Nicholas Phillipson

by Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

  I was very sorry to hear by Mr Leechman that you had been ill of late. I am afraid the Fatigues of your Class have exhausted you too much, and that you require more Leizure and Rest than you allow yourself. However, the good Season and the Vacation now approaches; and I hope you intend, both for Exercise and Relaxation, to take a Jaunt to this Place. I have many things to communicate to you. Were you not my Friend, you wou’d envy my robust Constitution. My Application has been and is continual; and yet I preserve entire Health. I am now beginning the Long Parliament; which, considering the great Number of Volumes I peruse, and my scrupulous method of composing, I regard as a very great Advance. I think you shou’d settle in this Town during the Vacation; where there is always some good Company; and you know, that I can supply you with Books, as much as you please.

  I beg to hear from you at your Leizure; and am

  Your affectionate Friend and humble Servant

  David Hume40

  So far as we know, the offer of hospitality and good company came to nothing. For heavy professorial duties and the pressures of overwork notwithstanding, Smith, doubtless egged on by Henry Home (elevated to the bench of the Court of Session as Lord Kames in 1752), was about to launch himself on the huge task of developing a philosophy that would be fit for consumption by the polite and learned world as well as by university students. With his moral philosophy course underway by 1754–5 he was in a position to turn to the hard grind of turning his philosophy into a book in the hope of establishing his reputation in London and Paris as well as Glasgow and Edinburgh. In order to do this, he had decided to present his moral philosophy as a means of providing a philosophical defence of Hume’s claim that commerce had the power to improve and perfect the human personality. It was a claim that Hume had made in Political Discourses of 1752 and it had been called into question in 1756 by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As Smith was to discover in writing the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Rousseau’s argument was not one that was easily refuted.

  7

  The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Civilizing Powers of Commerce

  Hume’s theory of human nature had provided Smith with a powerful point of departure in writing his Edinburgh lectures. There Smith had developed a theory of language to reinforce Hume’s theory of knowledge, and had demonstrated the importance of the sense of taste and propriety in extending our capacity for sociability. He had developed Hume’s theory of justice by showing how different systems of property, government and governance shape a people’s sense of justice and determine the principles of sociability on which a political society’s capacity for survival depends. In so doing he had reinforced Hume’s claim to have laid the foundations of a science of man based on a study of the sentiments human beings must acquire if they are to survive and prosper in organized societies. He was now ready to develop the theory of sociability on which his own contribution to the science of man would depend. When he met Hume for the first time in 1750–51, he found him working on the Political Discourses, which were to be his last contribution to what was now becoming their joint project. These were Hume’s hugely influential attempt to draw his theory of human nature into alignment with a theory of commerce and an account of the civilizing process. They were the work of a man whom Smith would describe as ‘by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age’.1

  By 1751 Hume’s intellectual career, like Smith’s, was in a state of flux. Important though the Treatise of Human Nature had been to Smith and other members of Henry Home’s circle, it had not been a popular success. During the 1740s Hume had devoted most of his literary time to applying its principles to an understanding of the moral and political culture of contemporary Britain, an analysis which resulted in the publication of a series of Essays, Moral, Political and Literary in 1741, 1742 and 1748. His purpose, central to his later work as a historian, was to persuade modern Britons that the origins of their constitution and liberties were modern rather than ancient, and to urge them to think again about the nature of their rights and duties as citizens of an ‘enormous monarchy’ that was being transformed by war, commerce and the growth of empire. By the late 1740s his intellectual career was moving in various directions. Two years spent as secretary to a diplomatic mission had taken him to Turin and Vienna and had given him an interest in international relations and in the often confused ideas of national interest held in the courts of modern Europe. The publication of Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois in 1748 had shown that it was possible to develop a system of jurisprudence out of a careful and systematic analysis of the manners of different societies. A further period of intensive reading of the classics had encouraged Hume to present his philosophical principles in a new way. This had resulted in the publication of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding of 1748 and the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals of 1751 – the latter, ‘of all my writings, historical, philosophical or literary, incomparably the best. It came unnoticed and unobserved into the world.’ He wrote about the principles of natural religion in the highly sceptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, a book that was written in 1751 and circulated in manuscript among his friends as being too controversial to publish. In his will he was to ask Smith to arrange for its posthumous publication, a request which Smith found curiously disturbing. With the publication in 1752 of his Political Discourses, Hume was ready to turn his attention to the grand project that was to occupy most of his time for the next decade, writing the history of England.

