Nicholas Phillipson

by Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

  All of this underlined one of the greatest differences between the two philosophers: Hume’s reluctance to use his brilliant insights into the cognitive processes that make it possible for us to live sociably to develop the science of man he had promised in the introduction to the Treatise. Perhaps this had something to do with a sceptic’s distrust of systems of knowledge. Perhaps he came to believe that Smith was temperamentally better suited to the task of system-building than himself. Perhaps the reason he is said to have given to one of his friends is the most plausible of all: ‘Pardon me, did I not sett out with a complete Theory of Human Nature which was so ill received that I determined to refrain from System making.’35 At all events, he was to spend the rest of his intellectual life using his insights into the principles of human nature as critical tools which could be used to analyse the philosophical and historical roots of the political and moral culture of his own country. It was a task he characteristically performed with the utmost brilliance and culminated in the writing of a massive history of England. It also made him a very rich man.

  Smith, for his part, was to find the task of developing a science of man on Humean principles very much to his taste, and was to deliver its first fruits in the later 1740s while making his debut in Edinburgh. It was here that he developed theories of rhetoric and jurisprudence which were based on the remarkable theories of language and property which were to underpin all of his subsequent moral and political thinking. Into these he was to weave his own conjectural discussion of the assumption on which all of Hume’s philosophy was based, that it was necessary to think of human beings as members of a species whose nature and history were deeply determined by indigence, infirmity and need. At the same time he was to address the problem Hume had so conspicuously avoided, the meaning and nature of those systems of science and philosophy, those products of the imagination, which history teaches have the power to refine or corrupt the human understanding. They were questions he was to address in his earliest works and of which he was to be ever mindful in his own philosophical practice. For Smith became at Oxford as he remained, the perfect Humean; and it was as a perfect Humean that he was to become Hume’s closest friend.

  4

  Edinburgh’s Early Enlightenment

  Smith left Oxford in late August 1746 and returned to Scotland, his final year having been overshadowed by the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and the slaughter at Culloden on 17 April 1746. Balliol was no place for a Scottish Presbyterian Whig and Smith once commented that he had left ‘in disgust’.1 But it was time for a move. Smith was twenty-three, in need of a patron, a job and people he could talk to, and Scotland was able to supply all three. His old friend James Oswald knew David Hume and the most formidable of Edinburgh’s cultural entrepreneurs, Henry Home, the future Lord Kames and one of Hume’s cousins. Henry Home was to be instrumental in launching Smith’s career in 1748 by means of an invitation to deliver two series of lectures in the capital, on rhetoric and on jurisprudence. It was an intelligent act of enlightened patronage. It meant exposing a well-connected and promising young philosopher to a demanding audience by giving him the chance of lecturing on subjects that were of philosophical importance and topical interest to the Edinburgh literati, and it was an opportunity Smith grasped with both hands. The lectures established his intellectual credentials and paved the way for an academic career at Glasgow, and the audiences were large enough to make him more than £100 – a professorial salary, as Hume commented rather enviously, ‘tho you had not the character of Professor’.2 And although Smith always preferred Glasgow’s collegiate culture and the peace and quiet of Kirkcaldy to the more mouvementé life of the capital, Edinburgh was to remain close to the centre of his field of vision for the rest of his life as a city he valued for its intellectual life and its cultural politics. What is more, it was a city that, by 1746, had reached a watershed in its history.

  Throughout Smith’s lifetime, Edinburgh’s history was shaped by the Act of Union of 1707, which had effectively sacrificed the Scottish parliament and privy council in exchange for the Scots’ right of free access to English markets at home and abroad. Edinburgh citizens had feared that the loss of these political institutions would be followed by the migration of the nobility, gentry and ambitious to the new centre of power in London. The city’s society and consumer economy would be destroyed and Edinburgh would become a ‘widowed metropolis’, as a later writer put it.3 It didn’t happen. The Union did not compromise the position of the Kirk, the legal system, the banks, the electoral system or the system of local government, and this was enough to ensure that Edinburgh would remain the focal point of the country’s distinctive form of civil society. Throughout the century, English ministers responded pragmatically to this situation, preferring to supervise Scottish government and the electoral system remotely whenever possible, leaving the effective business of Scottish government to agents or ‘managers’ they could trust. Indeed, the two greatest ‘managers’ of the century, the Earl of Islay, who would succeed his brother as 3rd Duke of Argyll in 1742 and ruled from around 1725 until 1761, and Henry Dundas who ruled from 1775 to 1801, were so powerful that they were generally known as uncrowned kings of Scotland. It was a situation that meant that throughout Smith’s life, Edinburgh, like Boston and Charleston and Dublin, would remain the effective centre of the public life of one of the great nations of the British Crown.

