Nicholas Phillipson
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Smith’s revisions were designed to refine and deepen this analysis in a way which would underline its ‘natural’ characteristics and would demonstrate that the civilizing process was one that could turn human beings into virtuous as well as sociable agents. The new section – ‘Of the Character of Virtue’ – looked back to the remarkable discussion of the wants and necessities of mankind that had prefaced Smith’s early discussions of political economy and had been so conspicuously omitted from the opening pages of the Wealth of Nations. There he had shown that man’s industriousness, ingenuity and love of improvement were a response to indigence and necessity. It was out of necessity that primitive man had learned how to cook, clothe and house himself, how to improve the raw materials provided by the natural world and the patterns of co-operation on which his survival and ability to live ‘conveniently’ depended. It was to supply the basic wants of feeding, clothing and housing that property, law, government and the arts and sciences had been invented. Smith began his revisions to the Theory of Moral Sentiments by extending the reach of this natural history to ethics. We learn the meaning of prudence and the duties we owe to ourselves from the experience of living co-operatively with others. This experience teaches us to think of the prudent man as one who values security and caution, who respects the rules of justice, who is generally competent, sincere, decent and discriminating in his choice of friends and has learned to be guided by the impartial spectator. We regard prudence of this sort ‘as a most respectable and even in some degree, as an amiable and agreeable quality, yet it never is considered as one, either of the most endearing, or of the most ennobling of the virtues’.46 No doubt it was an ‘inferior’ species of prudence in the sense that it was only motivated by the need for self-preservation, but it was on the existence of a prudent citizenry that the preservation and improvement of society depended. What was more, it was the basis for our admiration of the higher forms of prudence we admire in the greatest generals and patriots.
Prudence is, in all these cases, combined with many greater and more splendid virtues, with valour, with extensive and strong benevolence, with a sacred regard to the rules of justice, and all these supported by a proper degree of self-command. This superior prudence, when carried to the highest degree of perfection, necessarily supposes the art, the talent, and the habit or disposition of acting with the most perfect propriety in every possible circumstance and situation. It necessarily supposes the utmost perfection of all the intellectual and of all the moral virtues. It is the best head joined to the best heart. It is the most perfect wisdom combined with the most perfect virtue. It constitutes very nearly the character of the Academical or Peripatetic sage, as the inferior prudence does that of the Epicurean.47
Whatever Christian moralists might claim to the contrary, Smith was arguing that in common life we should always think of prudence as an essential component of virtue.
But what of beneficence and the duties we owe to others? It was easy to show how our sympathies and sense of duty move outward from ourselves to our families, friends and country and shape the way in which we respond to the beneficent instincts of others, particularly when we feel that family duty is coming into conflict with the duties we feel we owe our friends or country, and Smith took it for granted that the beneficence we show to our families and to the friends who have been of service to us would always be motivated by a degree of self-love. The much more difficult ethical question for the modern citizen was in deciding how much he owed his country. An uncritical love of country could all too easily lead him to view ‘with the most malignant jealousy and envy, the prosperity and aggrandisement of any other neighbouring nation’ and was a form of false patriotism that he and Hume had always regarded as a potentially fatal threat to the security, prosperity and public finances of Britain and France.
France and England may each of them have some reason to dread the increase of the naval and military power of the other; but for either of them to envy the internal happiness and prosperity of the other, the cultivation of its lands, the advancement of its manufactures, the increase of its commerce, the security and number of its ports and harbours, its proficiency in all the liberal arts and sciences, is surely beneath the dignity of two such great nations. These are all real improvements of the world we live in. Mankind are benefited, human nature is ennobled by them. In such improvements each nation ought, not only to endeavour itself to excel, but from the love of mankind, to promote, instead of obstructing the excellence of its neighbours. These are all proper objects of national emulation, not of national prejudice or envy.48
What complicated this age-old problem of the citizen’s duties to his country was the way in which the claims of patriotism had been caught up with those of political parties (and he might have added churches) and other associations. What worried Smith, as it had worried Hume, was that political life, like religious life in previous centuries, was becoming increasingly factious and ideologically charged. Like Hume he was troubled by the ease with which public spirit could become infected with a ‘certain spirit of system’ which spawned ideologies and utopias and ‘always animates it, and often inflames it even to the madness of fanaticism’. It was this deeply Humean fear that led him to insist that
The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided … He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear.49
These last political reflections, more discursive than Smith generally allowed, were his prelude to the discussion of the ethical quality which he thought would always be regarded as essential to a virtuous character whatever the metaphysicians and theologians might say – the capacity for self-command. His analysis had shown how hard it was even for the best-intentioned person not to be misled by his passions, ‘sometimes to drive him and sometimes to seduce him to violate all the rules which he himself, in all his sober and cool hours, approves of’.50 In earlier editions of the Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith had assumed that we think of the virtuous person as one who acts in accordance with the directions of the impartial spectator; but now this definition seemed too abstract, particularly when it was set in the context of the often conflicting demands made on the modern citizen’s loyalties in troubled times. He now made the simpler point that we admire the virtuous man for the consistency of his ethical conduct, and for the capacity for self-command that one needs to live a life directed by the impartial spectator. Nor were this sense of consistency and self-command easily acquired. It would always be difficult to square the duties we owed to ourselves with those we owed to family, friends, country and association in troubled times. It would be just as hard to prevent our ethical behaviour from becoming over-rigid, over-indulgent or over-sceptical. At the end, Smith was returning to his intellectual roots to show that in the modern world we recognize virtue as a quality which is built on prudence, beneficence and a Humean understanding of the principles of human nature. It was the finishing touch to Smith’s intellectual legacy, his ethical message to the citizens and magistrates of a commercial and what he hoped would become an enlightened civilization. It was, perhaps, for this reason that he told that intelligent young MP Samuel Romilly, he always considered the Theory of Moral Sentiments ‘a much superior work to his [Wealth of Nations]’.51