  The twelve essays published in the 1752 edition of the Political Discourses stand at the meeting-point of these various strands of Hume’s career. His discussion drew on important principles originally set out in the Treatise and now presented as principles that could be taken for granted. He used historical examples to illustrate his arguments in a way which foreshadowed the methods he was to use in the History of England. Most important of all, for Smith, Hume quietly introduced important refinements to his thinking about sociability by reflecting on the necessitous condition of the human species. His science of man was now as complete as it would ever be and he was ready to hand over the problem of developing it to Smith at exactly the moment at which Smith was beginning to address the same problem in his moral philosophy lectures. It could not have been more fitting that Smith’s first paper to the Glasgow Literary Society should have been his ‘Account of some of Mr David Hume’s Essays on Commerce’.

  In the Political Discourses, Hume was at his most acute, elegant and allusive. These were ‘discourses on commerce, money, interest, balance of trade etc wherein perhaps there will occur some principles which are curious, and which may seem too refined and subtile for such vulgar subjects’. He was being ironical. Hume was proposing a philosophical review of the language merchants, politicians and philosophers used to discuss the principles and politics of commerce. He wanted to show that economic questions were, properly speaking, questions about labour and the way in which it was deployed, and that these in turn were questions about the principles of human nature. As he put it, ‘everything in this world is purchased by labour and our passions are the only causes of labour’.2 This meant that the wealth and power of any state ought to be measured in terms of the quantity and quality of its labour force and not in terms of its gold and silver reserves. Money, Hume observed, ‘is not, properly speaking, one of the subjects of commerce; but only the instrument which men have agreed upon to facilitate the exchange of one commodity for another. It is none of the wheels of trade: It is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy.’3 Thus the primary duty of the sovereign in matters of commerce was to facilitate the circulation of money in ways which would stimulate trade and manufactures and enhance the quantity and quality of the nation’s workforce.

  Hume’s ideas about money, interest and the balance of trade were among the most important contributions to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment economic thinking, not least because of the use Smith was to make of them in the Wealth of Nation
s. Like Smith, Hume invited his readers to think of mankind as a naturally active species whose members used their labour to secure the ‘necessities’ and ‘conveniences’ of life. In primitive societies with subsistence economies, the struggle to secure the necessities of life would prevail. In modern commercial societies, men and women were better able to devote themselves to the pursuit of life’s conveniences. In both cases, however, the dynamics of human life were the same, driven by the never-ending, all-consuming desire to satisfy what we think of as our needs. Broadly speaking, this was the line taken by Bernard Mandeville, and, like Mandeville, Hume realized that needs are deeply influenced by fashion and that fashion is a mechanism for creating markets. What interested him was the part merchants played in shaping and satisfying those markets. Strictly speaking, merchants were entrepreneurs who transported the fruits of the labour market of one part of the country to another, money being the mechanism which made that possible. This was why the principles of commerce could only be understood in terms of the effects of the money supply and interest rates on the workings of the market. This was to move the discussion far beyond the limits of Mandeville’s and towards controversial questions about the role of government in the management of the economy, all of which returned, as Hume intended they should, to propositions about wealth, labour and need on which all of his economic thinking was based.

  But Hume was still faced with the problem of Mandeville’s cynicism. Mandeville’s story about the civilizing process had been about the enslavement of the human personality. Primitive man might have lived in a state of wretched insecurity and indigence but he had at least been his own master. Cunning rulers had duped him into submitting to political authority and to adopting canons of taste, manners and morals that had the sole function of breaking his self-regarding passions and turning him into a ‘taught animal’. Pride and gullibility, fed by fashion and the never-ending hunger for social approval, had made him a slave to social convention, unrecognizable even to himself. The only consolation Mandeville had been able to offer was that most people were so gullible that they failed to understand what was happening to them. Hume realized that his economic thinking would fail to convince unless he was able to show that commerce and economic progress were ethically beneficent and it was to this task that he was to devote some of his most eloquent and persuasive prose. Only the strictest moralists could legitimately argue that work was unnatural and deflected human beings from the state of indolence and contemplation for which they were born. ‘There is no craving or demand of the human mind more constant and insatiable than that for exercise and employment; and this desire seems the foundation of most of our passions and pursuits.’4 To argue that men were naturally indolent was to misunderstand the pleasures of indolence. ‘Indolence or repose, indeed seems not of itself to contribute much to our enjoyment; but like sleep, is requisite as an indulgence to the weakness of human nature, which cannot support an uninterrupted course of business or pleasure.’5 Primitive peoples were idle only because their societies lacked the necessary resources to make them industrious. In Hume’s view scarcity, and the invention of property, were the bedrocks on which political society and the progress of civilization depended, offering the sort of security on which industry and invention, sociability and happiness ultimately depended. Indeed Hume’s rhetoric suggests that because commercial civilization could offer its citizens the prospect of living more happily than the unfortunate, morally atrophied inhabitants of primitive societies, it was actually a more natural form of civilization than theirs.

