Nicholas Phillipson
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It would give me the greatest pleasure to believe that the present Administration rests on a solid Basis. It comprehends the worthiest and ablest men in the nation, the heads of the two great Aristocracies, whose disunion had weakened the … Government so much as at last to occasion the dismemberment of the empire. Their coalition, instead of being unpopular, was most devoutly to be wished for … I trust that the usual folly and impertinence of next winters opposition will more effectually reconcile the King to his new ministers, than … any address of theirs has yet been able to do.24
Smith had taken leave from the Customs House from March to July 1782 to visit London and work on the new edition, but the mouvementé life of the capital was clearly not conducive to work and he was forced to apologize to Thomas Caddell, who was now his publisher, in December 1782 that it was still not ready. In spite of more apologies for further delays (‘I have been labouring as hard as the continual interruption which my employment necessarily occasions, will allow me’25) the text was not finished until November 1783, and not published until November 1784. The new edition had a curious publishing history. Smith’s amendments consisted of ‘Some new arguments against the corn bounty; against the Herring buss bounty; a new concluding Chapter upon the mercantile System; A short History and, I presume, a full exposition of the Absurdity and hurtfulness of almost all our chartered trading companies’, and an index.26 Smith was particularly anxious that the readers of the two earlier editions should have access to his latest thoughts and he persuaded his publisher to publish them in a 24,000-word pamphlet, the Additions and Corrections to the first and second editions of Dr Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which was to be made available to these earlier readers and then assimilated into what was to be the third edition of 1784.
The Additions and Corrections contains Smith’s final onslaught on the commercial system and his last thoughts about Britain’s future in a post-mercantilist world. The ‘Conclusion of the Mercantile System’ deepened his assault with an attack on statutes which fostered the insidious practice of encouraging the importation of cheap foreign raw materials, a policy particularly favoured by linen manufacturers, and the corresponding use of bounties to discourage exports and to undercut foreign competition – a practice long favoured by the woollen industry. Smith had no new theoretical point to make but his discussion is striking because it is so densely illustrated from evidence of the statutes, which he had clearly been studying intensively in the Customs House and which showed that parliament had not only actively encouraged such measures, but was in danger of becoming the creature of the mercantile lobby. He was outraged by parliament’s willingness to encourage the importation of foreign linen yarn regardless of its consequences for domestic producers and the wages of the poor. Not only were arguments that this would preserve the balance of trade and increase national prosperity spurious and a cloak to naked self-interest, Smith exclaimed, but they were an affront to parliament and to liberty. As he put it in one of the last of the great juristic aphorisms that gave ethical depth to the Wealth of Nations, ‘To hurt in any degree the interest of any one order of citizens, for no other purpose but to promote that of some other, is evidently contrary to that justice and equality of treatment which the sovereign owes to all the different orders of his subjects.’27 It was a reminder that the liberalization of trade would have to proceed cautiously if it was not to provoke outrage.
The second new chapter, dealing with the history of trading companies, drew heavily on a ‘sober and judicious writer’, Adam Anderson’s Historical and Chronological deduction of the Origin of Commerce (1764), and brilliantly displayed Smith’s erudition as a historically minded jurist.28 His theme was the constitutions of deeply oligarchic companies which served the interests of proprietors rather than the public. Indeed, in time all ‘regulated companies’ came to resemble ‘in every respect, the corporations of trades, so common in the cities and towns of all the different countries of Europe; and are a sort of enlarged monopolies of the same kind.’29 It was not unreasonable for new trading companies to be granted a ‘temporary monopoly’ and military assistance from government, in order to allow hazardous enterprises to take root, in much the same way as ‘the monopoly of a new machine is granted to its inventor, and that of a new book to its author’.30 It was not acceptable to allow these monopolies to become all but permanent in a way that ensured that the civil and military government of vast territories like India were subordinated to the interests of a single commercial organization.
The East India Company was, of course, Smith’s primary target. Its affairs had been high on the political agenda since 1772 and were now reaching a climacteric. It had fared badly as a result of the bank crash of 1772 and had turned to government for financial help, which Lord North had been willing to provide as long as steps were taken to disentangle the civil and military government of the subcontinent from the affairs of the company by means of new constitutional arrangements. The point of Smith’s history was to show that, whatever the constitutional reforms, the civil government of India would always fall into the hands of the company and its dependants. ‘It seems impossible, by any alterations, to render those courts, in any respect, fit to govern, or even to share in the government of a great empire; because the greater part of their members must always have too little interest in the prosperity of that empire, to give any serious attention to what may promote it.’31 Smith’s remedy proposed a gradualist approach to a liberal objective. The company’s monopoly should be revoked, trade liberalized and the company left to the mercy of the market. He predicted that, ‘Without a monopoly … a joint stock company, it would appear from experience, cannot long carry on any branch of foreign trade’, and concluded:
The East India Company, upon the redemption of their funds and the expiration of their exclusive privilege, have a right, by act of parliament, to continue a corporation with a joint stock, and to trade in their corporate capacity to the East Indies in common with the rest of their fellow-subjects. But in this situation, the superior vigilance and attention of private adventurers would, in all probability, soon make them weary of the trade.32
Gradually and quietly the hold of the East India Company on trade and government would shrivel and die. In theory, it was a simple and unassuming exercise in political and constitutional improvement that would bring about as great a revolution in Britain’s relations with the orient as the loss of the American colonies had brought about in the west, a revolution which would usher in a new liberal global order. In fact the company’s rule would be succeeded by a singularly illiberal imperial regime which sought to use Smith’s liberal proposals to justify its own ends.