Smith’s death attracted little attention. Romilly was ‘surprised and, I own, a little indignant to observe how little impression [Smith’s] death has made [in London]. Scarce any notice has been taken of it, while for abo
ve a year together after the death of Dr Johnson [in 1784] nothing was to be heard but panegyrics of him, – lives, letters, and anecdotes.’52 The Edinburgh press all but ignored the event, while in London the press did little more than circulate a short, anonymous, anecdotal memoir that first appeared in the St. James’ Chronicle of 31 July 1790. This somewhat snide article by someone who clearly knew Smith, noted his oddities, his ungainliness, his respect for the French Encyclopaedists, his admiration of Hume ‘as by far the greatest Philosopher that the world had ever produced’ and his ‘[jealousy] of the property of his lectures’. The Theory of Moral Sentiments was written off as ‘ingenious but fanciful’ and the Wealth of Nations as a system of political economy which was ‘not essentially different from that of [the Milanese philosopher] Count Verri, [the English political writer] Josiah Tucker and Hume’. It was based on data derived from the Encyclopédie, although ‘fortified with stronger proofs than any of his predecessors’. The author concluded that ‘[Smith] deserves the chief praise and blame, of propagating a system, which tends to confound national wealth with national prosperity.’ It was left to Dugald Stewart to present the canonical portrait of Smith in his Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D., on which he began work immediately after Smith’s death, presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the winter of 1793, published in an abridged form in the Society’s Transactions in 1794 and in full in 1795. It was subsequently republished as an introduction to many editions of the Wealth of Nations. It is this portrait that continues to shape our understanding of Smith’s character.
Stewart knew Smith well and fully appreciated the elusiveness of his character, commenting that ‘it would require a very skilful pencil to present [this] to the public eye’.53 Stewart’s Smith was a kind, gentle, endearing eccentric who was ‘certainly not fitted for the general commerce of the world, or for the business of active life’. He was a genius who was constantly absorbed in speculation, ‘habitually inattentive to familiar objects, and to common occurrences’, and even when in company ‘was apt to be engrossed with his studies; and appeared, at times, by the motion of his lips, as well as by his looks and gestures, to be in the fervour of composition.’ Strangers – and some members of Johnson’s Club – were taken aback by his inability to take part in ordinary conversation and by his tendency ‘to convey his own ideas in the form of a lecture’, and Stewart’s portrait suggests that he was only truly at ease in the company of close friends. What does not come over in Stewart’s portrait is the contrast his portrait of the private man provides with the portrait of the public intellectual which has taken shape in this book. His professorial voice was commanding. He lectured as a man who knew that he was placing the study of human behaviour on new foundations and was well aware that in doing so, he was taking on the philosophical world at large. The axioms from which the different parts of his philosophy were derived were set out with daring and illustrated with the formidable erudition for which he rightly became famous. Nor does Stewart’s portrait of the unworldly philosopher obviously square with Smith’s evident abilities as a much respected and powerful academic administrator, with the value which Buccleuch attached to his advice in running his estates, with the respect with which his advice on public finance was treated by cabinet ministers, or with his career as a conscientious Customs Commissioner. Although the inconsequentialities of ordinary social life and conversation seemed to bore him, perhaps he was too gentle, too good-natured and too little of a committed recluse to be able to do without company, and certainly without the company of his friends. He made friends easily and kept those he had for life. It was of these that Stewart wrote, ‘The serenity and gaiety he enjoyed, under the pressure of his growing infirmities, and the warm interest he felt to the last, in every thing connected with the welfare of his friends, will be long remembered by a small circle, with whom, as long as his strength permitted, he regularly spent an evening in the week; and to whom the recollection of his worth still forms a pleasing, though melancholy bond of union.’
Perhaps the most enduring characteristic of his life and philosophy is its modesty. For all its scope, ambition and daring, his philosophy is the work of a modest man who set out to reflect on a simple, apparently unremarkable characteristic of human nature – our desire, when all things are equal, to improve our own lot, that of our families and that of the civil society to which we belong, It was a disposition the day labourer shared with the aristocrat, the young person making his or her way in the world with the sage and elder statesman. It was a disposition which taught the prudent citizen to value small and progressive adjustments to life and to the management of public affairs over millenarian attempts to create new heavens and a new earth. It was a disposition which came naturally to members of an indigent species, and evidence of its quiet and unassuming power was to be seen in the remarkable material, moral and intellectual progress of mankind and the advance of civilization. And to Smith, born into and educated in a world of improving landowners in Fife, and in the improvement-minded civil society of post-Union Scotland, it was the disposition of a family, class and country whose fortunes were being transformed by the seemingly natural consequences of an enlightened Union.
