Nicholas Phillipson
Page 22
It is extraordinary that in spite of working under these pressures, Smith now decided to reorganize his teaching and develop his thinking about government and police. As Dugald Stewart put it,
After the publication of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Mr Smith remained four years at Glasgow, discharging his official duties with unabated vigour, and with increasing reputation. During that time, the plan of his lectures underwent a considerable change. His ethical doctrines, of which he had now published so valuable a part, occupied a much smaller portion of the course than formerly: and accordingly, his attention was naturally directed to a more complete illustration of the principles of jurisprudence and of political economy.32
What is more, as a set of student notes taken in 1763–4 makes clear, he used his last year at Glasgow to reconstruct his course so as to bring questions about the duties of government to the fore, and to establish the central principle on which the economic thinking he was to develop in the Wealth of Nations would be based.
What is known about Smith’s jurisprudence in this period is to be found in two remarkably full sets of student notes, one taken in 1762–3, the other in the following year. The contrast between them is very striking. The earlier set of notes is as much a monument to Smith’s erudition as to his philosophy, every one of his principles fleshed out by a lavish use of carefully formulated historical illustrations; the later set of notes suggest that this illustrative material was drastically pruned and used schematically to allow the basic principles of Smith’s complex system to appear with greater clarity. What is more, these later notes show that in the final year of his academic career Smith reorganized his course in order to emphasize the importance of government in maintaining the rules of justice and fostering the sociable dispositions of its subjects. The earlier course he had begun with a natural history of property ownership, because he wished to show that the means of subsistence and the distribution of property determined the patterns of subordination and power on which the authority of governments and their peoples’ sense of justice was based; he had then gone on to discuss the principles of government and police. In the later course, however, Smith reversed the order of the first two sections, beginning with a discussion of the principles of government and only then going on to discuss the changing state of property in different forms of society, finishing with a discussion of police. What may have happened is this.
When Smith gave the original version of his course in Edinburgh in 1750, he cannot have done much more than propose the principles on which his theory of jurisprudence was based, that our sense of justice is derived from our sympathetic response to the resentment a person feels when the impartial spectator assures us that their person or their property has been unjustly violated. He would have then gone on to show how that sense of justice is shaped by the system of property that operates in a particular form of society, by the social system that is built upon it and, eventually, by the way in which it is governed. It was an approach to the subject that stressed the essentially historical, or as we might say, sociological roots of our understanding of justice. The Smith who had lectured in Edinburgh in 1750 could not possibly have acquired the erudition he was able to call on twelve years later to illustrate his principles. But the weight of this erudition and the lavish use of illustrations could be criticized on the grounds that they strengthened the ‘sociological’ dimension of the analysis at the expense of the political, a matter of some practical as well as theoretical importance to an enlightened professor concerned with preparing boys for public life. Smith saw the problem very well. As he commented at the beginning of the new version of his course,
Property and civil government very much depend on one another. The preservation of property and the inequality of possession first formed it, and the state of property must always vary with the form of government. The civilians begin with considering government and then treat of property and other rights. Others who have written on this subject begin with the latter and then consider family and civil government. There are several advantages peculiar to each of these methods, tho’ that of the civil law seems upon the whole preferable.33
And as if to emphasize the significance of beginning his new course with a discussion of the principles of government, Smith offered a brief critical history in which he highlighted the importance of Hobbes to a proper understanding of natural jurisprudence. For Hobbes was the supreme exponent of a theory of sociability that stressed the importance of sovereign power in making a fearful and egotistical people sociable. The reorganized course, stripped of excessive illustration, was now perfectly designed as a vehicle for helping students to concentrate on the principles and duties of governments in enforcing and improving the rules of justice and in encouraging the progress of opulence. It was a treatise on the principles of legislation in the making, the framework for the book which Smith would begin, but not complete, in the last years of his life.
Smith’s jurisprudence lectures, the later version particularly, are a call for a radical rethinking of the principles of government and the sort of governance that was appropriate to a polity with a system of agriculture based on feudal principles of land tenure and a rapidly expanding system of commerce and manufactures. The Humean axioms on which his theory of government was based were introduced and developed briskly; the authority of all governments rested on opinion in the form of the natural respect we have for age, birth, talent and wealth, and was reinforced by our sense of their utility – but ‘this principle is fully explained in the Theory of moral Sentiments’.34 He reminded his students of the cardinal Humean principle that, ‘Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor.’35 He offered them a somewhat slimmed down version of his natural history of government from the age of shepherds, through the feudal era to the modern age, in order to demonstrate how different orders of men, the nobility in particular, had used government to preserve their interests and perpetuate their power. It allowed him to demonstrate that the modern system of land tenure was based on the principles of a feudal system which was fundamentally alien to what he called the ‘culture of society’ in an age of commerce and improvement. And he was able to argue that some of the fundamental provisions of the laws relating to inheritance, like primogeniture, testamentary succession and entail, had more to do with perpetuating the power of the nobility than with facilitating the workings of a market economy. Such questions were frequently discussed by Edinburgh’s improvers and went to the heart of contemporary debate of the feudal system and the role of the nobility in Scottish society. While Montesquieu had thought that a landed nobility was the only means of defending a county like France from despotism, Smith was once again insisting that the nobility was always in danger of posing an obstacle to the development of commerce and civility. It was a reminder of the importance of providing them with an enlightened education.
Both versions of the lectures culminated in a discussion of ‘police’, that self-consciously used neologism he had probably first employed in Edinburgh to consider the problems involved in maintaining what he called the ‘cleanliness’ and internal security of a state and, above all, ‘cheapness or plenty, or, which is the same thing, the most proper way of procuring wealth and abundance’.36 This was the climax of his jurisprudence and, in a remarkable way, the climax of the curriculum he had been developing. And it is here in the last year of his academic career that it is possible to see a newer project taking shape, a project that would materialize some fourteen years later as the Wealth of Nations. This section of the lectures was based on a discussion of the division of labour and its significance for an understanding of the progress of ‘opulence’ and the principles of improvement. The subject was introduced with some care, with an account of the psychological origins of our sense of improvement. It was a discussion that his students would have realized had its roots in the lectures on rhetoric and belles-letters and moral philosophy, and it
served as a counterpoint to Hume’s classic account of commerce and the civilizing process and his own critical engagement with Rousseaunian pessimism.
Nature produces for every animal every thing that is sufficient to support without having recourse to the improvement of the original production. Food, cloaths, and lodging are all the wants of any animal whatever, and most of the animal creation are sufficiently provided for by nature in all these wants to which their condition is liable. Such is the delicacey of man alone, that no object is produced to his liking. He finds that in every thing there is need of improvement. Tho’ the practice of savages shews that his food needs no preparation, yet being acquainted with fire he finds that it can be rendered more wholesome and easily digested, and thereby may preserve him from many diseases which are very violent among them. But it is not only his food that requires this improvement. His puny constitution is hurt also by the intemperature of the air he breathes in, which tho’ not very capable of improvement must be brought to a proper temperament for his body and an artificial atmosphere prepared for this purpose. The human skin cannot endure the inclemencies of the weather, and even in these countries where the air is warmer than the natural warmth of the constitution, and where they have no need of cloaths, it must be stained and painted to be able to endure the hardships of the sun and rain.37
Indeed, Smith continued, in rhetoric which not even the occasional infelicities of student note-taking can disguise, ‘The whole industry of human life is employed not in procuring the supply of our three humble necessities, food, cloaths, and lodging, but in procuring the conveniences of it according to the nicety and delicacey of our taste. To improve and multiply the materials which are the principal objects of our necessities, gives occasion to all the variety of the arts.’
Agriculture, of which the principal object is the supply of food, introduces not only the tilling of the ground, but also the planting of trees, the producing of flax, hemp, and inumerable other things of a similar kind. By these again are introduced different manufactures, which are so very capable of improvement. The mettals dug from the bowells of the earth furnish materials for tools, by which many of these arts are practised. Commerce and navigation are also subservient to the same purposes by collecting the produce of these several arts. By these again other subsidiary arts are occasioned. Writing, to record the multitude of transactions, and geometry, which serves many usefull purposes. Law and government, too, seem to propose no other object but this, they secure the individual who has enlarged his property, that he may peaceably enjoy the fruits of it. By law and government all the different arts flourish, and that inequality of fortune to which they give occasion is sufficiently preserved. By law and government domestic peace is enjoyed and security from the forreign invader. Wisdom and virtue too derive their lustre from supplying these necessities. For as the establishment of law and government is the highest effort of human prudence and wisdom, the causes cannot have a different influence from what the effects have. Besides, it is by the wisdom and probity of those with whom we live that a propriety of conduct is pointed out to us, and the proper means of attaining it. Their valour defends us, their benevolence supplies us, the hungry [are] fed, the naked [are] cloathed, by the exertion of these divine qualities. Thus according to the above representation, all things are subservient to supplying our threefold necessities.38
Following this philosophical prelude, Smith was ready to introduce the division of labour into the discussion as the central principle on which a philosophical understanding of the progress of opulence depended. It was conventional enough for political theorists to associate the specialization that was characteristic of almost all societies – even the most primitive – with the progress or decline of civilization. It was less conventional, though by no means unknown, for theorists of trade and commerce to reflect on the effects of the division of labour on the manufacturing process; Hume’s Political Discourses takes this for granted. Smith’s remarkable achievement in the Wealth of Nations was to show how this experience could be used as the basis for an analysis of the workings of the economy of a nation as a whole and could set the terms in which its government ought to be discussed. Smith was to insist that freeing the market from obstructions was essential for preserving the rules of justice in a free polity. But that was for the future. In the lectures, Smith’s primary purposes were to show that ‘the division of labour is the immediate cause of opulence’ and to explain the principles which regulated it.39 It was not an organizational principle, which could be introduced by legislators; it was the unintended consequence of principles that were deeply embedded in human nature – the disposition to truck and barter and exchange and ‘that principle to perswade which so much prevails in human nature’.40
Man continually standing in need of the assistance of others, must fall upon some means to procure their help. This he does not merely by coaxing and courting; he does not expect it unless he can turn it to your advantage or make it appear to be so. Mere love is not sufficient for it, till he applies in some way to your self love. A bargain does this in the easiest manner. When you apply to a brewer or butcher for beer or for beef you do not explain to him how much you stand in need of these, but how much it would be your interest to allow you to have them for a certain price. You do not adress his humanity, but his self-love.41
It was language that would famously resurface in the Wealth of Nations.
Smith saw the division of labour as a mechanism for generating opulence whose progress could only be encouraged by removing obstructions that stood in the way of its natural development, and he ended this section of the lectures with a sometimes elaborate survey of some of the main types of obstacle which improvement-minded governments would have to contend with. These ranged from feudal laws of property, taxes, bounties, monopolies and privileges that necessarily affected prices and the workings of the market, and (strikingly, and in considerable detail) a Humean discussion of the fallacy that opulence consists of money, and a discussion of the problems involved in managing the money supply.
Smith had cast his lectures in a language of government which was juristic in origin and designed to call attention to the role of government in encouraging free trade, and by the end of his Glasgow career he was said to have had some success in turning some of the younger Glasgow merchants into free traders.42 But Smith was still lecturing as an improver who was interested in using the division of labour as a principle that could be used to discuss the problem of improving different types of economic enterprise. At this stage, he did not have a general theory that would explain the workings of the economy as whole and draw the discussion of the interplay of agriculture, manufactures and commerce, country, town and empire, and the workings of international trade into an integrated conceptual whole. Nor did he have a general answer to the provocative question he posed at the end of his lectures – why the progress of commerce in the civilized world had been so slow. He realized that the immediate answer to his question was that in unimproved societies, men lacked the stock they needed to allow them to develop new ways of using their labour, but that begged more general questions about the workings of the economies of pre-commercial forms of society which he was, as yet, in no position to address. In 1762 such a theory was beyond his reach. Nevertheless, as A.S. Skinner and R.M. Meek have shown, in the course of his lectures on the division of labour in April 1763, he seems to have hit on the potential significance of a seemingly simple principle which Hume had taken for granted, that the division of labour is regulated by the extent of the market. As he put it in the final version of his lectures, ‘From all that has been said we may observe that the division of labour must always be proportioned to the extent of commerce. If ten people only want a certain commodity, the manufacture of it will never be so divided as if a thousand wanted it.’43 Once generalized, illustrated and applied he was to use it to analyse the workings of an entity that could properly be described as an economy, and applied to an extraordinary critical
account of the entire economic development of modern Europe.