The publication of the new edition of the Wealth of Nations in November 1784 was an important event in Smith’s intellectual career, the moment at which a book originally designed for the political classes and the intelligentsia began to reach a broader market. The first two editions had consisted of about 1,250 quarto copies, selling at £1. 16/- in boards or £2. 2/- bound. The new edition was more affordable – 1,000 copies, in three octave volumes priced at 18s. in boards and 21s. bound. The fourth and fifth editions of 1786 and 1789 were virtually reprints of the third, consisting of 1,250 and 1,500 copies respectively, providing Smith with a revenue of £1,500–£1,800 in his lifetime, and future generations with the text which was to form the basis of subsequent editions and translations.33
Revising the Theory of Moral Sentiments was to be Smith’s last literary venture. It was a larger-scale, theoretically more demanding task than that of revising the Wealth of Nations and it was one which Smith must have known would be his last. Nothing was heard of the project for nearly a year after his mother’s death. As he told James Menteath, an old friend from Kirkcaldy, who was thinking of moving to Edinburgh in February 1785, his world was shrinking. ‘You are now, except one or two old Cousins, the oldest friend I have now remaining in the world, and it gives me the most unspeakable s
atisfaction to think that I have some chance of ending my days in your Society and neighbourhood. I ever am, my Dearest friend, your most affectionate and most faithful humble servant Adam Smith.’34 Smith first announced his intention of revising the Theory of Moral Sentiments somewhat offhandedly in April 1785, in a letter to Thomas Caddell: ‘If a new edition of the theory is wanted I have a few alterations to make of no great consequence which I shall send to you’, but nothing happened.35 In January 1787 he took a six-month leave of absence from the Customs, and visited London in May and June to see friends and to be treated for piles and an obstruction to the bowel which was painful and debilitating.36 One of Gibbon’s friends was shocked by his physical condition and wrote, ‘You will find near the Adelphi poor Adam Smith. I say poor because he seems very weak and not far from the end of his career; some fundamental operation has lately been performed on him by John Hunter since when he seems to pick up a little, I nevertheless fear that the machine is nearly worn out.’37
However, the London visit had its consolations for the gratifying reason that government was now in the hands of men who knew and admired the Wealth of Nations. By 1787 William Pitt’s ministry was firmly in power and attempting to negotiate a series of treaties with leading European states to liberalize trade. ‘The present Rage for Commercial Treaties’ had so far only resulted in one with France in 1786, and in a set of failed negotiations to create a free-trade union with Ireland, but in 1787 it also gave rise to legislation to revise and simplify the chaotically complex laws relating to customs duties, which Pitt had described as a set of ‘clogs and fetters’ on trade. Pitt, William Grenville, the Paymaster of the Forces and Henry Dundas had all read the Wealth of Nations and discussed it with Smith, and his reputation as a philosopher whose system seemed brilliantly designed to treat philosophically some of the most profound and difficult problems of contemporary government was to give rise to a possibly apocryphal story that, like the tale of Smith having been snatched by gypsies as a child, has become an essential part of the Smith legend. On arriving at Henry Dundas’s house at Wimbledon, Smith is supposed to have found a company that included Pitt, Grenville, Addington and Wilberforce. When they rose to receive him he asked them to be seated, Pitt is supposed to have replied, ‘No, we will stand till you are first seated, for we are all your scholars.’38 Pitt’s governance was enough to turn Smith for a moment from a Whig to a Pittite Tory. ‘I think myself much honoured by the slightest mark of Mr Pitts approbation. You may be assured that the long and strict friendship in which I have lived with some of his opponents, does not hinder me from discerning courage, activity, probity, and public spirit in the great outlines of his administration.’39 Rather later, the Earl of Buchan reported that he had reverted to his customary Whiggery.40
Shortly after his return to Edinburgh in July, Smith was to be gratified in a different way by being elected Rector of Glasgow University, in November 1787. As he wrote to the Principal, Archibald Davidson:
No preferment could have given me so much real satisfaction. No man can owe greater obligations to a Society than I do to the University of Glasgow. They educated me, they sent me to Oxford, soon after my return to Scotland they elected me one of their own members, and afterwards preferred me to another office, to which the abilities and Virtues of the never to be forgotten Dr Hutcheson had given a superior degree of illustration. The period of thirteen years which I spent as a member of that society I remember as by far the most useful, and, therefore, as by far the happiest and most honourable period of my life; and now, after three and twenty years absence, to be remembered in so very agreable manner by my old friends and Protectors gives me a heartfelt joy which I cannot easily express to you.41
This was the occasion on which he proposed to deliver three papers on the imitative arts to the Literary Society, the last of which he was unable to complete. Once again his failing health and the demands of the Customs House were proving troublesome. It was under these circumstances that he was at last to turn to the business of revising the Theory of Moral Sentiments in March 1788.
