Nicholas Phillipson

by Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

  Not many thought of Hume and Smith’s project as a genuinely ‘scientific’ contribution to knowledge, one which had established undoubted truths about man and society, politics and history. Thomas Reid, with the sharp intelligence of a Christian philosopher, was fully prepared to admit that Hume had demonstrated that the foundations of a science of man must be based on a study of our beliefs about the world, but thought that much work remained to be done on their metaphysical properties and on the organization of the mind. Hugh Blair and Lord Kames appreciated the importance Smith attached to the sense of taste in shaping the understanding, but were sure that its roots were hard-wired in the constitution of the mind and that its effects could not simply be explained in terms of ingenious speculations about the experience of common life. William Robertson had drawn heavily on Smith’s understanding of the progress of civilization in his work on the history of Europe and America but had preferred to think of that process as teleologically driven by a deity whose being, nature and purposes would always remain unclear. The Theory of Moral Sentiments was criticized by the intelligent, and in many ways sympathetic, Sir James Mackintosh in the influential dissertation on the progress of ethics he wrote for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1815, on the grounds that it was based on a theory of sympathy that begged more questions about the nature and powers of that fundamental property of human nature than it answered, and could therefore scarcely be regarded as a secure foundation for a genuine science of morals.

  Most important of all, as Biancamaria Fontana has shown, by the early nineteenth century, the Wealth of Nations itself was coming under fire from the formidably intelligent young men who circled round Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review, the most acute critical voice of the political, scientific and literary culture of a post-Enlightenment age. Most of them were Dugald Stewart’s pupils, who had been taught to admire the Wealth of Nations for its comprehensive, philosophical treatment of political economy, for its erudition and elegance, for the esprit de système which informed it, and above all for its unfailingly liberal sentiments. Smith’s theory was undoubtedly plausible, but was it true? For the ferociously clever Francis Horner, Smith’s thinking lacked rigour and left unanswered too many questions about the nature and scope of the science of political economy and that of government. It was too much a tract for its times, which all too often relied on the persuasive power of rhetoric rather than on hard analysis to sustain its axioms. That said, he was prepared to admit, rather patronizingly, that ‘the popular and plausible and loose hypothesis is as good for the vulgar as any other’.3

  Horner was questioning the ability of a sceptical Hume–Smith conception of science to sustain the sort of analysis demanded by a later generation. He and the younger members of Dugald Stewart’s class wanted a philosophy which furnished hard political and economic truths about the principles of economics and good government to advance the cause of constitutional and political reform, rather than one which was merely designed to refresh the political understanding of the intelligent citizens and legislators of a previous age. Indeed the question of how the principles of the Wealth of Nations could be corrected, refined and recast for use in new political, economic and intellectual environments was to be the task of successive generations of editors.

  It was no accident that one of the pieces of his work that Smith was prepared to save from the flames was his essay on the history of astronomy, which he had begun in the 1740s, had kept beside him for most of his intellectual life, and was apparently still tinkering with at the end. It is a piece which has much to say about Smith’s own conception of science.4 It was an essay about the origins of philosophical thought, the creation of philosophical systems, and the appeal which philosophy has to its public. Philosophy’s roots, Smith suggested, lay in the psychological need to explain the unexpected, to soothe the imagination and to restore the mind to a state of cognitive order and tranquillity. It was not an activity to appeal to primitive man or to those who lived in a state of chronic insecurity; under those circumstances philosophy would only generate amazement, fear and superstition. Philosophy would only perform its psychological and social functions when men had the security and leisure to reflect on the world, to attend to ‘that train of events which passes around them’ and to detect unexplained irregularities in the workings of nature. It was wonder rather than any hope of material gain that provided the spur to philosophy, and it was the pleasure involved in seeking ‘the invisible chains which bind together all these disjointed objects’ that was its own reward. Thus it was not the task of the historian of philosophy to consider philosophy’s contribution to the progress of truth but rather to consider ‘how far each of them was fitted to sooth the imagination, and to render the theatre of nature a more coherent, and therefore a more magnificent spectacle, than otherwise it would have appeared to be’.5 Indeed it was the glory of Newton’s philosophy that he had developed a system of philosophy that conquered all opposition ‘and has advanced to the acquisition of the most universal empire that was ever established in philosophy. His principles, it must be acknowledged, have a degree of firmness and solidity that we should in vain look for in any other system. The most sceptical cannot avoid feeling this.’6 It was a system of philosophy that appealed to his contemporaries’ sense of truthfulness and, so Smith implied, it would only reign until that sense of truthfulness was undermined. The claim that Smith had made of Newton’s philosophy was the same as the claim he made for his own. It was the claim of a philosopher who, for all the scale and scope of his own philosophy, had no illusions about the nature of its authority.

