ABSTRACT
There is a great deal that I find to treasure and admire in Economic Sentiments aside from its second chapter, but let me stick with that for a moment, since it gives me the opportunity to respond to certain complaints I’ve heard about the book as a whole. I believe I was originally led to Rothschild’s 1992 article by the bibliography in Jerry Muller’s book on Adam Smith. Muller, however, felt compelled to add that the article ‘is marred by an image of Smith which is rather more radical than can legitimately be adduced from a balanced reading of his works’ (Muller 1993: 260-1). Now Muller has a somewhat conservative ‘take’ on Smith, but I have heard similar complaints from people whose own politics are closer to Rothschild’s own. The complaints mystify me, frankly, and this panel seems to me a good place to ask whether someone might help explain them. For it has always seemed to me that Professor Rothschild’s argument about Smith’s reception is a model of historical responsibility. In the first place, the image of Smith she presents – as sceptical of conventional religion, supportive of the rights of the poor and suspicious of war – seems hard to quarrel with. (I’ll come back to this in a moment.) Second, to make her claims about Smith’s initial reception – that at
his death he was disliked by defenders of conventional religious beliefs and embraced by friends of the early French Revolution – she draws on a multitude of sources, including newspaper obituaries for Smith, which do indeed support her claims. Third, she fully allows that both what we might call, in retrospect, the ‘rightwing’ uses of Smith in the 1790s (William Pitt’s, for instance, in the debates over wage rates and poor relief) and what we might call the ‘leftwing’ uses (Samuel Whitbread’s, for instance, in those same debates) were legitimately able to draw on elements in Smith’s texts;1 far from reading a ‘radical’ image of Smith into his texts, she emphasizes the ambiguity of WN, in relation to later debates. Finally, she is careful to provide what philosophers call an ‘error theory’ for why Smith’s later admirers might have seriously misunderstood him. If you want to say that a person is making a grave error about something that should be obvious, it is not enough just to give evidence that he or she is wrong; you also want to account for how a rational person could have made such a mistake. And if Smith was a great champion of the poor but came to be seen, by 1800, as indistinguishable from the Edmund Burke of the ‘Thoughts on Scarcity’ (Rothschild 2001: 64),2 then a lot of people have made an enormous error about him. How might that have come about? Rothschild answers that question with a brilliant account of why, when Dugald Stewart produced the memoir that more than anything else defined the later view of Smith, he had strong political reasons to present as conservative a Smith as possible.