Smith told Thomas Caddell that he had taken four months’ leave from the Customs House ‘and I am at present giving the most intense application’. By now his plans for revision had become much more elaborate and more extensive; the new edition was to be a third longer than previous ones.
The chief and the most important additions will be to the third part, that concerning the sense of Duty and to the last part concerning the History of moral Philosophy. As I consider my tenure of this life as extremely precarious, and am very uncertain whether I shall live to finish several other works which I have projected and in which I have made some progress, the best thing, I think, I can do is to leave those I have already published in the best and most perfect state behind me. I am a slow a very slow workman, who do and undo everything I write at least half a dozen of times before I can be tolerably pleased with it; and tho’ I have now, I think, brought my work within compass, yet it will be the month of June before I shall be able to send it to you.42
A year later the work was still not done, although promised for midsummer – ‘I am very much ashamed of this delay; but the subject has grown upon me.’43 In the event, Caddell was not to receive the text until November 1789. It was sent for printing in January 1790 and appears to have been published some weeks later. By then Smith was still receiving visitors like the poet Samuel Rogers, and still entertaining at home and in the Oyster Club in spite of the fact that his health was finally giving way. The Earl of Buchan, a former pupil, saw him in February 1790 and told him he looked forward to seeing him again in a year’s time. ‘He squeezed my hand, and said, “My dear [friend], I may be alive then, and perhaps half-a-dozen of Februaries; but you will never see your old friend any more. I find that the machine is breaking down; so that I shall be little better than a mummy.” ’44 He supervised the destruction of his papers in early July and died on 17 July 1790, shortly after one of his Sunday suppers. He was buried in the Canongate Churchyard.
One of Smith’s reasons for revising the Theory of Moral Sentiments was to reply to criticism that had dogged his moral philosophy since its publication in 1759, that his ethics had effectively reduced morality to public opinion. At one level, it was not an altogether unreasonable charge. His subtle and nuanced discussion of the origin of our moral sentiments had shown that we owe our understanding of the principles of morality to sympathy, the imagination and the experience of common life. The core of his moral theory had dealt with the situation that arises when we feel that our own moral sentiments are at odds with those of others. Under these circumstances, Smith had claimed, our response was to turn in on ourselves, so that we could invoke the counsel of an internalized impartial spectator whose approbation could sometimes seem to mean more to us than that of real people in the real world. A Christian might have argued that this was because the voice of the internal spectator was that of conscience or the deity, but Smith had made it perfectly clear that it was the voice of an entirely fictitious being, an imaginary person who we invoke in difficult ethical situations to help us clarify our sense of ethical propriety and allow us to act in a way we ourselves could approve of. It meant that, strictly speaking, the impartial spectator speaks of rules of morality which have roots in our own ethical lives and that of our nation and civilization, and cannot properly be regarded as the eternal, never-changing voice of a deity. It was this that had led critics like Thomas Reid, Smith’s successor at Glasgow, to write off his ethical theory as ‘only a Refinement of the selfish System’, in the sense that however much we might delude ourselves into believing that the impartial spectator spoke the language of disinterested virtue, it was in fact no more than the voice of self-love.45
Such criticism was easily made but for Smith it missed the point. Whatever metaphysicians might say about the selfish or benevolent roots of our sense of morality, what mattered in common life was that we judge people we believe to be following an internally directed s
ense of morality quite differently from the way in which we judge those who seem to be responding to the opinions of those around them. We think of the former as people who are acting on principle and the others as people who are simply acting in a way which will avoid the disapproval of others. What is more, we feel quite differently about ourselves when we follow an internal voice rather than that of the crowd. We have deliberately abstracted ourselves from the opinion of the world in an attempt to act as morally responsible individuals, even though we know that our actions may disturb our relations with those around us. Smith had presented this response to ethical difficulty as one that any reader would recognize as being like his own; it could therefore be described as a ‘natural’ characteristic of human nature. What is more, it was a characteristic that was fundamental to understanding the process of socialization and the workings of the moral economy of a political society.