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Adam Smith
After two
centuries, Adam Smith remains a towering figure in the history of economic
thought. Known primarily for a single work, An
Inquiry into the nature an causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) ,
the first comprehensive system of political economy, Smith is more properly
regarded as a social philosopher whose economic writings constitute only the
capstone to an overarching view of political and social evolution. If his
masterwork is viewed in relation to his earlier lectures on moral philosophy
and government, as well as to allusions in The
Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) to a work he hoped to write on
the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions
they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society” , then The Wealth of Nations may be seen not
merely as a treatise on economics but as a partial exposition of a much larger
scheme of historical evolution.
Early Life
Unfortunately,
much is known about Smith’s thought than about his life. Though the exact date
of his birth is unknown, he was baptized on June 5,1723, in Kikcaldy, a small
(population 1,500) but thriving fishing village near Edinburgh, the son by
second marriage of Adam Smith, comptroller of customs at Kikcaldy, and Margaret
Douglas, daughter of a substantial landowner. Of Smith’s childhood nothing is
known other than that he received his elementary schooling in Kirkcaldy and
that at the age of four years he was said to have been carried off by gypsies.
Pursuits was mounted, and young Adam was abandoned by his captors. “He would
have made, I fear, a poor gypsy” , commented his principal biographer.
At the
age of 14, in 1737, Smith entered the university of Glasgow, already remarkable
as a center of what was to become known as the Scottish Enlightenment. There,
he was deeply influenced by Francis Hutcheson, a famous professor of moral
philosophy from whose economic and philosophical views he was later to diverge
but whose magnetic character seems to have been a main shaping force in Smith’s
development. Graduating in 1740, Smith won a scholarship (the Snell Exhibition)
and travelled on horseback to Oxford, where he stayed at Balliol College.
Compared to the stimulating atmosphere of Glasgow, Oxford was an educational
desert. His years there were spent largely in self-education, from which Smith
obtained a firm grasp of both classical and contemporary philosophy.
Returning
to his home after an absence of six years, Smith cast about for suitable
employment. The connections of his mother’s family, together with the support
of the jurist and philosopher Lord Henry Kames, resulted in an opportunity to
give a series of public lectures in Edinburgh - a form of education then much
in vogue in the prevailing spirit of “improvement” .
The
lectures, which ranged over a wide variety of subjects from rhetoric history
and economics, made a deep impression on some of Smith’s notable
contemporaries. They also had a marked influence on Smith’s own career, for in
1751, at the age of 27, he was appointed professor of logic at Glasgow, from
which post he transferred in 1752 to the more remunerative professorship of
moral philosophy, a subject that embraced the related fields of natural
theology, ethics, jurisprudence, and political economy.
Glasgow
Smith
then entered upon a period of extraordinary creativity, combined with a social
and intellectual life that he afterward described as “by far the happiest, and
most honourable period of my life” . During the week he lectured daily from 7:
30 to 8: 30 am and again thrice weekly from 11 am to noon, to classes of up to
90 students, aged 14 and 16. (Although his lectures were presented in English,
following the precedent of Hutcheson, rather than in Latin, the level of
sophistication for so young an audience today strikes one as extraordinarily
demanding.) Afternoons were occupied with university affairs in which Smith
played an active role, being elected dean of faculty in 1758; his evenings were
spent in the stimulating company of Glasgow society.
Among his
circle of acquaintances were not only remembers of the aristocracy, many
connected with the government, but also a range of intellectual and scientific
figures that included Joseph Black, a pioneer in the field of chemistry, James
Watt, later of steam-engine fame, Robert Foulis, a distinguished printer and
publisher and subsequent founder of the first British Academy of Design, and
not least, the philosopher David Hume, a lifelong friend whom Smith had met in
Edinburgh. Smith was also introduced during these years to the company of the
great merchants who were carrying on the colonial trade that had opened to
Scotland following its union with England in 1707. One of them, Andrew
Cochrane, had been a provost of Glasgow and had founded the famous Political
Economy Club. From Cochrane and his fellow merchants Smith undoubtedly acquired
the detailed information concerning trade and business that was to give such a
sense of the real world to The Wealth of
Nations .
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
In 1759
Smith Published his first work, The Theory
of Moral Sentiments . Didactic, exhortative, and analytic by turns, The Theory lays the psychological
foundation on which The Wealth of Nations was
later to be built. In it Smith described the principles of “human nature “,
which, together with Hume and the other leading philosophers of his time, he
took as a universal and unchanging datum from which social institutions, as
well as social behavior, could be deduced.
