Smith only developed the full theoretical reach of his theory in the ‘Considerations’. This was prudent. Not only was it a highly sceptical theory but it was not directly relevant to the system of rhetoric he was about to unfold. What mattered was that his audience should think of language as an acquired skill, learned in the course of historical time as a response to need. His message to his listeners was clear. Instead of following the advice of the old rhetoricians, instead of cultivating the grand style and the elaborate syntax, arcane vocabulary and highly mannered use of figures of speech so beloved of them, it was more sensible for the modern citizen to cultivate a plain style sustained by the sense of propriety we all develop in the hope of improving our ability to communicate effectively with others. As he put it, ‘It is the custom of the people that forms what we call propriety, and the custom of the better sort from whence the rules of purity of stile are to be drawn.’15 It followed that the best guides to style in any age were not to be found in textbooks but in the works of the authors who were most admired by men of taste and position:
In some of our former Lectures we have given a character of some of the best English Prose writers, and made comparisons betwixt their different manners. The Result of … which as well as the rules we have laid down is, that the perfection of stile consists in Expressing in the most concise, proper and precise manner the thought of the author, and that in the manner which best conveys the sentiment, passion or affection with which it affects or he pretends it does affect him, and which he designs to communicate to his reader.
This you’ll say is no more than common sense, and indeed it is no more. But if you’ll attend to it all the Rules of Criticism and morality when traced to their foundation, turn out to be some Principles of Common Sence which every one assents to; all the business of those arts is to apply these Rules to the different subjects and shew what their conclusion is when they are so applyed. Tis for this purpose we have made these observations on the authors above mentioned. We have shewn how fare they have acted agreably to that Rule, which is equally applicable to conversation and behaviour as writing. For what is that makes a man agreable company, is it not, when his sentiments appear to be naturally expressed, when the passion or affection is properly conveyed and when their thoughts are so agreable and naturall that we find ourselves inclined to give our assent to them.16
Smith’s main examples were drawn from the moderns rather than the ancients. He was struck by the fact that the modern public admired writers as different as Sir William Temple, Jonathan Swift and Addison, and suggested that the reason was that each in his own way respected the need for perspicuity in the use of language and had acquired a particular literary voice of his own. Indeed this ability to speak in one’s own voice would always be associated with speaking candidly and persuasively. But Smith’s most striking illustration was an exception which proved his rule, an admired modern author whose style seemed to embody everything Smith disliked most. This was the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the founding fathers of modern Whiggery and politeness whose abominable style was symptomatic of the problems of his age and upbringing. The idea of beauty that permeated his style was ‘abstracted from his own character’ and characterized by a ‘polite dignity’ and ‘a grand and pompous diction’, which was unable to disguise the thinness of his reasoning, the weakness of his character and his distasteful lack of sociability, all of which Smith proceeded to expose with a relish that rivals that of Bernard Mandeville, one of Shaftesbury’s most savage critics.
If we attend to the Character and circumstances of this nobleman we will easily perceive what it was which lead him to this Conduct. He was connected with a father and educated under a tutor [John Locke], who [had] no very strong affection to any particular sect or tenets in Religion, who cried up freedom of thought [and] Liberty of Conscience in all matters religious or philosophicall without being attached to any particular men or opinions. If these friends of his were inclined to any one sect it was rather to the puritans than the established Church, as their tenets best suited with that Liberty of Conscience they so strenuously maintained. Shaftesbury himself, by what we can learn from his Letters, seems to have been of a very puny and weakly constitution, always either under some disorder or in dread of falling into one. Such a habit of body is very much connected, nay almost continually attended by, a cast of mind in a good measure similar. Abstract reasoning and deep searches are too fatiguing for persons of this delicate frame. Their feableness of body as well as mind hinders them from engaging in the pursuits which generally engross the common sort of men. Love and Ambition are too violent in their emotions to find ground to work upon in such frames; where the passions are not very strong. The weakness of their appetites and passions hinders them from being carried away in the ordinary manner, they find no great difficulty in conforming their conduct to the Rules they have proposed to themselves. The fine arts, matters of taste and imagination, are what they are most inclined to cultivate. They require little labour and at the same time afford an entertainment very suitable to their temper and abilities.17
It is hard to think of a more spectacularly effective means of rubbishing the grand style than this ad hominem attack on an admired philosopher for lacking the character and acumen needed to place Whiggery and politeness on sound philosophical principles.
Smith was now ready to discuss literary and oratorical genres and he did so much more informally that the ancients. ‘It is rather reverence for antiquity than any regard for the beauty or usefulness of the thing itself which makes me mention the ancient divisions of rhetoric,’ he commented tartly.18 All that his students needed to remember was that ‘every discourse proposes either barely to relate some fact, or to prove some proposition’, and that whenever the arrangement of facts was an issue, the practice of the most admired historians and the taste of modern readers was the best, and indeed only appropriate, guide. In the last resort, however, Smith’s message was provocative and clear. Authors and orators should be thought of as entrepreneurs playing the literary market. Here his exemplar was the fascinating case of Tacitus, an author who had brought about a historiographical revolution by sensing that Romans had become as interested in the mental histories of the great men who had made their history as in the events themselves.