Epilogue
When Smith made his first will in 1773 and made Hume his executor, he asked him to destroy all of his unpublished papers after his death with the possible exception of that ‘juvenile’ essay on the history of astronomy of which he was rather fond. The decision whether or not to publish it posthumously was left to Hume’s discretion. By 1790 his thoughts about the future of his unpublished papers had changed. In the advertisement to the last edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments he admitted that he now had ‘very little expectation of ever being able to execute’ the book on jurisprudence he had planned in 1759, ‘when I entertained no doubt of being able to execute every thing which [the first edition] announced’.1 His lecture notes had been destroyed, but a small number of unpublished and often fragmentary essays were spared and their future left to the discretion of his executors, Joseph Black and James Hutton. These, they said, ‘appeared to be parts of a plan he had once formed, for giving a connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant arts. It is long since he found it necessary to abandon that plan as far too extensive; and these parts of it lay beside him neglected until his death.’ It was a reminder that the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations had been part of a grander plan for a Science of Man that had proved to be beyond his physical resources.
Smith seems to have realized that his project for developing a Science of Man as he and Hume had known it had run its course. They had set out to show that processes by which the human personality, and the customs, habits and institutions which made political life and the progress of civilization possible, could be explained in terms of the imaginative and sympathetic response of an indigent species to the never-ending pressures of need. Hume had made the enterprise possible by providing Smith with the sceptical account of the processes which teach us how to survive and prosper in political society. It was he who had shown how deeply this needs-driven view of the making of the human mind penetrated and shaped a person’s understanding of the natural and supernatural worlds, of politics, morality and religion. And it was he who had prescribed its agenda.
Hume had left it to Smith to develop this new science and it is Smith’s published and unpublished, finished and unfinished texts that have provided an insight into what was being attempted, as well as what was accomplished. He had shown that it was possible to study the workings of the mind and the process of socialization by means of a study of the sentiments and the different strands of the sensibility in which the human personality was embodied. Smith had explored the processes by which we acquire the senses of propriety, justice, political obligation and beauty on which our skills in the arts of social intercourse and our character depend. In doing so, he had introduced into his analysis a simple observation about the principles of human nature that had
been ignored by modern philosophy, that man’s natural indigence had somehow gone hand in hand with a love of improvement which he would exercise whenever he felt secure enough to do so. Indeed, as has already been suggested, the business of extending this principle to every aspect of human life had been Smith’s singular contribution to the science of man. It had allowed him to suggest that a reasonably stable society will follow a material, moral, political and intellectual path of development that was more natural and more secure than one which was determined by the whims of its sovereigns, and it was he who had developed the stadial model of civilization’s progress that was to be one of the lasting legacies of his exploration of the science of man to philosophy, history and the social sciences. In this respect it had been a deeply Epicurean enterprise.
But it had been an Epicurean enterprise shaped by Hume’s notably sceptical theory of knowledge, by his provocative claim that the mind was, in the last resort, the Empire of the Imagination, and by that loathing of priestcraft which had identified him in Europe as a philosopher bearing the mark of a true philosophe. Smith’s scepticism had been more circumspect and his attitude to priestcraft more discrete; he never challenged the general principles of Hume’s theory of human nature, but he regarded them as principles to be explored and developed rather than taken at face value. It had been Hume who had made his project for developing a science of man based on a study of the sentiments possible, but it had been left to Smith to consider how the imagination responds to different sorts of event in the natural and moral worlds, and to develop his own radical theory of sympathy to explain how we acquire these senses of justice, morality and taste on which our capacity for sociability, survival and happiness depends. It had been an inquiry which led him to his own peculiarly sceptical conclusions. His ethics had shown that what many think of as the voice of conscience or the deity has its origins in the complicated processes of sympathetic interaction, thus gently reducing it to a form of false consciousness which Christians would inevitably find objectionable. In his jurisprudence and his political economy he had viewed the business of government and politics through the eyes of the sceptical observer who preferred to encourage the governing classes to liberalize their systems of public administration, rather than speculate on utopian solutions to the problem of promoting liberty and prosperity. And although he never shared Hume’s notoriety as a public infidel, few Scots were in any doubt where his religious sympathies lay. The Glasgow clergy had sensed that infidelity on his appointment to the professorship of Logic and Metaphysics in 1751; Edmund Burke had been among those who had scoffed at his defence of Hume’s notably non-Christian death as a typical manifestation of the clannishness of modern non-believers; James Boswell had irreverently dubbed his old professor as ‘an infidel in a bag-wig’. ‘Ascanius’ – who was probably the Earl of Buchan – writing in the Bee in 1791 put the contemporary view well: ‘In many respects, Adam Smith was a chaste disciple of Epicurus, as that philosopher is properly understood … O venerable, amiable, and worthy man, why was you not a Christian?’2