One
question in particular interested Smith in The
Theory of Moral Sentiments . This was a problem that had attracted
Smith’s teacher Hutcheson and a number of Scottish philosophers before him. The
question was the source of the ability to form moral judgments, including
judgments on one’s own behavior, in the face of the seemingly overriding
passions for self-preservation and self-interest. Smith’s answer, at
considerable length, is the presence within each of us of an “inner man” who
plays the role of the “impartial spectator” , approving or condemning our own
and others’ actions with a voice impossible to disregard. (The theory may sound
less naive if the question is reformulated to ask how instinctual drives are
socialized through the superego.) The thesis of the impartial spectator,
however, conceals a more important aspect of the book. Smith saw humans as
created by their ability to reason and - no less important - by their capacity
for sympathy. This duality serves both to pit individuals against one another
and to provide them with the rational and moral faculties to create
institutions by which the internecine struggle can be mitigated and even turned
to the common good. He wrote in his Moral
Sentiments the famous observation that he was to repeat later in The Wealth of Nations : that self-seeking
men are often “led by an invisible hand... without knowing it, without
intending it, to advance the interest of the society.” It should be noted that
scholars have long debated whether Moral
Sentiments complemented or was in conflict with The Wealth of Nations , which followed it.
At one level there is a seeming clash between the theme of social morality
contained in the first and largely amoral explanation of the manner in which
individuals are socialized to become the market-oriented and class-bound actors
that set the economic system into motion.
Travels on the Continent
The Theory quickly brought Smith wide esteem
and in particular attracted the attention of Charles Townshend, himself
something of an amateur economist, a considerable wit, and somewhat less of a
statesman, whose fate it was to be the chancellor of the exchequer responsible
for the measures of taxation that ultimately provoked the American Revolution.
Townshend had recently married and was searching for a tutor for his stepson
and ward, the young Duke of Buccleuch. Influenced by the strong recommendations
of Hume and his own admiration for The
Theory of Moral Sentiments , he Approached Smith to take the Charge.
The terms
of employment were lucrative (an annual salary of f300 plus
travelling expenses and a pension of f300 a year after) ,
considerably more than Smith had earned as a professor. Accordingly, Smith
resigned his Glasgow post in 1763 and set off for France the next year as the
tutor of the young duke. They stayed mainly in Toulouse, where Smith began
working on a book (eventually to be The
Wealth of Nations ) as an antidote to the excruciating boredom of
the provinces. After 18 months of ennui he was rewarded with a two-month sojourn
in Geneva, where he met Voltaire, for whom he had the profoundest respect,
thence to Paris where Hume, then secretary to the British embassy, introduced
Smith to the great literary salons of the French Enlightenment. There he met a
group of social reformers and theorists headed by Francois Quesnay, who are
known in history as the physiocrats. There is some controversy as to the
precise degree of influence the physiocrats exerted on Smith, but it is known
that he thought sufficiently well of Quesnay to have considered dedicating The Wealth of Nations to him, had not the
French economist died before publication.
The stay
in Paris was cut short by a shocking event. The younger brother of the Duke of
Buccleuch, who had joined them in Toulouse, took ill and perished despite
Smith’s frantic ministration. Smith and his charge immediately returned to
London. Smith worked in London until the spring of 1767 with Lord Townshend, a
period during which he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and broadened
still further his intellectual circle to include Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson,
Edward Gibbon, and perhaps Benjamin Franklin. Late that year he returned to
Kirkcaldy, where the next six years were spent dictating and reworking The Wealth of Nations , followed by another
stay of three years in London, where the work was finally completed and
published in 1776.
The Wealth of Nations
Despite
its renown as the first great work in political economy. The Wealth of Nations is in fact a
continuation of the philosophical theme begun in The Theory of Moral Sentiments . The ultimate problem to
which Smith addresses himself is how the inner struggle between the passions
and the “impartial spectator’ explicated in Moral
Sentiments in terms of the single individual - works its effects in
the larger arena of history itself, both in the long-run evolution of society
and in terms of the immediate characteristics of the stage of history typical
of Smith’s own day.
The
answer to this problem enters in Book 5, in which Smith outlines he four main
stages of organization through which society is impelled, unless blocked by
deficiencies of resources, wars, or bad policies of government: the original
rude’ state of hunters, a second stage of nomadic agriculture, a third stage
of feudal or manorial “farming” , and a fourth and final stage of commercial
interdependence.
It should
be noted that each of these stages is accompanied by institutions suited to its
needs. For example, in the age of the huntsman, “there is scar any established magistrate
or any regular administration of justice. “With the advent of flocks there
emerges a more complex form of social organization, comprising not only
formidable” armies but the central institution of private property with its
indispensable buttress of law and order as well. It is the very essence of
Smith’s thought that he recognized this institution, whose social usefulness he
never doubted, as an instrument for the protection of privilege, rather than
one to be justified in terms of natural law: “Civil government,” he wrote, “so
far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted
for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some
property against those who have none at all.” Finally, Smith describes the
evolution through feudalism into a stage of society requiring new institutions
such as market-determined rather than guild-determined wages and free rather
than government-constrained enterprise. This later became known as
laissez-faire capitalism; Smith called it the system of perfect liberty.