If we consider the state of the Romans at the time Tacitus wrote and the dispositions of the people which it must necessarily occasion we will find this plan of Tacitus to be a very naturall one. The Roman Empire was in the reign of Trajan arrived to its greatest pitch of Glory. The people enjoyed greater internall Tranquillity and Security than they had done in any of the former reigns or indeed in the last 150 years of the Republick. Luxury, and Refinement of manners, the naturall consequence of the former, were then as far advanced as they could be in any state. Sentiment must bee what will chiefly interest such a people. They who live thus in a great City where they have the Liberty of disposing of their wealth in all the Luxuries and Refinement of Life; who are not called to any publick employment but what they inclined to and obtained from the favour and Indulgence of the prince; Such a people, I say, having nothing to engage them in the hurry of life would naturally turn their attention to the motions of the human mind, and those events that were accounted for by the different internall affections that influenced the persons concerned, would be what most suited their taste. The French monarchy is in much the same condition as the Romans under Trajan and we find accordingly that those writers who have studied to be the most agreable have made great use of Sentiment. This is that in which the works of Marivaux and the younger Crebillon … resemble Tacitus as much as we can well imagine in works of so conterary a nature. They are Allways at great pains to account for every event by the temper and internall disposition of the severall actors in disquisitions that approach near to metaphysicall ones.19
It was this, Smith might have added, that accounted for the striking interest in sentiment being shown by the Scottish literati of his day.
In the last section of his course, discussing different forms of composition, Smith offered his first, highly sophisticated thoughts about the methods of modern science and on the problems of offering accounts of the world that were convincing. He was interested in the dialectical method ‘In which the design of the writer is to Lay Down a proposition and prove this by the different arguments which lead to that conclusion’. Aristotle had used this method, but he had produced so many subordinate propositions ‘that they produce [in the reader] the very effect he intended to have avoided by them Viz. Confusion’. What he called for was a Newtonian analysis in which ‘we may lay down certain principles known or proved in the beginning, from whence we account for the severall Phenomena, connecting all together by the same Chain’. This Newtonian method ‘is undoubtedly the most Philosophical, and in every science whether of Moralls or Naturall philosophy etc.’, and it was the most ‘engaging’ of methods. ‘It gives us a pleasure to see the phaenomena which we reckoned the most unaccountable all deduced from some principle (commonly a well-known one) and all united in one chain.’20 It was a method designed to explore propositions that appealed to the common sense of an audience, in the hope of showing how they could develop credible maps of the world of knowledge. It was Smith’s first exercise in presenting philosophy as a matter of mapping the world of experience as contemporaries knew it. How far those maps could be said to represent the geography of what was true rather than what was plausible or probable was a matter that a Humean like Smith chose not to explore.
In spite of occasional memory lapses, confusions and moments of exasperation (‘not a word more can I remember’), the two students made an impressive job of recording Smith’s lectures in 1762–3, unwittingly succeeding in throwing important light on his thinking at the beginning of his career. He had surely always seen himself as the revisionist who wished to place a classic ancient subject on modern philosophical foundations, the philosopher who had used Aristotle as his starting point, Hutcheson, Hume and Condillac as his modern guides, and an analytical method developed by Hobbes, Newton and Hutcheson from the principles of Euclidean geometry to establish his own philosophical voice. His hope that students of human nature would study the specialized problems of rhetoric as aspects of the principles of sociability, and would consider language and style as aspects of principles of communication that were essential to the maintenance of society, was as fundamental to his thinking in the late 1740s as it was to remain for the rest of his life. He was to speak of the way in which we trade moral sentiments, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and trade our goods and services, in the Wealth of Nations, as aspects of that love of persuading others that is so deeply rooted in the necessitous condition of human nature that it almost seems ‘natural’ to us. Indeed, ‘every one is practising oratory on others thro the whole of his life’.21 Smith was preparing the ground for a much more wide-reaching theory of human nature, which held that all our sentiments – moral, political, intellectual and aesthetic – were acquired, developed and refined in the process of learning to communicate with others. It was for these reasons that a new theory of language was of fundamental importance in understanding the nature of the human personality.