  KIRKCALDY

  1. The Burgh School, Hill Street, Kirkcaldy, built in 1725, closed in 1743 and demolished in 1964. Smith was a pupil from 1731/2 to 1737.

  2–3. Eutropius’ Historiae Romanae Breviarium was a classic school text in progressive academies in the early eighteenth century. Smith’s copy has survived, but thr practice signatures on the endpapers hint that he did not think much of the book.

  SMITH’S GLASGOW, 1737–40: The College

  4. Glasgow’s much-admired College buildings, many of which were built in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, were only finished in the 1750s, when Smith returned to the college as Professor of Moral Philosophy. John Slezer’s print of the college in 1693 from his Theatrum Scotiae was brought up to date around 1707 and represents the College as Smith must have known it as a student. The layout of the buildings suggests that they were modelled on those of Oxford or Cambridge and which Smith was to encounter at first hand as a student at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1740 to 1746.

  5. Balliol College, in a print from David Loggan’s Oxonia Illustrata (1675).

  SMITH’S GLASGOW, 1737–40: Professors and their Patron

  6. Smith was fortunate in his teachers at Glasgow. Robert Simson (a print derived from a portrait by Peter de Nune) was Professor of Mathematics from 1711 to 1761, one of the most important mathematicians in contemporary Europe and a leading influence on Smith’s thinking about philosophical method.

  7. ‘The Never to be forgotten Francis Hutcheson’ (print derived from a portrait by Allan Ramsay) was a charismatic Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1729 to 1746 who transformed the philosophy curriculum at Glasgow and introduced Smith to the moral philosophy of the ancient and modern worlds.

  8. Archibald, Earl of Islay, 3rd Duke of Argyll (1682–1761), the ‘Uncrowned King of Scotland’ to his contemporaries, was the College’s unofficial patron (print based on a portrait by Allan Ramsay). He kept an intelligent and watchful eye on the College’s affairs and took a keen interest in its modernizing agenda. His secretary, William Smith, was Adam Smith’s guardian.

  DAVID HUME

  9. David Hume (1711–76) was one of Smith’s closest friends and the most powerful influence on his philosophy. This plate, the frontispiece for the 1768 edition of Hume’s Essays and Treatises and the 1770 edition of his History of England, was based on a specially commissioned drawing by an Edinb
urgh miniature painter, John Donaldson. Hume declared that it was ‘the likest that has been done for me, as well as the best Likeness’. His publisher, Andrew Millar, took care to present Hume as historian and philosopher, and it is the complex interplay between the two forms of enquiry that characterizes Hume’s and Smith’s approaches to the problem of developing a Science of Man.

  EDINBURGH

  10. An anonymous view of Edinburgh as Smith would have known it in the late 1740s. The city is seen from the south and shows what is now called the Royal Mile from the castle, past the Cathedral to the Palace of Holyrood. In the following decade grandiose plans for developing the city as the modern and enlightened capital of an important province of the British Crown were still only dreams. They were taking shape at the end of Smith’s life when he became one of the city’s most prominent citizens.

  11. David Martin’s posthumous portrait of Henry Home, Lord Kames, presents Smith’s early patron and Edinburgh’s leading cultural entrepreneur in his sometimes arrogant and cantankerous old age.

  SMITH AND THE FRENCH MORALISTS

  Smith paid close attention to the work of contemporary French moral philosophy when developing his own systems in the 1740s and 1750s. Generally he thought of the work of the French as serious and even brilliant, but conceptually misguided.

  12. The abbé E. B. Condillac (1715–78), engraving by G. Volpato, was Smith’s target in developing the theory of language which underpinned his rhetoric and his understanding of the process of social exchange.

  13. C.-L. de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), engraving by A. de Saint-Aubin, published his celebrated De l’esprit des lois in 1748. It provided a critical point of reference for the theory of justice Smith developed in his lectures at Edinburgh and Glasgow.

  14. J.-J. Rousseau (1712–78), by L.-M. Halbou, gathering herbs. Smith was deeply interested in his thinking but found him to be a theorist who was ‘more capable of feeling strongly than of analising accurately’.

  SMITH’S GLASGOW, 1751–63

  15. View of a Fine Art Exhibition in the Court of Old College, based on an earlier print by David Allan of 1761, pays tribute to the College’s attempt to extend the reach of its teaching to the Fine Arts. The College accommodated the Foulis Academy, and many of the paintings on display and on sale were copies of Old Masters made by its pupils.