There is
an obvious resemblance between this succession of changes in the material basis
of production, each bringing its requisite alterations in the superstructure of
laws and civil institutions, and the Marxian conception of history. Though the
resemblance is indeed remarkable, there is also a crucial difference: in the
Marxian scheme the engine of evolution is ultimately the struggle between
contending classes, whereas in Smith’s philosophical history the primal moving
agency is “human nature “driven by the desire for self-betterment and guided
(or misguided) by the faculties of reason.
Society and “the invisible hand”
The
theory of historical evolution, although it is perhaps the binding conception
of The Wealth of Nations , is
subordinated within the work itself to a detailed description of how the
invisible hand” actually operates within the commercial, or final, stage of
society. This becomes the focus of Books I and II. In which Smith undertakes to
elucidate two questions. The first is how a system of perfect liberty,
operating under the drives and constraints of human nature and intelligently
designed institutions, will give rise to an orderly society. The question,
which had already been considerably elucidated by earlier writers, required
both an explanation of the underlying orderliness in the pricing of individual
commodities and an explanation of the “laws” that regulated the division of the
entire “wealth” of the nation (which Smith saw as its annual production of
goods and services) among the three great claimant classes - laborers,
landlords, and manufacturers.
This
orderliness, as would be expected, was produced by the interaction of the two
aspects of human nature, its response to its passions and its susceptibility to
reason and sympathy. But whereas The Theory
of Moral Sentiments had relied mainly on the presence of the “inner
man” to provide the necessary restraints to private action, in The Wealth of Nations one finds an
institutional mechanism that acts to reconcile the disruptive possibilities
inherent in a blind obedience to the passions alone. This protective mechanism
is competition, an arrangement by which the passionate desire for bettering
one’s condition - a “desire that comes with United States from the womb, and
never leaves United States until we go into the grave “- is turned into a
socially beneficial agency by pitting one person’s drive for self-betterment
against another’s.
It is in
the unintended outcome of this competitive struggle for self-betterment that
the invisible hand regulating the economy shows itself, for Smith explains how
mutual vying forces the prices of commodities down to their natural levels,
which correspond to their costs of production. Moreover, by inducing labour and
capital to move from less to more profitable occupations or areas, the
competitive mechanism constantly restores prices to these “natural” levels
despite short-run aberrations. Finally, by explaining that wages and rents and
profits (the constituent parts of the costs of production) are themselves
subject to this natural prices but also revealed an underlying orderliness in
the distribution of income itself among workers, whose recompense was their
wages; landlords, whose income was their rents; and manufacturers, whose reward
was their profit.
Economic growth
Smith’s
analysis of the market as a self- correcting mechanism was impressive. But his
purpose was more ambitious than to demonstrate the self-adjusting properties of
the system. Rather, it was to show that, under the impetus of the acquisitive
drive, the annual flow of national wealth could be seen steadily to grow.
Smith’s
explanation of economic growth, although not neatly assembled in one part of The Wealth of Nations , is quite clear.
The score of it lies in his emphasis on the division of labour (itself an
outgrowth of the “natural” propensity to trade) as the source of society’s
capacity to increase its productivity. The
Wealth of Nations opens with a famous passage describing a pin
factory in which 10 persons, by specialising in various tasks, turn out 48,000
pins a day, compared with the few, perhaps only 1, that each could have
produced alone. But this all-important division of labour does not take place
unaided. It can occur only after the prior accumulation of capital (or stock,
as Smith calls it) , which is used to pay the additional workers and to buy
tools and machines.
The drive
for accumulation, however, brings problems. The manufacturer who accumulates
stock needs more laborers (since labour-saving technology has no place in
Smith’s scheme) , and in attempting to hire them he bids up their wages above
their “natural” price. Consequently his profits begin to fall, and the process
of accumulation is in danger of ceasing. But now there enters an ingenious
mechanism for continuing the advance. In bidding up the price of labour, the
manufacturer inadvertently sets into motion a process that increases the supply
of labour, for “the demand for men, like that for any other commodity,
necessarily regulates the production of men.” Specifically, Smith had in mind
the effect of higher wages in lessening child mortality. Under the influence of
a larger labour supply, the wage rise is moderated and profits are maintained;
the new supply of laborers offers a continuing opportunity for the manufacturer
to introduce a further division of labour and thereby add to the system’s
growth.
