We have mentioned that one of the Moderates’ heroes was Francis Hutcheson. Another, at least by 1759, was Hutcheson’s former pupil Adam Smith. His early lectures given in Edinburgh at the behest of Lord Kames heavily influenced their notion of poetry and literature, or belles lettres, as a cultural bellwether, and of clear, elegant English as the best vehicle for modern literary communication (the model Smith himself had proposed was Jonathan Swift). They were also impressed by his Theory of Moral Sentiments, which reworked Hutcheson’s theory of an innate moral sense. William Robertson used Smith’s lectures on natural law and the four-stage theory of civil society for his own history of Europe—so much so that Smith privately accused him of plagiarism!
All this shows that long before he published his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith was a prominent and influential figure in Edinburgh circles. He attended the meetings of the Select Society and the Poker Club, and went to the dinner parties of even nonintellectual citizens. As a guest he could be trying. He rarely spoke, but when he did, it was usually at great length. Alexander Carlyle remembered Adam Smith as “the most absent man in Company that I ever saw, Moving his Lips and talking to himself, and Smiling, in the midst of large Company’s.” Once, when he had started on a long harangue criticizing a leading Scottish politician, someone discreetly pointed out that the man’s closest relative was also sitting at the table. “Deil care, deil care,” Smith muttered, “it’s all true.”
II
Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, just across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh, in 1723. His father, Adam Smith, Sr., was trained in the law, and served as a customs inspector in Kirkcaldy. It was not a cushy job. One of the unforeseen results of the Treaty of Union had been a huge increase in smuggling along Scotland’s coasts. His father’s frustrations in trying to intercept the operations of local smugglers, most of whom were otherwise law-abiding citizens and merchants, were an early lesson for the younger Adam Smith in how human ingenuity will find a way to defy government rules and regulations, such as customs tariffs, when they fly in the face of self-interest. Here is how Smith would put it in his Wealth of Nations, almost fifty years later: “The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition . . . is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often incumbers its operations.”
Words that have made every socialist, and every liberal of an altruistic Hutcheson mold, gnash his teeth! But the truth is that it was Adam Smith who snatched Hutcheson from the burning embers to which the skeptic David Hume had consigned him, and who tried to find a way to keep the idea that human beings have an inborn moral sense, and natural regard for others, alive as a basic principle of human nature. We usually think of Adam Smith as an economist, and the founder of the study of political economy, or “the dismal science”—and there certainly are pages of Wealth of Nations that are dismal. But Adam Smith thought of himself primarily as a moral philosopher, and almost all his studies came down to answering the basic questions Hutcheson had raised. Why are human beings on average good rather than bad? Why do they choose (on the whole) to lead constructive lives, getting up in the morning to go to work and raise a family and build relationships with other human beings, instead of (on the whole) murdering and plundering them?
The answers Smith came with up were different from Hutcheson’s, because by now he had to confront the challenge of Lord Kames’s cynical realism and that of his disciple, David Hume. In many ways Smith is the fusion of the two sides of the Enlightenment, the “soft” side represented by Hutcheson—with its belief in man’s innate goodness, its faith in the power of education to enlighten and liberate, and its appeal to nature—and the “hard” side represented by Kames and Hume, with its cool, skeptical distrust of human intentions and motives. A fusion, but also a tension runs all through Smith’s work, a tension that is never fully resolved. It is the tension that runs through all of modern life and culture, in fact—a tension between what human beings ought to be, and occasionally are, and what they really are, and generally remain. Smith’s great achievement was to have the courage to confront that tension head-on, to describe it and analyze it, and then leave it to others in the future to understand it in their own way. It is this, not his role as the supposed high priest of capitalism, that has made him one of the great modern thinkers, and makes him still important to us today.
Adam Smith was a man of thought and contemplation rather than action. He almost became a minister, although he was never ordained. He should have been a lawyer, like his father, but when he went to the University of Glasgow in 1737, he fell instead under the spell of Francis Hutcheson. At Glasgow, Smith absorbed the twin traditions of Scottish learning, the study of natural and civil law, and afterwards wrote brilliant and influential lectures on both. In every respect his education was Scottish; all the leading influences on his thought were entirely Scottish-based. Although he did go to England to study at Oxford for seven years, he found nothing of value there. He summed up his experience there in his description of the average university as a “sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection, after they have been hunted out of every other corner of the world.”
Yet Smith did not hesitate to use Scottish universities as a base for his work and activities. His public lectures in Edinburgh in 1750 and 1751 earned him enough of a reputation to bring him back to Glasgow as professor of logic, and then as Hutcheson’s successor to the Chair of Moral Philosophy. At first Smith tried to emulate the informal, animated lecture style of his great teacher, but he soon gave up and resigned himself to reading his notes aloud from his desk. What drew students was not Smith’s style, but the substance of his lectures, which were nothing less than an attempt to fulfill the great project Hutcheson had envisioned decades before, of creating a science of human behavior as coherent and irrefutable as the physical science of Isaac Newton. It would begin with a “natural history of man as a political agent” and end with “the general principles of municipal law, political oeconomy, and the law of nations.” This would have been a daunting task in any case, but by 1755 it was even more so, because now Smith, like everyone else, had to work under the shadow of David Hume.