  One of the reasons this worked was that for much of the century the city supported the collective life of the higher Scottish gentry and of some of the minor nobility, a class for whom the expensive and often Scotophobic attractions of London held limited appeal. This was a class of crucial importance to Scottish public life and to the future of the Union. It supplied a significant proportion of the tiny Scottish electorate; it provided the counties with most of the county Sheriffs and Justices of the Peace, on whom the burdens of local government mostly fell; and it supplied Scotland’s supreme courts, the Courts of Session and Justiciary, with most of their judges and the Scottish Bar, the Faculty of Advocates, with most of its members. The restoration of lay patronage in the Church of Scotland in 1712 meant that these landowners were able to tighten their grip on country parishes and the General Assembly, the Church’s ruling body. By the 1720s they expected Edinburgh to be able to maintain a university fit for their sons and a society fit for their wives and daughters. And although only a few of them made political careers in London, they provided the public life of post-Union Scotland with its middle-management, responsible, as Smith might have put it, for maintaining the rules of justice and policing a country whose political life was being transformed by an incorporating, parliamentary union.

  This was Smith’s world and it was one whose subjects’ outlook on public life was shaped at every level by the legacy of the Union. Presbyterians knew very well that some of the Kirk’s most bitter internal divisions had roots in the legislation restoring lay patronage to the Kirk and introducing toleration a year later in 1713. Lawyers and litigants – and there were few more litigious landowners than those of Scotland – were acutely aware of the problems of preserving the integrity of Scots jurisprudence and litigating in a British state in which the House of Lords had become the country’s final court of appeal. Merchants and manufacturers knew that their business involved exploiting the domestic and overseas markets opened up by the Union. And those with political business to attend to and patronage to solicit were well aware that Edinburgh and London provided different points of access to the Crown and the ministry, for no churchman, lawyer, merchant or elector would ever forget that the Union had given them access to the increasingly lucrative stock of civil, military, naval and imperial patronage that lay in the hands of the British Crown. Patronage became an essential component of the cement that allowed the Union to bed down and to flourish.

  By Smith’s day, these brute facts of public life were being shaped by a distinctive political language, which defined the ideological character of Edinburgh’s public life
and provided its elite with a resource for discussing their own and their country’s future. It was a language which looked back to the remarkable debate about the Union that had been staged in Edinburgh between 1698 and 1707, and to the hopes and fears that contemporaries had held for their country’s future in a post-Union age. What is interesting about the debate is that, while there had been passionate differences of opinion about the possible consequences of an incorporating union, there was a fairly general agreement about the nature of the country’s problems and the responsibilities that the Scots parliament faced in addressing them. No one at the time seriously doubted that seventeenth-century Scotland had been ‘a failing nation’, with a defective constitution, an underdeveloped, feudal economy and a fragile system of international trade that was being damaged by international war. No one doubted that the prime cause of these problems lay in the existing regal union with England, which had obstructed the development of Scottish trade, perpetuated the economic and political power of a greedy, self-serving feudal nobility and undermined the development of Scotland’s political institutions. No one seriously doubted that the key to restoring Scottish fortunes lay in a renegotiated union with England which would allow the Scots to rebuild their country’s economy and political life and release the energies or ‘virtue’ of its governing elite. English ministers and a significant number of Scottish MPs favoured an ‘incorporating’, or parliamentary, union, which would abolish the Scots parliament, merge its powers with that of England and create a free trade union with England. The exchange would do away with a factious institution that had become the playground for a politically ambitious nobility and was making the country ungovernable, and would lay the foundations for a system of free trade between the two countries that would allow the country’s economy to be rebuilt and the fabric of its civil society to be restored. However, most Scots would have preferred a ‘federal’ union, built around a reformed parliament dominated by the gentry, on the grounds that economic ‘improvement’ and national regeneration could only be effectively directed by a free parliament and a virtuous patriotic elite.

  These disagreements reflected deep anxieties about the future of the country and its landed elite, which were to become part of the mindset of ambitious young men of Smith’s generation and part of the ideological underpinning of Edinburgh’s enlightenment. While most could agree that a new union was necessary for curbing or even breaking the power of the great nobility, some thought that this could only be done by a British parliament which the nobility was unable to control. Others agreed with the austere and intelligent Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, that this was a task for a reformed Scottish parliament dominated by tough, radical country gentlemen like Fletcher himself. Either way, the Union debate had had the effect of drawing questions about the problems of modernizing a country with an essentially feudal rural economy into the centre of political debate. It was a question which was to be of the deepest interest to the Edinburgh literati in Smith’s day, and to Smith himself as a university professor and as the tutor and friend of the Duke of Buccleuch, one of the greatest Scottish magnates.

