Nicholas Phillipson

by Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

  The Humean review in the Critical Review provided a strikingly nuanced discussion of the theory of sympathy, ‘this spring, this movement, this power’ in shaping the passions. Once again, Smith was praised for using illustrations which appealed to ‘common sense and experience’, for writing ‘like a man of the world’ rather than a pedant and – surely this is a Humean joke – for ‘the strict regard which the writer every where preserves to the principles of religion: however some pretenders to science may endeavour to separate the philosopher from the lover of religion, it will always be found, that truth being every where uniform and consistent, it is impossible for a man to digest himself of the one character, without renouncing all just claim to the other.’10 Hume himself had doubts about the theory of sympathy itself which were not discussed in the Critical Review essay. Writing to Smith on 28 July he commented, ‘I am told that you are preparing a new Edition, and propose to make some Additions and Alterations, in order to obviate Objections … I wish you had more particularly and fully prov’d, that all kinds of Sympathy are necessarily Agreeable. This is the Hinge of your System, and yet you only mention the Matter cursorily in p. 20.’ And later, ‘You say expressly, it is painful to go along with Grief and we always enter into it with Reluctance. It will probably be requisite for you to modify or explain this Sentiment and reconcile it to your System.’11 This was indeed the hinge of Smith’s system, but the objection, as it stood, could be fairly easily answered. While it might be easier to sympathize with a person’s joy than with his resentment, the emotional bond that is created by a recognition that we are in sympathy with each other is itself necessarily pleasurable. Smith was to add a footnote to this effect in the new edition, telling his friend Gilbert Elliot, ‘I think I have entirely discomfitted him.’12

  Elliot had reservations of a different sort. Like many members of the Scottish literati he was troubled by the sceptical implications of a theory that appeared to reduce the principles of ethics to social experience and popular culture. Indeed, before long Smith’s successor in the Moral Philosophy chair, Thomas Reid, and his old patron Henry Home (now Lord Kames), would regard the theory (and Smith’s entire theory of morals) as ‘a Refinement of the selfish System’ of Mandeville.13 Elliot was a rich, intelligent advocate and MP, a thoughtful Christian and a close friend of Hume, who had sent him the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in the hope that he would be able to strengthen his presentation of the argument from design, the foundation stone on which most moderate, non-enthusiastical defences of the principles of natural religion were based. Smith was to take Elliot’s criticism of his moral theory equally seriously. Although Elliot’s letter is missing, Smith’s lengthy and belated reply of 10 October makes it clear that, like Reid and Kames, Elliot was worried by the sceptical implications of his theory. Smith replied with a fascinating elaboration of his theory of the impartial spectator, which was included in the revised edition he was preparing. It describes the situation in which we find ourselves when we try to judge our own conduct, aware of the presence of the impartial spectator and feeling like an accused person standing before the ‘tribunal within the breast’.

  But tho this tribunal within the breast be thus the supreme arbiter of all our actions, … tho it can mortify us amidst the Applauses and Support us under the Censure of the world, yet if we enquire into the origin of its institution, its jurisdiction, we shall find, is in a great measure derived from the authority of that very tribunal, whose decisions it so often and so justly reverses. When we first come into the world, being desireous to please those we live with, we are accustomed to Consider what behaviour is likely to be agreeable to every person we converse with, to our parents, to our masters, to our companions. We address ourselves to individuals, and for some time fondly pursue the impossible and absurd project of rendering ourselves universally agreable, and of gaining the good will and approbation of every body. We soon Learn, however, from experience, that this universal approbation is altogether unattainable. As soon as we come to have more important interests to manage, we find, that by pleasing one man we almost certainly disoblige another, and that by humouring an individual, we may often irritate a whole people. The fairest and most equitable conduct must frequently obstruct the interests or thwart the inclinations of particular persons, who will seldome have candour eneough to enter into the propriety of our motives, or to see that our conduct, how disagreable soever to them, is perfectly suitable to our situation. We soon learn, therefore, to sett up in our own minds a judge between ourselves and those we live with. We Conceive ourselves as acting in the presence of a person quite candid and equitable, of one who has no particular relation, either to ourselves, or to those whose interests are affected by our conduct; who is neither father, nor Brother, nor friend, either to them, or to us; but is meerly a man in general, an impartial Spectator who considers our conduct with the same indifference with which we regard that of other people.

  To be sure, ‘the weak, the vain, and the frivolous’ will generally be content to follow public opinion in determining the way in which they choose to lead their lives. But the dutiful, virtuously minded man who wishes to escape from the Rousseaunian ethical jungle, the man who is best fitted for a useful public life, will be the man whose life is always directed by the impartial spectator. For ‘it is only by consulting this judge within that we can see whatever relates to ourselves in its proper shape and dimensions, or that we can make any proper comparison between our own interests and those of other men’.14 Elliot’s intervention had elicited from Smith a remarkable portrait of the virtuous Smithian citizen and magistrate – sociable, serious, resourceful and self-reliant, and actually not at all unlike Elliot himself. It was a characterization that was to be the centrepiece of the second, and until the last year of his life, the definitive text of the Theory of Moral Sentiments.

  There is a footnote to the story of Smith’s labours in perfecting an original and provocative system of morals. In 1761 he had published an extended version of his lecture on the origins of language in a little-known and short-lived review called the Philological Miscellany under the title ‘Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages’. One can see why he wanted to do so. His theory of morals and the elaborate discussion of the process of sympathetic exchange on which it was based had presupposed the theory of language on which his theory of rhetoric was based. The theory of language he had presented to his Edinburgh and Glasgow students had been designed to show that language was essentially a vehicle for communication which had a history that was probably as old as civilization. Not only was this a subject of obvious relevance to an understanding of the workings of sympathy, it was also a means of addressing Rousseau’s objection that ‘not even our new grammarians’ (he has Condillac in mind) could convince him that all the complexities of modern grammar could be explained in naturalistic terms.15 Smith disagreed. His expanded account of the theory of language was designed to show how this could be achieved by using a proper, Humean theory of the imagination. It completed his critique of Rousseau’s theory of sociability and was reprinted in the third edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1763 and in every subsequent edition published in his lifetime. It is a pity that more recent editions have not followed suit. As Dugald Stewart commented, it was an essay ‘on which the author himself set a high value’.16

  By the summer of 1759 Smith had other, more immediate reasons for thinking about the practical value of his ethics. He had taken on the task of tutoring Thomas Fitzmaurice, the younger son of a wealthy, intelligent and politically ambitious Anglo-Irish peer, the 1st Earl of Shelburne. The practice of trawling universities for tutors for the sons of great men was common in early modern Europe, and in this Scotland was no exception. The normal practice was for the academic to resign his post and enter the household of his patron. The arrangement between Shelburne and Smith was unusual and, indeed in the case of Glasgow, unprecedented, in that Shelburne decided to send his son to Glasgow as a universit
y student. He wanted him to live with Smith and for Smith to be given ‘total charge and direction without any controul’ of his education. For all of this, Smith was to be paid at least £100. It was an arrangement brokered by Gilbert Elliot, who was well aware that it had wider significance for the university. ‘I have very little doubt, but you might even draw a good many of the youth of this part of the world [he was writing from London] to pass a winter or two at Glasgow, notwithstanding the distance and disadvantage of the dialect, provided that to your real advantages you were to add the best Masters for the exercises [i.e. riding and fencing], and also for acquiring the french language.’17 The university, which was already developing new ways of civilizing clerical and professional education, was now being invited to civilize the education of the nobility. Smith took Shelburne’s instructions at face value. The course of study he prescribed was his and his alone and although he reported his plans for his new pupil in meticulous detail, he never asked the Earl for comments or approval. For his part, Shelburne was deference itself, unfailingly appreciative of every aspect of Smith’s teaching and commenting at the start of Fitzmaurice’s second year, ‘I wish him to stay so long as You, Sir, can endure him under your Eye, and so long as he shall continue worthy of your Attention.’18 Smith and the head of an important political family had developed a self-consciously ‘enlightened’ relationship based on the mutual respect in which the philosopher and the man of rank and position held each other.

  Fitzmaurice arrived in January 1759, just as the Theory of Moral Sentiments was going through the press, and stayed until September 1760 when he left for Oxford to study English law.19 To start with, Smith thought him a young aristocrat who had acquired ‘a somewhat flippant smartness’ at Eton. His plans for his education were formidable. From January to May, he was to spend six hours a day at university classes in Latin, Greek, Philosophy and Mathematics and another two to three hours a day being taught privately by Smith. He spent the summer vacation reading ancient and modern moral philosophy with Smith – this included De l’esprit des lois – and in taking private mathematics classes with Smith’s old professor Robert Simson; by then Fitzmaurice had acquired a taste for mathematics and mechanics. For light relief, he was taken on jaunts to Inverary, to visit the Duke of Argyll and to Edinburgh to meet the literati. The following autumn was spent on philosophy, mathematics and ‘history and law’, all subjects which required students to attend to the principles of the different systems of thought. As Smith put it in a letter to Shelburne explaining why he thought his son would do well to study civil law with Hercules Lindesay as a preparation for reading English law at Oxford,

  The civil Law is digested into a more regular System than the English Law has yet been, and tho’ the Principles of the former are in many respects different from those of the latter, yet there are many principles common to both, and one who has studied the civil law at least knows what a System of law is, what parts it consist of, and how these ought to be arranged: so that when he afterwards comes to study the law of any other country which is not so well digested, he carries at least the Idea of a System in his head and knows to what part of it he ought to refer every thing that he reads.20

  Fitzmaurice’s domestic life was closely supervised and regarded as a sort of education in itself. He does not seem to have mixed much with other students or to have frequented the town. His days revolved around long, private conversations with Smith, which were sometimes of ‘the greatest intimacy’.21 He began to lead a blamelessly simple life, which allowed Smith to record that he ‘is perfectly sober, eats no supper, or what is next to none, a roasted apple or some such trifle and drinks scarce any thing but water. There is the more merit in this part of his conduct as it is the effect of Resolution not of habit: for I find he had been accustomed to a different way of living at Eton: But your Lordships and My Lady Shelburnes good advice has, I understand, produced this change.’22 Smith reported every detail of his financial dealings with his pupil to Shelburne. His pocket money was handed out in exchange for a receipt. He was made to ‘pay all his own accounts after he has summed and examin’d them along with me. He gives me a receipt for whatever money he receives: in the receipt he marks the purpose for which it is to be applyed and preserves the account as his voucher, marking upon the back of it the day when it was payed. These shall all be transmitted to your Lordship when there is occasion.’23 It was an attention to ‘Oeconomy’ of which Shelburne greatly approved. To judge from Smith’s last letter to Shelburne, the eighteen months spent at Glasgow had succeeded in turning a ‘very lively, and tolerably ungovernable’ sixteen-year-old Etonian into a serious, independent-minded young man with a mind which was ‘rather strong and firm and masculine than very graceful or very elegant’. Smith continued:

  No man can have a stronger or a more steady resolution to act what, he thinks, the right part, and if you can once satisfy him that any thing is fit to be done you may perfectly depend upon his doing it. To this excellent disposition he joins a certain hardness of character, if I may call it so, which hinders him from suiting himself, so readily as is agreeable, to the different situations and companies in which he has occasion to act. The great outlines of essential duty which are always the same, you may depend upon his never transgressing, but those little properties which are continually varying and for which no certain rule can be given he often mistakes. He has upon this account little address and cannot easily adjust himself to the different characters of those whom he desires to gain. He had learned at Eton a sort of flippant smartness which, not having been natural to him at first, has now left him almost entirely. In a few months more it will probably fall off altogether. The real bottom of his character is very grave and very serious, and by the time he is five and twenty, whatever faults he has will be the faults of the grave and serious character, with all its faults the best of Characters.24

  This was measuring Fitzmaurice’s character in Smithian terms against the criteria he had set out in the Theory of Moral Sentiments for the man of duty, the budding statesman, who was capable of living his life according to the direction of the impartial spectator.

  What is only implied in Smith’s letters is that he and Fitzmaurice clearly become genuinely fond of each other. As Boswell and others had noticed, Smith liked students and took them seriously, and Fitzmaurice had no difficulty in treating his old tutor as a friend; his last surviving letter to Smith, written from Oxford in 1762, is a cheerful, badly written, gossipy letter which urges Smith to keep in touch and is signed off, ‘With very great sincerity, yours very Affectionately, Thomas Fitzmaurice.’25 A year later David Hume reported from Paris that ‘Mr Fitzmaurice, your old Friend’ was enthusiastically encouraging an abortive project for translating the Theory of Moral Sentiments into French.26 Unfortunately, Smith’s painstaking and time-consuming work preparing Fitzmaurice for public life was a projet manqué. After leaving Oxford, he entered Parliament as member for a succession of family seats from 1762 to 1780, dabbled disastrously in the linen industry and suffered a stroke that incapacitated him for life.27 There is a postscript to the story of Smith’s relations with the Shelburne family. Smith made his first trip to London on university business in 1761 in the company of Fitzmaurice’s elder brother, the future Prime Minister and 2nd Earl of Shelburne, one of the most thoughtful politicians of the age. He told Dugald Stewart,

  I owe to a journey I made with Mr Smith from Edinburgh to London, the difference between light and darkness through the best part of my life. The novelty of his principles, added to my youth and prejudices, made me unable to comprehend them at the time, but he urged them with so much benevolence, as well as eloquence, that they took a certain hold, which, though it did not develope itself so as to arrive at full conviction for some few years after, I can fairly say, has constituted, ever since, the happiness of my life, as well as any little consideration I may have enjoyed in it.28

  By the early 1760s Smith’s teaching was attracting attention from abroad. Théo
dore Tronchin, a fashionable Genevan physician who could count Voltaire and members of the French royal family among his patients, was a leading member of the Genevan literati and an early critic of Rousseau, sent his son to study at Glasgow, thus providing Smith with a useful entrée to Genevan philosophical circles when he was touring Europe with the Duke of Buccleuch in 1765. He also played an important part in the education of two Russian students, Semyon Desnitsky and Ivan Tret’yakov, protégés of Catherine the Great who were being prepared for professorial careers in the newly founded Moscow University. Both took Smith’s courses in ethics and jurisprudence and studied civil law with John Millar; both became dedicated Smithians who devoted their subsequent careers to propagating and adapting his ethics and jurisprudence for Russian purposes. Desnitsky was to become a particularly formidable disciple, proposing – though never publishing – a Russian translation of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. According to A.H. Brown, his work on jurisprudence, and more particularly his Proposal Concerning the Establishment of Legislative, Judicial and Executive Authority in the Russian Empire of 1768, which was dedicated to Catherine, were the work of a jurist who understood the principles of the historical analysis on which Smith had based his jurisprudence very well, and whose thinking was to find its way into questions about monopolies and the principles of taxation which Catherine directed her ministers to address in her Nakaz (Instruction) of 1768.29 Smith’s theory of government and police was reaching court circles in Russia a decade before the publication of the Wealth of Nations.

  All of this was happening at a time when Smith was becoming ever more heavily involved in College business. As Dean of Faculty in 1760–62, he was to be involved in a series of disciplinary cases involving members of the Faculty and was to find himself at the centre of a highly charged constitutional tangle concerning the powers of the Principal and the Rector. His attitude to university administration was essentially managerial in the sense of wanting to make an existing system work, and it was improvement-oriented in the sense that it was directed to developing a system of government based on principles rather than on the whims and interests of its professors.30 Smith was as scrupulous in his attitudes to precise accounting in managing the university’s library and reforming the university’s accounting system as he had been in teaching Fitzmaurice the principles of ‘Oeconomy’. Most suggestive was his handling of the constitutional crisis that erupted in 1762 over the respective powers of the Principal and Rector. The tangled details do not matter, but Smith’s part in attempting to resolve it does. He was assiduous in attempting to mediate between the Principal and the professors and it was he and John Millar who were largely instrumental in drafting the lengthy report to the Rector’s Court which proposed means of resolving it. The report, which is dated 12 August 1762, surveyed records concerning the respective powers of the Principal and Rector since the foundation of the university in 1577 in considerable detail, contrasting ‘the confused and disorderly manner in which the minutes of all meetings are recorded in the previous century’ with modern practice. ‘The University had in this respect been no worse that almost all other Courts which have generally subsisted a century or two before they have fallen upon a proper regular and orderly method of preserving the records of their proceedings.’ For this, the report commented, the present Professor of Mathematics, Robert Simson, was to be thanked. It was he, as Clerk to the university, ‘who introduced order and method into the affairs of the Society in this respect as well as in many others’.31 It was a report which showed an acute sensitivity to the way in which faulty constitutions could obstruct good government and it emphasized the crucial role that legislation and legislators play in maintaining the machinery of civil government.