  16. Robert Paul’s View of the Middle Walk in the College Garden (1756) is the work of one of the Foulis Academy’s alumni whose prints of Glasgow provide a polite and sentimentalized image of Glasgow in its age of Enlightenment.

  HENRY, 3rd DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH

  17. Smith was appointed tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch in 1763. This appointment, together with the substantial pension it brought, allowed him to resign an onerous professorship that was compromising his time and his health. Smith and Buccleuch became and remained close friends for the rest of Smith’s life, Smith acting as one of the Duke’s closest advisers and Buccleuch helping to secure Smith a lucrative and honourable appointment as Commissioner of Customs in Scotland. This portrait by Thomas Gainsborough was probably painted to celebrate the Duke’s majority in 1767. For the pupil of the greatest philosopher of sentiment in Europe, it is an appropriately sentimental portrait.

  DAVID HUME IN PARIS, 1764

  18. Hume played a minor part in securing Smith’s appointment as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch and a more significant part in arranging his stay in Toulouse and Paris. He had been appointed secretary to the British Ambassador in 1763 and was lionized by Paris society. He was preparing the ground for Smith’s arrival in Paris when he was recalled with the Ambassador in 1765, only weeks before Smith and Buccleuch arrived. Louis Carrogis’s portrait of Hume, painted in about 1764, shows him at this Parisian moment of his life.

  GENEVA, 1765

  19. Smith and Buccleuch’s Grand Tour took the somewhat unusual step of including Geneva in 1765, a city with a sophisticated intellectual life and the home of both Rousseau and Voltaire (plate of the city taken from Baron Zurlauben’s Tableaux de la Suisse, c. 1780). Rousseau was away but Smith was able to meet Voltaire, whom he greatly admired and whose portrait bust he acquired. Although their conversations were not recorded the meetings were clearly a success. Of Voltaire Smith was to exclaim, ‘Sir, there is only one Voltaire,’ while Voltaire said of Smith apropos the Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘We have nothing to compare with him, and I am embarrassed for my dear compatriots.’

  20. Portrait of Voltaire from a drawing by Denon made on 6 July 1775.

  PARIS, 1765–6

  21. When Buccleuch and Smith arrived in Paris in December 1765 they stayed in the rue Colombiers, Saint-Germain, shown here in the Plan de Turgot of 1734–9.

  22. François Quesnay (1694–1744) engraved by J.-G. Wille. Quesnay’s circle of économistes formed the focal point of Smith’s intellectual life in Paris when his thinking about political economy was at an important stage of its development. Smith once said that if Quesnay had lived, he would have dedicated the Wealth of Nations to him.

  SMITH IN LONDON

  23. From 1766 onwards Smith was to be a fairly regular visitor to London, often staying in what had become the Scots’ quarter of the City, Charing Cross, here portrayed by Sir John Dean Paul.

  24. The centre of Scottish life was the British Coffeehouse in Cockspur Street, off Charing Cross. This was redesigned and rebuilt in the late 1770s in a notably avant-garde style by Smith’s friend the Scottish architect Robert Adam, a symbol, perhaps, of the importance and pretensions of the Scots community in the age of Enlightenment. The building was demolished a century later.

  SMITH IN EDINBURGH, 1778–90

  25. On his appointment as Commissioner of Customs in Scotland in 1778, Smith moved with his mother and his cousin Janet Douglas from Kirkcaldy to Panmure House in Edinburgh’s Canongate. Mary Elton’s View from the Walk on the Top of Calton Hill (1820) makes it possible to identify the Canongate Church and its large churchyard (on the extreme right) where his mother probably worshipped and Smith was buried. Panmure House lies in the close immediately to the east of the church.

  26. Smith and his two celebrated friends the geologist James Hutton and the chemist Joseph Black set up a dining club in Edinburgh which was variously known as the Oyster Club or Adam Smith’s Club, as famous in Scotland for its conversation as Samuel Johnson’s Club was in London. Hutton and Black feature in James Kay’s Original Portraits as ‘Philosophers’.

  MARGARET SMITH, ADAM SMITH’S MOTHER

  27. One of Smith’s first acts upon moving to Edinburgh with his mother and cousin was to commission this portrait of his mother, then in her eighties. It is said to be by Conrad Metz, a visiting artist, and has remained in her family’s possession ever since. She remained a formidable social presence for the rest of her life, one of Smith’s old pupils declaring that the best route to Smith’s favour was via his philosophy and his mother. Margaret Smith died in 1784.

  ADAM SMITH, COMMISSIONER OF CUSTOMS