If Adam Smith is the first great modern economist, then David Hume is modernity’s first great philosopher. His literally unorthodox views made him a legend in his own time. One day, after he had bought his house in Edinburgh’s New Town, he was going home by taking a shortcut across the deep bog left by the draining of the North Loch. As he walked along the treacherous and narrow path, he slipped and fell into the bog. Unable to extricate himself, he began calling for help as darkness started to fall. An old woman, an Edinburgh fishwife, stopped, but when she looked down and recognized him as “David Hume the Atheist,” she refused to help him out. Hume pleaded with her and asked her if her religion did not teach her to do good, even to her enemies. “That may well be,” she replied, “but ye shall na get out o’ that, till ye become a Christian yoursell: and repeat the Lord’s Prayer and the Belief [i.e., the Apostolic Creed].” To her amazement, Hume proceeded to do just that, whereupon, true to her word, the old lady reached down and pulled him out.
The story reveals a great deal about Hume the man: his self-deprecating sense of humor (the story comes out of one of Hume’s letters); his keen awareness of the clash of cultures in the meeting between the philosopher and the fishwife; but above all his awareness, even relish, of his status as an outsider, even within his own country and city. It was not just Hume’s religious views that made him the outsider and renegade, however. For more than two thousand years Western philosophers had praised the primacy of reason as the guide to all human action and virtue. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, and even Hutcheson could all agree with that great time-hon
ored consensus, that the job of reason was to master our emotions and appetites. With one earth-shaking book, his first, Hume reversed this. “Reason is,” he wrote, “and ought to be, the slave of the passions.”
That “ought to be” stood two thousand years of philosophy on its head. Hume quietly pointed out that human beings are not, and never have been, governed by their rational capacities. Reason’s role is purely instrumental: it teaches us how to get what we want. What we want is determined by our emotions, our passions—anger, lust, fear, grief, envy, but also joy, love of fame, love of contentedness, and, paradoxically, our desire to live according to rational principles—or in the last case, to recognize the dictates of necessity and act accordingly. It is not reason, however, that teaches us this, but habit, a frame of mind that associates certain effects with certain causes or actions. We are, in the end, creatures of habit, and of the physical and social environment within which our emotions and passions must operate. We learn to avoid the passions that destroy, and pursue the ones that succeed—in order to get what we consider our just desserts, and gratify our self-interest.
A Treatise of Human Nature appeared in 1734, when Hume was only twenty-six. Yet it contained the seeds of almost everything he would write for the next forty years, and the seeds of a new philosophic outlook for the West. Other thinkers, of course, had recognized the importance of self-interest in human affairs. Lord Kames, as founder of the civil society school, had stressed its paramount role in the creation and formation of all social ties. But Hume carried this to a new level.
For Hume, self-interest is all there is. The overriding guiding force in all our actions is not our reason, or our sense of obligation toward others, or any innate moral sense—all these are simply formed out of habit and experience—but the most basic human passion of all, the desire for self-gratification. It is the one thing human beings have in common. It is also the necessary starting point of any system of morality, and of any system of government.
If Hume had made a dog’s breakfast of Hutcheson’s moral theories (Hutcheson was horrified when he first read the Treatise, and did what he could to prevent Hume from getting a university appointment), he gave a similar disturbing twist to the question Lord Kames had started out with: Why does society exist? He agreed with his mentor that it was there to protect property. But Hume also pointed out that we are surrounded by a seething, crawling cesspool of passions, our own as well as those of others. Left to ourselves, with no external constraints, the result would be a murderous chaos—Hume certainly saw Hobbes’s view of man’s natural depraved state as more realistic than Hutcheson’s more exalted vision. Yet no society, even the best organized, can possibly police each and every outbreak of self-gratification at the expense of others. There aren’t enough minutes in the day. Any appeal to reason is hopeless, since “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions”: and the passions are the root of the problem.
So, in order to survive, Hume concluded, society has to devise strategies to channel our passions in constructive directions. Through social rules and conventions and customs, internalized by its members and made into regular habits, it turns what might be socially destructive impulses into socially useful ones. The passion of lust becomes licit within the confines of marriage—which not only prevents social discord, but actually helps to propagate the society’s members. Anger and bloodlust are rightly condemned as socially disruptive—that is, unless they are unleashed on the battlefield against society’s enemies.
The passion of avidity could, if left without limits, destroy all social bonds, as each member of society robs and plunders his neighbors, and is plundered in turn. However, canalizing that desire and pushing it in a constructive direction makes it work to the benefit of society. Instead of robbing a bank, why not open one? One can make more money with less work and stress, and help his neighbors at the same time. In short, the passion of avidity becomes socialized—“refined” as William Robertson might say—and generates a sense of property. We can have what we want, when we want it, society tells us, just as long as we do not take it at the expense of the rights of others.
“There is no passion, therefore,” Hume concluded, “capable of controlling the interested affection but the very affection itself, by an alteration of its direction.” And he went further: “Men are not able radically to cure either in themselves or others that narrowness of soul which makes them prefer the present to the remote,” or, in other words, the short-term to the long-term. Men cannot change their nature. All they can do is create social and political arrangements that “render the observation of justice the immediate interest of some particular person, and its violation their more remote.” Hence the origin of government, and hence the best possible social framework within which human beings can operate, based on a secular Golden Rule: I won’t disturb your self-interest, if you don’t disturb mine.
This is the best we can hope for, in a world in which men are governed by self-interest, and “even when they extend their concern beyond themselves, it is not to any great distance”; in which morality is largely a matter of convention and ingrained habit; in which the laws of nature offer nothing to help, and appeals to reason fall on deaf ears; and with an empty sky above, devoid of divine guidance or even a supernatural presence. This world offers a form of liberty—the freedom to pursue one’s own self-interest—and a form of authority: the power of the magistrate “to punish transgressors, to correct fraud and violence, and to oblige men, however reluctant, to consult their own real and permanent [long-term] interests.” But, Hume had to conclude, there is nothing particularly exalted, or inspiring, about the nature of civil society.
What did his contemporaries make of all this? A large part of the response to Hume was, very understandably, negative. It comes as no great surprise that Hutcheson was horrified, or that the Kirk’s General Assembly tried to have him censured, or that he failed to get a university appointment not once but twice. But much of the response was respectful, and at times slightly celebratory, even among those, such as Edinburgh’s literati, who were deeply disturbed by the implications of Hume’s philosophy. This was not explained merely by his affable personality, which made him a popular guest at dinner parties and club meetings, or his elegant command of written English (although he always spoke it with a heavy Scottish burr). It arose from his own confidence in the future of civil society, which seems strange given its less-than-noble origins, and from his optimism about modern commercial society in particular.
The work that made him a major figure in British letters was his collection of Political Discourses, which Andrew Millar published in London in 1752, followed by other collections and reissues of earlier essays over the next half-decade. In them, Hume pointed out what seemed to him obvious: society’s effort to canalize human being’s passions into constructive channels does work; we do learn from past failures and manage over time to improve how government works and how it administers justice and protects civil rights. The whole growth of the British constitution from feudal despotism to modern liberty was proof of this. History revealed to Hume a growth of human industry and cooperation over time, as well as a growth of personal liberty of the sort Hutcheson and others celebrated. And central to it was the role of commerce, as the great engine of change:
It rouses men from their indolence; and presenting the gayer and more opulent part of the nation with objects of luxury, which they never have dreamed of, raises in them a desire of a more splendid way of life than what their ancestors enjoyed. . . . Imitation soon diffuses all these arts; while domestic manufactures emulate the foreign in their improvements. . . . Their own steel and iron, in such laborious hands, become the equal to the gold and rubies of the INDIES.
Commerce and liberty; liberty and refinement; refinement and the progress of the human spirit were all interrelated. And every Scottish Whig could applaud Hume’s statement that “it is impossible for the arts and sciences to arise, at first, among any people unless that pe
ople enjoy the blessing of a free government.”
But Hume also threw out a warning. Liberty was a fine thing, but it required a counterbalancing principle—something to remind us that human beings are creatures of their passions and that, left entirely to themselves, they become their passions’ slaves. Jacobites and Tories had had a point: no society can survive without some stable center of authority. The power of government is needed to redirect those potentially destructive passions, to “punish transgressors,” and ultimately to preserve the conditions under which liberty can be enjoyed. “In all governments,” Hume wrote, “there is a perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between Authority and Liberty, and neither of them can ever absolutely prevail in the contest.”
Politics in modern society, then, must involve a tension between two conflicting, but complementary principles: liberty, which preserves individuals, and authority, which preserves society. Authority that is absolute and uncontrolled ends by destroying society itself; Hume foresaw what the history of totalitarianism would teach the rest of us. But he also realized that even in the freest society, “a great sacrifice of liberty” has to be made to authority, which, he wrote, “must be acknowledged essential to its very existence.”
How much of a sacrifice is, of course, the key question, for eighteenth-century Britons as well as for us. Hume never quite answered it, although he did, in his essays and his History of England, explore the conditions under which the question can be posed. However, it may be that Hume thought there was no real answer. He may have simply decided that the struggle is perpetual, and that we only realize we have gone too far when it is already too late.
How the Scots Invented the Modern World Page 23
