Nicholas Phillipson
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39. LJ, p. 492.
40. LJ, pp. 493–4.
41. LJ, pp. 347–8.
42. Stewart, p. 300.
43. LJ, p. 494. Cf. LJ, pp. 355–6.
44. Scott, p. 151.
45. Corr., p. 9.
46. Corr., p. 69.
Notes on Sources
On the bibliographical history of the Theory of Moral Sentiments see A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith, edited by K. Tribe; on its reception see the useful anthology On Moral Sentiments. Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith, edited by J. Reeder. On the subsequent career of Smith’s pupil Thomas Petty Fitzmaurice, see L.B. Namier and J. Brooke, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790.
On the development of Smith’s political economy see R.L. Meek and A.S. Skinner’s classic ‘The Development of Adam Smith’s Ideas on the Division of Labour’, reprinted in Skinner’s A System of Social Science: Papers Relating to Adam Smith.
On Smith’s state of health and the interesting suggestion that the effects of overwork were complicated by hypochondria see M. Barfoot’s ‘Dr William Cullen and Mr Adam Smith: A Case of Hypochondriasis’.
9. SMITH AND THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH IN EUROPE 1764–6
1. Corr., p. 36.
2. Carlyle, Anecdotes and Characters, p. 199.
3. The list of books is given in Corr., p. 58.
4. Corr., pp. 95–6.
5. Tytler, Memories of the Life and Writings of … Henry Home of Kames, vol. i, pp. 272–3n.
6. Stewart, pp. 306–7.
7. Quoted in Bonnyman, ‘Agricultural Improvement in the Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 61.
8. According to Carlyle, when Townshend proposed giving Hallam a pension of £100 to compensate for losing his pupil, Buccleuch replied, ‘No … it is my desire that Hallam may have as much as Smith, it being a Great Mortification to him, That he is not to Travel with me’ Carlyle, Anecdotes and Characters, p. 142n.
9. Carlyle, ibid. Dalrymple’s comment was made to Horace Walpole: Ross, pp. 195–6.
10. D. Hume–Comtesse de Boufflers, 15 July 1766, Hume, Letters of David Hume, vol. ii, p. 63.
11. Quoted in Ross, ‘Educating an Eighteenth-Century Duke’, in The Scottish Tradition: Essays in Honour of R.G. Cant, p. 185.
12. Ibid., p. 184.
13. Quoted in Taillefer, Vivre à Toulouse sous l’Ancien Régime, p. 341.
14. WN, p. 726.
15. TMS, p. 120.
16. Taillefer, Vivre à Toulouse, p. 201; Godechot, La Revolution Française dans le Midi Toulousain, ch. 1; Schneider, The Ceremonial City. Toulouse Observed 1738–1780, ch. 1.
17. Corr., pp. 101–2; Ross, ‘Educating an Eighteenth-Century Duke’, pp. 178–97; Bonnyman, ‘Agricultural Improvement in the Scottish Enlightenment’, ch. 2.
18. Corr., pp. 102–3.
19. Ross, pp. 207–9.
20. Clayden, Early Life of Samuel Rogers, p. 95.
21. Faujas Saint Fond, Travels in England, Scotland, and the Hebrides, vol. ii, p. 241.
22. Ross, ‘Educating an Eighteenth-Century Duke’, p. 183.
23. Corr., p. 97.
24. Corr., p. 108.
25. Hume, Letters of David Hume, vol. i, p. 524. A change of ministry deprived Hertford of his post but not before securing a pension of £400 for life for Hume. Mossner, Life of David Hume, pp. 493–4.
26. Quoted in Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of his Day, p. 286.
27. Rae, p. 199.
28. Stewart, pp. 302–3.
29. Rae, p. 197.
30. ‘Etat des habits linge et effet apartenant a Monsieur Smith’, Scott, pp. 261–2.
31. Ross, pp. 213–14.
32. WN, p. 467.
33. Ross, p. 214.
34. The full title of Mirabeau’s Rural Philosophy is Philosophie rurale, ou économie générale et politique de l’agriculture, réduite à l’ordre immuable, des lois physiques & morales qui assurent la prospérité des empires. The full title of Quesnay’s book is Physiocratie, ou constitution naturelle du gouvernement le plus avantageux au genre humain.