Here then
was a “machine” for growth - a machine that operated with all the reliability
of the Newtonian system with which Smith was quite familiar. Unlike the
Newtonian system, however, Smith’s growth machine did not depend for its
operation on the laws of nature alone. Human nature drove it, and human nature
was a complex rather than a simple force. Thus, the wealth of nations would
grow only if individuals, through their governments, did not inhibit this
growth by catering to the pleas for special privilege that would prevent the
competitive system from exerting its begin effect. Consequently, much of The Wealth of Nations, especially Book IV,
is a polemic against the restrictive measures of the “mercantile system” that
favoured monopolies at home and abroad. Smith’s system of “natural liberty” ,
he is careful to point out, accords with the best interests of all but will not
be put into practice if government is entrusted to, or heeds, the “mean
rapacity, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind.”
The Wealth of Nations is therefore far
from the ideological tract it is often supposed to be. Although Smith preached
laissez-faire (with important exceptions) , his argument was directed as much
against monopoly as government; and although he extolled the social results of
the acquisitive process, he almost invariably treated the manners and
manoeuvres of businessmen with contempt. Nor did he see the commercial system
itself as wholly admirable. He wrote with decrement about the intellectual
degradation of the worker in a society in which the division of labour has
proceeded very far; for by comparison with the alert intelligence of the
husbandman, the specialized worker “generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as
it is possible for a human being to become” .
In all of
this, it is notable that Smith was writing in an age of preindustrial
capitalism. He seems to have had no real presentiment of the gathering
Industrial Revolution, harbingers of which were visible in the great ironworks
only a few miles from Edinburgh. He had nothing to say about large-scale
industrial enterprise, and the few remarks in The
Wealth of Nations concerning the future of joint-stock companies
(corporations) are disparaging. Finally, one should bear in mind, that, if
growth is the great theme of The Wealth of
Nations , it is not unending growth. Here and there in the treatise
are glimpsed at a secularly declining rate of profit; and Smith mentions as
well the prospects that when the system eventually accumulates its “full
complement of riches” all the pin factories, so to speak, whose output could be
absorbed - economic decline would begin, ending in an impoverished stagnation.
The Wealth of Nations was received with
admiration by Smith’s wide circle of friends and admires, although it was by no
means an immediate popular success. The work finished, Smith went into
semiretirement. The year following its publication he was appointed
commissioner both of customs and of salt duties for Scotland, posts that
brought him f600 a year. He thereupon informed his former charge that
he no longer required his pension, to which Buccleuch replied that his sense of
honour would never allow him to stop paying it. Smith was therefore quite well
off in the final years of his life, which were spent mainly in Edinburgh with
occasional trips to London or Glasgow (which appointed him a rector of the
university) . The years passed quietly, with several revisions of both major
books but with no further publications. On July 17,1790, at the age of 67, full
of honours and recognition, Smith died; he was buried in the churchyard at
Canongate with a simple monument stating that Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations , was buried there.
Beyond
the few facts of his life, which can be embroidered only in detail,
exasperatingly little is known about the man. Smith never married, and almost
nothing is known of his personal side. Moreover, it was the custom of his time
to destroy rather than to preserve the private files if illustrious men, with
the unhappy result that much of Smith’s unfinished work, as well as his
personal papers, was destroyed (some as late as 1942) . Only one portrait of
Smith survives, a profile medallion by Tassie; it gives a glimpse of the older
man with his somewhat heavy-lidded eyes, aquiline nose, and a hint of protrusive
lower lip. “I am a beau in nothing but my books,” Smith once told a friend to
whom he was showing his library of some 3,000 volumes.
From
various accounts, he was also a man of many peculiarities, which included a
stumbling manner of speech (until he had warmed to his subject) , a gait
described as “vermicular” / and above all an extraordinary and even comic
absence of mind. On the other hand, contemporaries wrote of a smile of
inexpressive benignity,” and of his political tact and dispatch in managing
the sometimes acerbic business of the Glasgow faculty.
Certainly
he enjoyed a high measure of contemporary fame; even in his early days at
Glasgow his reputation attracted students from nations as distant as Russia,
and his later years were crowned not only with expression of admiration from
many European thinkers but by a growing recognition among British governing
circles that his work provided a rationale of inestimable importance for
practical economic policy.
Over the
years, Smith’s lustre as a social philosopher has escaped much of the
weathering that has affected the reputations of other first-rate political
economists. Although he was writing for his generation, the breadth of his
knowledge/ the cutting edge of his generalization, the boldness of his vision,
have never ceased to attract the admiration of all social scientists, and in
particular economists. Couched in the spacious, cadenced prose of his period,
rich in imagery and crowded with life, The
Wealth of Nations projects a sanguine but never sentimental image of
society. Never so finely analytic as David Ricardo nor so stern and profound as
Karl Marx, Smith is the very epitome of the Enlightenment: hopeful but
realistic, speculative but practical, always respectful of the classical past but
ultimately dedicated to the great discovery of his age - progress.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
John Rae.
Life of Adam Smith” 1985
William
Scott. “Adam Smith as Student and Professor” 1987
Andrew S.
Skinner. “Essays on Adam Smith” 1988
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