ABSTRACT
Nicholas Phillipson is widely regarded as – possibly – the leading historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. This biography ofAdam Smith was published by Penguin Books in the same year as the (slightly) revised version of his biography of David Hume, originally published in 1989. Although the biography of Smith is newer and longer, the physical appearance of the two books – medallions of their profiles and reproductions of their signatures in the titles – invites comparison between them. Whether or not this was the intention, such comparison is in fact illuminating. The volume on Hume is subtitled ‘The Philosopher as Historian’. The volume on Smith is subtitled ‘An Enlightened Life’. As it seems to me, the parallel between the two books could have been more striking if the second had been subtitled ‘The Economist as Philosopher’. This alternative subtitle, I think, would have given a better indication of what I judge to be the book’s distinctive value. The first problem for any biographer ofAdam Smith is this: is it in fact possible
to write an account of his life, as opposed to his thought? Smith published two very influential books that went into several editions in his lifetime. But he was a poor correspondent, did not keep a diary, and, before he died, oversaw the destruction of many papers, including unfinished manuscripts. If biography requires some insight into the psychological and emotional life of its subject, the prospects for a biography of Adam Smith are poor. There is almost no material to call on. Smith seems to have been sociable, and he certainly formed lasting friendships. Yet he preserved a nearly impenetrable personal privacy. Just what he felt, or believed, or hoped, loved or hated is virtually impossible to say with any degree of certainty. No sources have survived that would help us on these questions, probably because none ever existed. That leaves only two sources out of which biography can be constructed – what
he did and what he wrote. What he did – his career – is easily ascertained and well known but, in recounting his life and times, for the most part we have to be content with his times. On this score, Phillipson writes interestingly without the meticulous attention to detail that sometimes burdens Ian Ross’s definitive biography.We learn a lot about Kirkcaldy at the time Smith was born, Glasgow, both city and university, when he was a student, Oxford during the period he spent there, Edinburgh and Glasgow during his years as a professor, continental Europe during his employment
as a tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch, and Edinburgh again in his latter years. Since everyone must, to some extent, be influenced by the social circumstances in which they live, we can say something about Smith by implication. But it is all highly conjectural. This is no criticism of Phillipson. There simply is nothing else to do, and his social histories of these places are full of interest. Still, the book is subtitled an enlightened life. If we turn to what Smith thought, rather than his personal commitments, there
is more promising material. Even here, though, a significant amount of conjecture is required. Smith’s intellectual and academic career began with lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence that he gave in Edinburgh between 1748 and 1751 under the patronage of Lord Kames. It is highly plausible to suppose that these lectures established his reputation as an effective lecturer and thinker of substance since at the end of this period he was appointed to the Chair of Logic at Glasgow, and soon thereafter translated to the Chair of Moral Philosophy, a position that his teacher Hutcheson had filled with such distinction. But what of the lectures that led to these professorial appointments? We have no text, or even notice of them, so that it is impossible to say where they were held, who attended them, or how they were received. Still less, obviously, is it possible to say what they contained. Phillipson fills this gap by saying that ‘it is reasonable to suppose that the notes two students took of the course [he gave in Glasgow] in 1762-3 give a pretty fair guide to the essentials of a system of thought that had been developed in the 1740s’ (p. 92). Perhaps, but this is rather slender ground upon which to entitle a twenty page chapter ‘Smith’s Edinburgh Lectures’, and the subtitle’s admission, ‘a conjectural history’, does nothing to offset this weakness. The Glasgow lectures referred to here were never published. A carefully edited
version of the students’ very comprehensive notes formVolume IV of the Glasgow edition of Smith’s Collected Works. This has given them a certain authority. One might nevertheless hesitate to accord them truly canonical status, because Smith was so particular about what he published, and so careful about whether he had successfully articulated the views he meant to advance. Smith did publish a paper in 1761 on the origins of language. This paper seems largely to replicate the third of these lectures, and it provides Phillipson with more grounds for speculation about the Edinburgh lectures. ‘It was thinking which surely belongs in outline at least to the earliest stages of his philosophical career’. The words ‘surely’ and ‘at least’ have an element of special pleading to my ears. We are on decidedly firmer ground when we turn to Smith’s published works –
the Theory of Moral Sentiments and theWealth of Nations. Both made their mark in their day, and have continued to do so, and the revised editions, on which Smith himself worked, enable us to chart changes and developments in his thought, although the later editions of WN are not of any great consequence in this regard. Taken together, these works, from the time of their publication, have provided philosophers and others with a rich resource for scholarly debate and discussion, about both their relative merits and their relationship. The ‘Adam Smith problem’ famously formulated by German scholars, rested upon the idea that there was a fundamental disunity between the two – TMS taking mutual sympathy as its key
concept, while WN was built around individual competition. If sympathy rules, then society rests upon natural sociability; if economic competition rules, then an ‘invisible hand’ is required to secure social coordination. Almost all Smith scholars today hold that this ‘problem’ rests upon a superficial
reading of the texts, but not all of them are as successful as Phillipson in uncovering the deep unity in Smith’s work.WN is universally regarded as a foundational work in the emerging science of economics, while TMS is a work of moral philosophy, and for a long time this perception led toWN being heralded as Smith’s real claim to fame. On this view of the matter, Smith moved from the study of philosophy to the study of economics, the latter being a highly innovative spin-off from the former. But Phillipson is excellent at showing just how the economics no less than the moral philosophy flows from the same underlying intellectual project – the ‘science of man’, a part philosophical, part empirical exploration of human nature that Smith engaged in alongside his contemporaries in the Scottish Enlightenment, especially David Hume. It is Phillipson’s success in doing this that prompts my suggestion that a more informative subtitle for the book might be ‘the economist as philosopher’. For Phillipson, though, the science of human nature, of which both TMS andWN
are such notable exercises, is importantly ‘enlightened’ because its major purpose is to counter the baneful effects of religion. ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the Wealth of Nations, and indeed Smith’s entire project for a modern science of man’, he tells us, ‘were built on the Enlightenment’s quintessential assault on religion’ (p. 190). What drives this ‘assault’ is a determination to displace ‘superstition’ by learning that is firmly grounded in empirical science. This desire to dispel superstition, Phillipson alleges, is as central to Smith’s economic theory as to his moral philosophy.