35. The copy of Physiocratie that Quesnay presented to Smith is listed in Mizuta, Adam Smith’s Library, no. 1388.
36. WN, p. 679.
37. Corr., p. 113.
38. WN, p. 678.
39. Stewart, p. 304.
40. Hume, Letters of David Hume, vol. ii, p. 205.
41. WN, pp. 663–4.
42. I am indebted to Istvan Hont’s discussion of the économistes’ project in Jealousy of Trade, esp. ch. 5.
43. WN, p. 665.
44. WN, p. 673.
45. WN, p. 674.
46. WN, p. 380. Hont, Jealousy of Trade, pp. 189–92, 368–72.
47. ‘An Extract from Rural Philosophy (1763)’, in Meek, ed., Precursors of Adam Smith, p. 111.
48. Corr., p. 118.
49. Corr., pp. 114–16.
50. Corr., p. 121.
51. Corr., p. 121. It is not known to whom this letter was addressed. Ross suggests Lady Frances Scott; David Raynor more plausibly suggests Townshend, Campbell Scott’s stepfather.
Notes on Sources
Stewart, Ross and Rae deal pretty fully with Smith and Buccleuch’s tour. On the physiocrats, see Dugald Stewart’s influential discussion of the significance of their thought for Smith in Stewart, pp. 339–48, R.L. Meek’s Precursors of Adam Smith and T.J. Hochstrasser’s, ‘Physiocracy and the Politics of Laissez-faire’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by M. Goldie and R. Wokler. See also two important recent discussions of the historical contexts in which their theory was developed: Hont’s Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective and M. Sonenscher’s Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution.
10. LONDON, KIRKCALDY AND THE MAKING OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS 1766–76
1. Bonnyman, ‘Agricultural Improvement in the Scottish Enlightenment’, ch. 1.
2. Corr., pp. 328–34, esp. notes 1–2.
3. Campbell and Skinner, pp. 139–40.
4. Corr., pp. 122–4.
5. Corr., p. 252.
6. Corr., p. 125.
7. Rae, pp. 259–60.
8. Corr., pp. 155–6. On an earlier visit to Kirkcaldy to visit James Oswald, Hume had written of crossing the Firth of Forth, ‘Oh that horrid sea-sickness! Are there no chairs from the ferry to your house?’ Hume, Letters of David Hume, vol. ii, p. 95.
9. Carlyle, Anecdotes and Characters, p. 250.
10. Stuart, Memoire of Frances, Lady Douglas, pp. 52–3. I am grateful to David Raynor for this reference.
11. Bonnyman, ‘Agricultural Improvement in the Scottish Enlightenment’, p. 225.
12. Corr., pp. 156, 180.
13. Corr., p. 140.
14. WN, p. 678.
15. WN, pp. 312, 299.
16. Hamilton, ‘The Failure of the Ayr Bank’.
17. WN, pp. 316–17.
18. Corr., pp. 162–3.
19. Corr., pp. 163–4.
20. Corr., p. 168.
21. Boswell: The Ominous Years, p. 264.
22. The Bee or Literary Weekly Intelligencer, iii (11 May 1791).
23. Corr., pp. 173–9; ‘get my lug in my lufe’ means ‘I’ll get my ears boxed’.
24. Corr., p. 186.
25. Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, pp. 360–61.
26. WN, p. 614. cf. p. 630.
27. ‘Smith’s Thoughts on the State of the Contest with America, February 1778’, Corr., pp. 376–85. It was first published by G.H. Gutteridge in American Historical Review, vol. xxxviii, 1933, pp. 714–20.
28. WN, p. 617.
29. WN, p. 616.
Notes on Sources
Ross, Rae and Campbell and Skinner deal reasonably fully with this period. B.D. Bonnyman’s PhD thesis, ‘Agricultural Improvement in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Third Duke of Buccleuch, William Keir and the Buccleuch Estates
, 1751–1812’, raises important questions about Smith’s involvement in the reorganization of the Buccleuch estates in Scotland and calls attention to a neglected aspect of Smith’s career.
11. THE WEALTH OF NATIONS AND SMITH’S ‘VERY VIOLENT ATTACK … UPON THE WHOLE COMMERCIAL SYSTEM OF GREAT BRITAIN’
1. There were notices and reviews in the Annual Register, the Monthly Review, the Critical Review, the London Magazine, the Scots Magazine, the Edinburgh Weekly Magazine and the Hibernian Magazine (Ross, p. 429).
2. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book, pp. 236–7.
3. Corr., pp. 192, 190, 188.
4. Stewart, p. 310. See also Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment, pp. 57–61.
5. Stewart, pp. 309–10.
6. WN, pp. 26–7, 138, 715.
7. Hume, Letters of David Hume, vol. ii, p. 205.
8. WN, p. 49.
9. WN, pp. 265–7.
10. WN, p. 276n.
11. WN, p. 283.
12. WN, p. 291.
13. WN, pp. 341–2.
14. WN, pp. 345–6.
15. WN, p. 377.
16. WN, pp. 378, 380.
17. WN, p. 380.
18. WN, pp. 49, 429, 449–50.
19. WN, pp. 434–5.
20. WN, p. 570.
21. WN, p. 493.
22. WN, p. 572.
23. WN, p. 580.
24. WN, pp. 604–5.
25. A Letter from Governor Pownall to Adam Smith, L.L.D. F.R.S., being an Examination of Several Points of Doctrine, laid down in his ‘Inquiry in to the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ (London 1776). Reprinted in Corr., pp. 337–76; quote from p. 369.
26. WN, p. 456.
27. WN, p. 471.
28. WN, p. 687.
29. WN, p. 706.
30. WN, p. 715.
31. WN, p. 731.
32. WN, p. 764.
33. WN, p. 796.
34. WN, p. 788.
35. WN, p. 810.
36. WN, pp. 796–7.
37. WN, p. 830.
38. WN, p. 924.
39. WN, p. 911.
40. Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, pp. 360–61.
41. WN, pp. 944–7.
Notes on Sources
Much attention has been paid by recent historians of ideas and intellectual historians to the problem of setting the Wealth of Nations in its historical context. For the present writer, the first great attempt to do this was Duncan Forbes’ historic ‘Scientific Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, and R. L. Meek’s ‘The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology’ in his Economics and Ideology and Other Essays. Forbes’ pioneering essay was written before the notes on Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence of 1762–3 had been published and D. Winch’s Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision was the first substantial attempt to consider their significance for a historical understanding of the Wealth of Nations. The range of the discussion was broadened by K. Haakonssen’s The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith and complicated by Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by I. Hont and M. Ignatieff. More recently, Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment and Hont’s Jealousy of Trade have addressed the problem of setting Smith’s political economy in wider European contexts; the present discussion is much indebted to both.
For those who prefer to read the Wealth of Nations as a work of philosophy, S. Fleischacker’s On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion is to be recommended.
12. HUME’S DEATH
1. Corr., pp. 187–90.
2. Corr., pp. 192–3.
3. Corr., pp. 193–4.
4. Quoted in Ross, pp. 291–2.
5. Corr., pp. 186–7.
6. Corr., pp. 185–6.
7. Corr., pp. 190–91.
8. Corr., pp. 216–17.
9. Corr., p. 206.
10. Corr., pp. 194–5.
11. Corr., p. 208.
12. Corr., pp. 210–12.
13. Corr., p. 203.
14. Corr., p. 216.
15. Corr., p. 206.
16. Corr., pp. 217–21.
17. Corr., pp. 203–4.
18. Cited in Rae, pp. 312–13. See also Aston, ‘Horne and Heterodoxy: The Defence of Anglican Beliefs in the Late Enlightenment’.
19. Allardyce, ed., Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, pp. 466–7.
20. Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778, pp. 270–71.
21. Corr., p. 251.
22. Corr., pp. 223–4. Edmund Curll was a notorious hack biographer of the previous generation.
23. Cited in Ross, p. 302.
24. Hume, ‘Of Tragedy’, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, p. 220.
25. ‘Of the Imitative Arts’, EPS, p. 176.
26. ‘Of the Imitative Arts’, EPS, pp. 178–9.
27. ‘Of the Imitative Arts’, EPS, p. 178.
28. ‘Of the Imitative Arts’, EPS, p. 187.
29. ‘Of the Imitative Arts’, EPS, p. 209.
30. ‘Of the Imitative Arts’, EPS, p. 192.
31. ‘Of the Imitative Arts’, EPS, p. 194.
32. ‘Of the Imitative Arts’, EPS, p. 204.
33. ‘Of the Imitative Arts’, EPS, p. 205.
34. Ross, p. 380.
35. Corr., p. 227.
36. Corr., pp. 190, 213.
37. Corr., pp. 227–8.
38. Corr., p. 228.
39. Corr., pp. 252–3.
Notes on Sources
Rae and Ross write well about this episode in Smith’s life. On the other hand, Smith’s work on aesthetics and the imitative arts has been almost completely ignored. For two alternative approaches to these essays see P. Jones, ‘The Aesthetics of Adam Smith’, in Adam Smith Reviewed, edited by Jones and A.S. Skinner, and N. De Marchi’s ‘Smith on Ingenuity, Pleasure, and the Imitative Arts’, in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith.
13. LAST YEARS IN EDINBURGH 1778–90
1. Corr., pp. 193, 190.
2. Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh 1750–1840, pp. 61–5. The bridge collapsed in 1769, less than two years after it had been opened. This, together with its length and the Edinburgh winds, discouraged many old-town residents from settling in a suburb which now seemed perilously far from the centre of public life.
3. I am very grateful to Anthony Lewis for valuable information drawn from Edinburgh City Archives for help on this point.
4. Rae, pp. 326–7.
5. John Brewer has a memorable account of the London Customs House at work in The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783, pp. 211–17.
6. Thompson, ed., The Anecdotes and Egotisms of Henry Mackenzie, 1745–1831, pp. 91–2.
7. Campbell and Skinner, pp. 200–2.
8. Henry Dundas–Lords of Treasury, 2 November 1782, NLS, Melville MSS/Acc2761.
9. Ross, pp. 332–3.
10. Corr., pp. 249–50.
11. Thompson, Anecdotes and Egotisms of Henry Mackenzie, p. 124. There is a reasonably reliable history of the club in McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement, pp. 168–70.
12. Playfair, ‘Biographical Account of James Hutton …’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, (1797) vol. v., pp. 117, 112.
13. Stewart, p. 331.
14. [Kay], A Series of Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings by the late John Kay, vol. i, pp. 72–5.
15. [Scott], The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., p. 840.
16. EUL. MSS. La. II, 451–2, ff. 429–34.
17. Corr., p. 253.
18. Ross, p. 351.
19. Corr., p. 287.
20. ‘Henry Mackenzie’s Book of Anecdotes’, NLS MS 2537. Quoted in Ross, p. 343.
21. Allardyce, ed., Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, p. 468.
22. Corr., pp. 275–6.
23. [Walpole], The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, vol. xii, p. 252.
24. Corr., p. 269.
25. Corr., p. 266.
26. Corr., p. 266.
27. WN, p. 654.
28. WN, p. 744.
29. WN, p. 733.
30. WN, p. 754.
31. WN, p. 752.
32. WN, p. 755.
33. Tribe, ed., A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith, pp. 19–20.
34. Corr., pp. 280–81.
35. Corr., p. 281.
36. Corr., pp. 308–9.
37. Quoted in Ross, p. 374.
38. The story first appears in [Kay], A Series of Original Portraits … by the late John Kay, vol. i, pp. 74–5.
39. Cited in Ross, p. 376.
40. The Bee or Literary Weekly Intelligencer, iii (11 May 1791), p. 166.
41. Corr., pp. 308–9.
42. Corr., pp. 310–11.
43. Corr., p. 320.
44. The Bee or Literary Weekly Intelligencer, iii (11 May 1791), p. 166.
45. [Reid], The Correspondence of Thomas Reid, p. 104.
46. TMS, p. 216.
47. TMS, p. 216.
48. TMS, p. 229.
49. TMS, pp. 232–3.
50. TMS, p. 237.
51. Romilly, Memoirs, vol. i, p. 403.
52. Ibid.
53. Stewart’s account of Smith’s character concludes his biographical memoir. Stewart, pp. 329–32.
Notes on Sources
Rae and Ross are essential reading. D.D. Raphael’s introduction to the Glasgow edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments provides the most thorough and thoughtful discussion of Smith’s amendments, although its conclusions are somewhat different to those proposed here.
EPILOGUE
1. TMS, p. 3.
2. The Bee or Literary Weekly Intelligencer, iii (11 May 1791), p. 167.
3. Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review 1802–1832, p. 47. See also Collini et al., That Noble Science of Politics. A Study in Nineteenth-century Intellectual History, esp. ch. 1.
4. ‘The Principles which lead and direct Philosophical Enquiries; illustrated by the History of Astronomy’, in EPS, pp. 31–105.
5. Ibid., p. 46.
6. Ibid., pp. 104–5.
Bibliography of Works Cited
Aarsleff, H., The Study of Language in England 1780–1860 (Princeton, 1967).
Allardyce, A. (ed.), Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century: From the MSS of John Ramsay, Esq. of Ochtertyre, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1888).