  The Union debate also threw complex Scottish attitudes to the English into relief. The fear of the political, economic and cultural power of the English, and memories of Oliver Cromwell’s attempt to govern the country by direct rule, were endemic. Pro-Unionists believed that the English would soon realize that it was not in their interest to impose direct rule on the Scots, and some went so far as to hope for a ‘friendly’ union between the two countries. Their opponents thought this was naive. There was nothing in the history of Anglo-Scottish relations to suggest that the English would refrain from meddling in Scottish affairs in the future, and anyway the Act of Union offered no constitutional guarantees to prevent a largely English parliament from imposing its will on the Kirk, the legal system or any of the institutions that were supposed to be preserved by the Act of Union. As we shall see, the 1745 rebellion was to present the Edinburgh literati with uncomfortable evidence that while the country had developed an informal system of devolved government that offered the prospect of a form of public life in which they could expect to play a significant part, there was nothing they could do to check the power of the Court and parliament in London, and nothing to prevent the return of direct rule.

  Perhaps the most important of the ideological ambivalences thrown up by the prospect of an incorporating union was to be found in attitudes to commerce. The primary and overriding attraction of an incorporating union lay in the prospect of free access to English markets at home and abroad; as Andrew Fletcher put it, rather caustically, and in terms that Hume and Smith would echo a generation later, ‘trade is now become the golden ball, for which all nations of the world are contending, and the occasion of so great partialities, that not only every nation is endeavouring to possess the trade of the whole world, but every city to draw all to itself; and that the English are no less guilty of these partialities than any other trading nation.’4 Pro-Unionists agreed, though preferring to emphasize the importance of trade in stimulating the economic growth on which civility and national greatness depended, rather than the ‘jealousy of trade’ that Fletcher regarded as the natural accompaniment of the mercantile system. For those who opposed the incorporating union did so because they believed that, unless commercial activity was regulated by a virtuous elite and a reformed parliament, Scotland would become an economic satellite of England and its wealth and independence would be dissipated by luxury. These hopes and fears continually returned to questions about the role of commerce, culture and patriotism in regenerating a fallen nation – questions, above all, about the consequences of economic and political Improvement.

  The early years of the Union appeared to justify all the sceptics’ fears about the consequances of an incorporating union for Scotland. Smith himself put the matter well in 1760, in a letter to his publisher William Strahan:

  Nothing … appears to me more excusable than the disaffection of Scotland [after the Union]. The Union was a measure from which infinite Good has been derived to this country. The Prospect of that good, however, must then have appeared very remote and very uncertain. The immediate effect of it was to hurt the interest of every single order of men in the country. The dignity of the nobility was undone by it. The greater part of the Gentry who had been accustomed to represent their own country in its own Parliament were cut out for ever from all hopes of representing it in a British Parliament. Even the merchants seemed to suffer at first. The trade to the Plantations was, indeed, opened to them. But that was a trade which they knew nothing about: the trade they were acquainted with, that to France, Holland and the Baltic, was laid under new embarressments which almost totally annihilated the two first and most important branches of it. The Clergy too, who were then far from insignificant, were alarmed about the Church. No wonder if at that time all orders of men conspired in cursing a measure so hurtful to their immediate interest. The views of their Posterity are now very different; but those views could be seen by but few of our forefathers, by those few in but a confused and imperfect manner.5

  It was not until the 1720s that the tide began to turn in the optimists’ direction. The worst of the period of economic readjustment was over, the Jacobite threat seemed to have been contained and the informal system of devolved governance under the Earl of Islay had begun to take shape. Edinburgh was becoming a significant centre of government and social life, and was developing a distinctive cultural infrastructure. At one level, this infrastructure resembled that of other comparable centres of provincial government and society in the Anglo-Saxon world. It was a culture that revolved round societies of men of letters, dedicated to the improvement of literature, philosophy, natural science and the fine and useful arts; small, informal clubs inspired by Addison’s Spectator, meeting in coffee-houses and taverns and attempting to combine polite conversation with serious drinking; and assemblies, race-meetings, concert societies and theatres – somewhat late in the da
y in the case of Edinburgh, on account of the resolute opposition of the Edinburgh Presbytery. It was an elite culture dedicated to improvement and to providing local elites with a distinctive political identity. In Edinburgh, however, improvement was to acquire philosophical, literary and patriotic overtones. As early as 1712, a little spectator club founded by the poet Allan Ramsay, the father of the painter, set out to show that the cultivation of polite taste and manners could serve as a means of regenerating a rich vernacular poetic legacy and of providing a post-Union generation with a useable literature. The Rankenian Club, a society of gentlemen and professors founded in 1716 and lasting until 1745, thought that their metaphysical discussions would encourage ‘mutual improvement by liberal conversation and rational enquiry’ and so help disseminate throughout the country ‘freedom of thought, boldness of disquisition, liberality of spirit, accuracy of reasoning, correctness of taste and attention to composition’.6 The most durable of all the societies of Edinburgh’s enlightenment, the Philosophical Society, originally a society of medical professors, resolved in 1737 ‘to carry their disquisitions into other parts of nature, besides such as more immediately relate to the branches of medicine’ in the manner of the other great academies of Europe.7 The much grander and more aristocratic The Honourable the Society for Improvement in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland, which flourished from 1723 until 1745, went to some trouble to spell out the connections between improvement and patriotism in a country with an underdeveloped agrarian economy like Scotland’s: