The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition
Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, on the east coast of Scotland, in 1723. After attending the Burgh School, Smith proceeded to Glasgow University (1737–40) where he studied under Francis Hutcheson. Thereafter he took up a Snell Exhibition in Balliol College, Oxford (1740–6). In 1748 Henry Home (Lord Kames) sponsored a course of public lectures on rhetoric and Smith was appointed to deliver them. The course was successful and led, in 1751, to Smith’s election to the chair of logic in Glasgow University where he lectured on language and on the communication of ideas. In 1752 Smith was transferred to the chair of moral philosophy where he continued his teaching in logic, but extended the range to include natural theology, ethics, jurisprudence and economics.
Smith’s most important publications in this period, apart from two contributions to the Edinburgh Review (1755–6), were the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, later editions, 1761, 1767, 1774, 1781, 1790) and the Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages (1761).
The Theory of Moral Sentiments served to draw Smith to the attention of Charles Townsend and was to lead to his appointment as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch in 1764, whereupon he resigned his chair. The years 1764–6 were spent in France, first in Bordeaux and later in Paris, where Smith arrived after a tour of Geneva and a meeting with Voltaire. The party settled in Paris late in 1765 where Smith met the leading philosophes. Of especial significance were his contacts with the French economists, or Physiocrats, notably Quesnay and Turgot, who had already developed a sophisticated macroeconomic model for a capital using system.
Smith returned to London in 1766, and to Kirkcaldy in the following year. The next six years were spent at home working on his major book, which was completed after a further three years in London (1773–6). The basis of Smith’s continuing fame, An Inquiry into the Mature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, was published on 9 March 1776. It was an immediate success and later editions (of which the third is the most important) appeared in 1778, 1784, 1786 and 1789.
In 1778 Smith was appointed Commissioner of Customs and of the Salt Duties, posts which brought an additional income of £600 per annum (to be added to the continuing pension of £300 from Buccleuch) and which caused Smith to remove his household to Edinburgh (where his mother died in 1784). Adam Smith himself died, unmarried, on 17 July 1790 after ensuring that his literary executors, Joseph Black and James Hutton, had burned all his manuscripts with the exception of those which were published under the tide of Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795). He did not complete his intended account of ‘the general principles of law and government’, although generous traces of the argument survive in the lecture notes.
The broad structure of the argument on which Smith based his system of social sciences may be established by following the order of Smith’s lectures from the chair of moral philosophy. The ethical argument is contained in Theory of Moral Sentiments and stands in the broad tradition of Hutcheson and Hume. Smith was concerned, in large measure, to explain the way in which the mind forms judgements as to what is fit and proper to be done or to be avoided. He argued that people form such judgements by visualizing how they would behave in the circumstances confronting another person or how an imagined or ‘ideal’ spectator might react to their actions or expressions of feeling in a given situation. A capacity to form judgements on particular occasions leads in turn to the emergence of general rules of conduct which correct the natural partiality for self. In particular Smith argued that those rules of behaviour which related to justice constitute the ‘main pillar which upholds the whole edifice’ of society.
Smith recognized that rules of behaviour would vary in different communities at the same point in time as well as over time, and addressed himself to this problem in the lectures on jurisprudence. In dealing with ‘private law’ such as that which relates to life, liberty or property, Smith deployed the analysis of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in explaining the origin of particular rules in the context of four socioeconomic stages—those of hunting, pasture, agriculture and commerce. In the lectures on ‘public’ jurisprudence he paid particular attention to the transition from the feudal-agrarian state to that of commerce; that is, to the emergence of the exchange economy and the substitution of a cash for a service nexus.
The economic analysis which completed the sequence and which culminated in the Wealth of Nations is predicated upon a system of justice and takes as given the point that self-regarding actions have a social reference. In fact the most complete statement of the psychology on which the Wealth of Nations relies is to be found in Part VI of The Theory of Moral Sentiments which was added in 1790.
The formal analysis of the Wealth of Nations begins with an account of the division of labour and of the phenomenon of economic interdependence and then proceeds to the analysis of price, the allocation of resources and the treatment of distribution. Building on the equilibrium analysis of Book I, the second book develops a version of the Physiocratic model of the circular flow of income and output before proceeding to the analysis of the main theme of economic growth. Here, as throughout Smith’s work, the emphasis is upon the unintended consequences of individual activity and leads directly to the policy prescriptions with which Smith is most commonly associated: namely, the call for economic liberty and the dismantling of all impediments, especially mercantilist impediments, to individual effort.
Yet Smith’s liberalism can be exaggerated. In addition to such necessary functions as the provision of defence, justice and public works, Jacob Viner (1928) has shown that Smith saw a wide and elastic range of governmental activity.
The generally optimistic tone which Smith uses in discussing the performance of the modern economy has also to be qualified by reference to further links with the ethical and historical analyses. Smith gave a great deal of attention to the social consequences of the division of labour, emphasizing the problem of isolation, the breakdown of the family unit, and the mental mutilation (affecting the capacity for moral judgement) which follows from concentrating the mind on a restricted range of activities. If government has to act in this, as in other spheres, Smith noted that it would be constrained by the habits and prejudices of the governed. He observed further that the type of government often found in conjunction with the exchange or commercial economy would be subject to pressure from particular economic interests, thus limiting its efficiency, and, also, that the political sphere, like the economic, was a focus for the competitive pursuit of power and status.
A.S.Skinner
University of Glasgow
References
Smith, A. (1976 [1759]) Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L.Macfie.
——(1976 [1776]) Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H.Campbell, A. S.Skinner and W.B.Todd.
——(1977) Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E.C.Mossner and I.S.Ross. This includes: A Letter from Governor Pownall to Adam Smith (1776); Smith’s Thoughts on the State of the Contest with America (1778); Jeremy Bentham’s Letters to Adam Smith on Usury (1787; 1790).
——(1978) Lectures on jurisprudence, ed. R.L.Meek, D.D. Raphael and P.G.Stein. This includes two sets of students notes.
——(1980) Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W.P.D. Wightman: ‘The History of Astronomy’; ‘The History of the Ancient Physics’; ‘History of the Ancient Logics and Metaphysics’; ‘Of the External Senses’; ‘Of the Imitative Arts’; ‘Of the Affinity between Music, Dancing and Poetry’.
This also includes ‘Contributions to the Edinburgh Review’ (1755–6) and ‘Of the Affinity between certain English and Italian Verses’, ed. J.C.Bryce; Dugald Stewart, Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, ed. I.S.Ross.
——(1983) Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J.C.Bryce. This includes the Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages.
Viner, J. (1928) ‘Adam Smith and laissez faire’, in J.Hollander et al., Adam Smith, 1776–1926, Chicago.
Further reading
Campbell, T.D. (1971) Adam Smith’s Science of Morals, London.
Haakonssen, K. (1981) The Science of the Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith, Cambridge, UK.
Hollander, S. (1973) The Economics of Adam Smith, Toronto.
Lindgren, R. (1975) The Social Philosophy of Adam Smith, The Hague.
Macfie, A.L. (1967) The Individual in Society: Papers on Adam Smith, London.
O’Driscoll, G.P. (ed.) (1979) Adam Smith and Modern Political Economy, Iowa.
Rae, J. (1965 [1895]) Life of Adam Smith, London. (Reprinted with an introduction by J.Viner, New York.
Reisman, D.A. (1976) Adam Smith’s Sociological Economics, London.
Scott, W.R. (1937) Adam Smith as Student and Professor, Glasgow.
Skinner, A.S. and Wilson, T. (1975) Essays on Adam Smith, Oxford.
Winch, D. (1965) Classical Political Economy and the Colonies, London.
——(1978), Adam Smith’s Politics, Cambridge, UK.
See also: political economy; Scottish Enlightenment, social theory.
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