  In times when industry and the arts flourish, men are kept in perpetual occupation, and enjoy, as their reward, the occupation itself, as well as those pleasures which are the fruit of their labour. The mind acquires new vigour; enlarges its powers and faculties; and by an assiduity in honest industry, both satisfies its natural appetites, and prevents the growth of unnatural ones, which commonly spring up, when nourished by ease and idleness. Banish those arts from society, you deprive men both of action and of pleasure; and leaving nothing but indolence in their place, you even destroy the relish of indolence, which never is agreeable, but when it succeeds to labour, and recruits the spirits, exhausted by too much application and fatigue.

  Another advantage of industry and of refinements in the mechanical arts, is, that they commonly produce some refinements in the liberal; nor can one be carried to perfection, without being accompanied, in some degree, with the other. The same age, which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers, and ship-carpenters. We cannot reasonably expect, that a piece of woollen cloth will be wrought to perfection in a nation, which is ignorant of astronomy, or where ethics are neglected …

  The more these refined arts advance, the more sociable men become: nor is it possible, that, when enriched with science, and possessed of a fund of conversation, they should be contented to remain in solitude, or live with their fellow-citizens in that distant manner, which is peculiar to ignorant and barbarous nations. They flock into cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge; to show their wit or their breeding; their taste in conversation or living, in clothes or furniture. Curiosity allures the wise; vanity the foolish; and pleasure both. Particular clubs and societies are everywhere formed: Both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace. So that, beside the improvements which they receive from knowledge and the liberal arts, it is impossible but they must feel an encrease of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together, and contributing to each other’s pleasure and entertainment. Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and are found, from experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polished, and, what are commonly denominated, the more luxurious ages.6

  This was the voice of Edinburgh’s enlightenment at its most philosophical, inviting readers to reflect on the unintended consequences of a harmless and misunderstood characteristic of human nature and to ask whether these could be so easily written off as the fruits of vice. What is noticeable, however, is that Hume studiously avoided the more troubling ethical questions Mandeville had raised. If commerce and the psychological motors that drove it transformed the human personality, were there not still qualitative questions to be asked about the effects of the civilizing process on the human personality? Was there not something to Mandeville’s point that by losing our primitive brutish innocence we had made ourselves utterly dependent on the opinions of others and unrecognizable to ourselves? Philosophically, Hume was not much interested in such questions, but they resurfaced in a new and troubling form at the very moment at which Smith was faced with the problem of turning his moral philosophy lectures into a book as a result of the publication of two key works of enlightened thinking: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language and Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, published in 1755 and 1756 respectively. Smith was to review them both in two essays written for the Edinburgh Review of 1755–6, a short-lived, but ambitious journal founded and edited by members of the Select Society. These essays mark his debut in print as a philosopher.7

  Smith’s admiration of Johnson’s Dictionary was real but qualified. ‘Any man who was about to compose a dictionary or rather a grammar of the English language, must acknowledge himself indebted to Mr Johnson for abridging at least one half of his labour,’ Smith wrote. What was wrong was its method, which Smith thought ‘not to be sufficiently grammatical. The different significations of a word are indeed collected; but they are seldom digested into general classes, or ranged under the meaning which the word principally expresses. And sufficient care has not been taken to distinguish the words apparently synonomous [sic].’ Smith went on to explain what he meant by giving two worked examples of how ‘But’ and ‘Humour’ ought to have been treated. What is interesting is that in this first published essay, Smith was in effect ad
vertising his own methods by applying them to the problems of lexicography. Once again, he was recommending the use of the ‘didactick’ method of building each proposition on a general principle or axiom which could be developed and given substance through the use of a carefully organized display of erudition. Only then, Smith commented of the methods of lexicography, would the philosopher be able to show which usages were incorrect and to be avoided.

  His review of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality was more ambitious. He began with a call for a more cosmopolitan and less parochial approach to reviewing from the Scottish press and for more attention to be paid to the moral philosophy of England and France, the only two countries which were producing philosophy ‘with such success or reputation as to excite the attention of foreign nations’. But the contrast between the character of the English and the French mind was striking. In literature the English characteristically showed imagination, genius and invention, and in philosophy had added ‘something to that stock of observations with which the world had been furnished before them’. The French, on the other hand, were notable for their ‘taste, judgment, propriety and order’ and for their ‘peculiar talent … to arrange every subject in that natural simple order, which carries the attention, without any effort, along with it’. He was struck by the recent revival of French philosophy, a field which had long been paralysed by Descartes’ intellectually alluring errors. Here the most promising development was the appearance, volume by volume, of Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Here was a great work which had all the philosophical strengths which Johnson’s Dictionary lacked. It provided ‘a compleat, reasoned and even critical examination of each subject’ and a map of ‘the different arts and sciences, their genealogy and filiation … [which] is nearly the same with that of my Lord Bacon’. This was the voice of a philosopher who had his own views of the problems involved in mapping the principles of knowledge according to secure philosophical principles.