Smith’s theory of rhetoric suggests that his belief that the human personality could best be understood in developmental terms as the story of how individuals learned to live sociably, was with him from the first. His discussion of authorship and literary genre suggests that he fully realized the implications of this insight for the wider understanding of the history of human society he was to develop in his lectures on jurisprudence. His practical advice about how to cultivate the art of speaking and writing persuasively and pleasingly was designed to encourage his students to attend to the tastes of their own age and culture and to the cultivation of their moral personalities and identities. But perhaps the most idiosyncratic of all Smith’s early messages was contained in his remarkable attack on Shaftesbury. The attack on his philosophy, his taste and his character was an attack on a species of Whiggery and politeness that was passé, the culture of an aristocratic order that for all its rank, power and privilege was, and would remain, an obstacle to understanding the principles of commerce and liberty. It seems right to think of Smith at the start of his career as a young philosopher who saw himself as one of the heralds of a new era in the history of civilization, a Scot who was uniquely placed to provide it with a new philosophy and a new understanding of itself.
The success of the rhetoric course prepared the ground for the course on jurisprudence, a course he must have begun to plan in 1748–9 and was to deliver in 1750–51. He could reckon on there being a market from the young philosophically minded lawyers who had enjoyed the rhetoric lectures, and he would again have been able to count on enthusiastic support from Henry Home. As we have seen, Home was dissatisfied with the teaching of jurisprudence at Glasgow and Edinburgh; Hutcheson’s lectures were too metaphysical and William Cleghorn, Edinburgh’s Professor of Moral Philosophy had interests which lay in the field of politics rather than jurisprudence. What was wanted was a course that was based on the principles of human nature and allowed for extended discussion of the principles on which different systems of law were based. In fact Home had given some idea of what he had in mind in a volume of essays he had written during the Forty-Five and published in 1747 as Essays upon Several Subjects concerning British Antiquities. They were addressed primarily to lawyers and called for new thinking about the origins of legal institutions in Britain, and the feudal system. His essay on the latter would offer ‘probably Conjectures at what Time, and after what Manner the Feudal Law was introduced into Scotland’, and would show that this revolutionary event in Scottish history must have taken place, not ‘all at once as our Authors insinuate but by Degrees’ in response to changing circumstances.22 But what made the challenge of mounting a new system of jurisprudence more appealing was the publication in 1748 of two seminal works, Montesquieu’s Défense de l’esprit des lois and David Hume’s Three Essays: Moral and Political. Montesquieu’s great book offered a new, historically sensitive approach to politics. Hume’s slender but powerful volume provided one of the most potent critiques of Montesquieu’s new system, as it did also of Locke’s political philosophy and the intellectual foundations of the party-political culture of contemporary England. Smith was to take on the task of responding to the greatest of all contemporary French philosophers and of laying the foundations of a new, more scientific, more historically based form of Whiggery. It would round off his attack on the Whiggery of the older generation and establish his claim to be regarded as one of the architects of the new Scottish science of man.
For Smith De l’esprit des lois resembled Condillac’s essay on the origins of language, in that both could be regarded as brilliant but ultimately unsatisfactory French contributions to the science of man. Montesquieu regarded his book as the culmination of a lifetime spent thinking about the principles of liberty in a world dominated by enormous monarchies and the rapid extension of commerce.23 He called for a revolution in thinking about the principles of law. He thought that it was misleading to think of laws merely as the commands of sovereigns or as the product of historical accidents. As he said, ‘Many things govern men: climate, religion, laws, the maxims of the government, examples of past things, mores, and manners; a general spirit is formed as a result.’24 Thus it was better to think of laws as systems of rules whose spirit, or ethos, could be understood in terms of the interplay of the physical and moral environments in which they had developed – environments that were created by climate and geography, the economy, constitution and manners. It followed from this that legislators would do well ‘to follow the spirit of the nation when doing so is not contrary to the principles of government, for we do nothing better than what we do freely and by following our natural genius. If one gives a pedantic spirit to a nation naturally full of gaiety, the state will gain nothing, either at home or abroad. Let it do frivolous things seriously
and serious things gaily.’25 Montesquieu’s book was written for legislators rather than philosophers, for men on whom the problem of curbing corruption and preventing the ultimate horror of despotism depended. Above all, and in spite of his admiration of the English constitution, De l’esprit des lois was about France, about preventing the monarchy from sliding into despotism, and about the importance of a powerful and effective nobility to its future. Smith found it hard to think of the nobility as a bastion of liberty. But what he and other Scots admired was Montesquieu’s method, his typology of the different forms of government known to history, his analysis of the conditions on which their survival depended, and his erudite and acute analysis of the spirit of Roman law and the French legal system. It was a method which called for the sort of historical thinking about laws, political institutions and reform that lawyers were arguing for in their discussions of the Highland problem, and to which Home was already committed as a jurist.
But for all its strengths this was a line of enquiry the Scots thought deeply flawed. As Home put it,
Montesquieu has dealt with all the effects that derive from the nature of government, from the difference of climate, the strength and weakness of a people, servitude etc. However, he did not develop the effects that derive from human nature itself, from our passions and from the natural spring of our actions … Human nature itself has a much greater influence on the establishment of laws and manners than all the other causes which Montesquieu lists.26
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