Recovery of the Political in Adam Smith’, Critical Issues in Social Thought (1989), 91–112, where the conclusion turns on her belief that Smith’s theory of history overwhelms his theory of politics by refusing ‘to lend a genuine efficacy to political action’. See also Nicholas Xenos, ‘Classical Political Economy: The Apolitical Discourse of Civil Society’, Humanities in Society, 3 (1980), 229–42, for whom ‘the end of government has become encapsulated within the system of political economy itself’ leaving politics ‘totally subordinate to political economy’ (pp. 236–7).
See, e.g., Milton L. Meyers, The Soul of Modern Economic Man: Ideas of Self-Interest, Thomas Hobbes to Adam Smith (University of Chicago Press, 1983), 120. Meyer’s conclusion, if not style of argument, has some similarities with that of Albert Hirschman, for whom also Smith provides the end of a story of how the passions might be deployed to control interests; see The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, 1977), 100–13.
For my own encounter with this viewpoint see ‘Adam Smith and the Liberal Tradition’ in K. Haakonssen (ed.), Traditions of Liberalism; Essays on John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill (Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies, 1988), 83–104.
In part at least reconstructing Smith’s ‘science of a legislator’ was the object of my Adam Smith’s Politics, but the politics loomed larger than the natural jurisprudence. I have also argued this case with special reference to Smith’s views on the corn trade in ‘Science and the Legislator: Adam Smith and After’, Economic Journal, 93 (1983), 501–20. For a fuller account that covers the whole field of the regulations of ‘police’ in its relationship to Smith’s jurisprudence see K. Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator; The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge, 1981).
It is dealt with in T.W. Hutchison, ‘Positive’ Economics and Policy Objectives (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964), especially Chapter 1.
The distinction between the ‘science’ and ‘art’ of political economy belongs to the 1830s and 1840s, and was often associated with criticism of Smith for confusing the two: see D. Winch, ‘Higher Maxims: Happiness versus Wealth in Malthus and Ricardo’, in S. Collini, D. Winch and J. Burrow (eds), That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 65–89.
As is most fully argued by T.D. Campbell, Adam Smith’s Science of Morals, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971);
see also D.D. Raphael, ‘Adam Smith: Philosophy, Science, and Social Science’, in S.C. Brown (ed.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), 77–93. This is not to deny the hortatory content of TMS, though it seems significant that Smith’s final advice to students was to adopt any one of the available non-licentious moral codes or systems: see TMS, VII.4.5.
As good examples published over a lengthy period see Glenn R. Morrow, The Ethical and Economic Theories of Adam Smith (New York: Longmans Green, 1923)
A.L. Macfie, The Individual in Society (1967)
A.S. Skinner, A System of Social Science (Oxford University Press, 1979). As a result of the labours of the editors of the Glasgow edition, of course, we have a large number of suggested parallels between WN and TMS.
A useful compendium can be found in D.C. Coleman (ed.), Revisions in Mercantilism (London: Methuen, 1969). Coleman has returned to the subject in recent years in two articles which criticize Smith’s interpretation of mercantilism: see ‘Mercantilism Revisited’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 773–91; and ‘Adam Smith, Businessmen, and the Mercantile System in England’. History of European Ideas 9 (1988) 161–70
In denying the usefulness of ‘mercantilist’ as a description of Steuart’s position I am taking issue with Gary M. Anderson and Robert D. Tollison, ‘Sir James Steuart as the Apotheosis of Mercantilism and his Relation to Adam Smith’, Southern Economic Journal, 5 (1984) 456–68.
See R.D.C. Black, ‘Theories of Population in Britain and Ireland before Malthus’. ‘Le teorie della popolazione prima di Malthus in Inghilterra e in Irlanda’, Le Teorie della popolazione prima di Malthus a cura di Gabriella Gioli (Milan, 1987), pp. 47–69.
See, e.g., E. Heckscher, Mercantilism (London, Allen & Unwin, 1935), Vol. I, pp. 286–315; and R.H. Tawney’s introduction to the reprint of T. Wilson, Discourse upon Usury (London, 1925).
By Joyce Oldham Appleby in Capitalism and a New Social Order (New York University Press, 1984), 19–23.
As several recent commentators have noted: see especially T.A. Home, ‘Envy and Commercial Society: Mandeville and Smith on “Private Vices, Public Benefits”’, Political Theory, 9 (1981), 551–569
D. Castiglione, ‘Mandeville Moralised’, Annali della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, 17 (1983), 239–90.
See J.W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought, (Oxford, 1988), chapter 3.
I have benefited from Michael Ignatieff’s highly perceptive comparison of Rousseau and Smith in The Needs of Strangers, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), Chapter 4, and the related article he has written on ’Smith, Rousseau and the Republic of Needs’, in T.C. Smout (ed.), Scotland and Europe, 1200–1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), 187–206. See also L. Dickey, ‘Historicizing the “Adam Smith Problem”: Conceptual, Historiographical and Textual Issues’, Journal of Modern History, 58 (1986), 579–609, which stresses the 1790 changes, though evaluates them differently.
See, e.g., L. Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis andTriumph of Economic Ideology (London: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 61.
See D.D. Raphael, Adam Smith (Oxford: Past Master, 1985), Chapters 3 and 5.
See the compendium of such cases assembled by N. Rosenberg. ‘Some Institutional Aspects of the Wealth of Nations’, Journal of Political Economy, 68 (1960), 557–70.
This formulation can be found in D.C. Coleman, ‘Adam Smith, Businessmen, and the Mercantile System’, p. 167. George J. Stigler makes similar criticisms of Smith’s failure to follow through with the self-interest principle in his ‘Smith’s Travels on the Ship of State’, in A.S. Skinner and T. Wilson (eds), Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 237–46.
See D.D. Raphael, ‘Hume and Smith on Justice and Utility’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 72 (1972–3), 101–3. On the ‘agreeable’ notion of desert and its inadmissability within any desirable or workable system of justice see D. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn, (Oxford, 1902), pp. 193–5.
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© 1993 Hiroshi Mizuta and Chuhei Sugiyama
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Winch, D. (1993). Adam Smith: Scottish Moral Philosopher as Political Economist. In: Mizuta, H., Sugiyama, C. (eds) Adam Smith: International Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22520-0_5
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