Adam Smith

From Philosopedia

Smith, Adam (5 June 1723 - 17 July 1790)

Smith, the eminent Scottish economist who became known as the prophet of modern capitalism, while at Oxford was reprimanded for reading David Hume’s allegedly atheistic “Treatise of Human Nature.” His own The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) became known for its extensive and lengthy argument which utilized three of his favorite words: sympathy, duty, and propriety. David Garrick, the actor and Smith’s fellow club member, called Smith’s conversation “flabby” (although Smith’s biographer, Ian Simpson Ross, in The Life of Adam Smith (1995), ascribes the remark to Oliver Goldsmith).

The critic Peter Ackroyd has written that Smith’s voice was harsh, that he was easily embarrassed, that he was prone to stammer. He dictated to an amanuensis, because he could wield a pen only with great difficulty and “his own handwriting remained clumsy, large, and almost childish.”

Smith traveled on the Continent from 1764 to 1766 as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch. While in France he met some of the Physiocrats and began to write An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which was finally published in 1776. Led by the rationalist current of the century and influenced by Hume and others, he came to believe that in a laissez-faire economy the impulse of self-interest would bring about the public welfare. In the book, he wrote,

• Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

His pragmatism, as well as the leaven of ethical content and social insight in his thought, differentiates him from the rigidity of David Ricardo and the school of early 19th-century utilitarianism. His Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795) appeared posthumously. In 1751, as Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University, Smith upset the orthodox by abandoning the Sunday class on Christian Evidences, and he petitioned the Senatus to be allowed to be relieved of the duty of opening his class with prayer. When permission was not given, word got out that the compulsory prayers were “thought to savour strongly of natural religion.”

Smith was well-founded in rationalism before he met Voltaire and other French freethinkers, and his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) contained a positive hostility to certain ecclesiastical forms of theistic optimism. Smith’s Wealth of Nations, states Robertson,

• is so completely naturalistic that only the habit of taking the Christian religion for granted could make men miss seeing that its account of the conditions of the rise of new cults applied to that in its origin no less than to the rise of any of its sects. As a whole, the argument might form part of Gibbon’s fifteenth chapter. And even allowing for the slowness of the average believer to see the application of a general sociological law to his own system, there must be inferred a great change in the intellectual climate of Scottish life before we can account for Smith’s general popularity at home as well as abroad after his handling of ‘enthusiasm and superstition’ in the Wealth of Nations. The fact stands out that the two most eminent thinkers in Scotland in the latter half of the eighteenth century [Hume and Smith] were non-Christians, and that their most intellectual associates were in general sympathy with them.

According to Joseph McCabe, Smith “was cautious about expressing his Deism, and shortly before he died he had sixteen volumes of his manuscripts burned.”

In the 20th Century, particularly with the fall of communism, Smith’s laissez-faire views have been misappropriated by some. Nobel laureate James Buchanan, a conservative economist at George Mason University, has written that Smith “was certainly not an extreme advocate of laissez faire.”

Journalist Sylvia Nasar adds that, far from being a conservative, Smith was a philosopher who inspired French revolutionaries, American suffragettes, and Japanese political reformers. He had the fundamental view that charity alone, while essential, cannot suffice to create prosperity: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” He was a person who thumbed his nose not only at the church but also at university and empire. His “invisible hand,” often misinterpreted as implying divine approval of greed, was a reference to the fact that self-interest, not charitable impulses, motivated butchers, brewers and bakers to feed society. Every individual, he concluded, is “led by an invisible hand to . . . without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society.”

Ian Ross in The Life of Adam Smith (1995) tells how Smith claimed he had been kidnapped by gypsies at the age of three, a story entirely untrue. Ross also tells how Smith was visited by a certain noble lady “as he was going to breakfast, and falling into discourse, Mr. Smith took a piece of bread and butter, which, after he had rolled it round and round, he put into the teapot and pour’d water upon it: some time after he poured it into a cup, and when he had tasted it, he said it was the worst tea he had ever met with.”

Samuel Johnson, who disliked Smith’s skepticism, called him a dull dog. In Hume’s words, Smith was affected by “indolence and love of solitude.” Smith’s mother, who lived into her nineties and was a person in his words who “loved me more than any other person ever did or ever will love me,” was the only woman in his life. Smith died six years after his mother’s death of “chronic obstruction” of the bowels.

{CE; FFRF; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; The Economist, 11 November 1995; TRI; TYD}