Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. His other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was published in 1759. The first, commonly referred to as the Wealth of Nations, firmly established Smith as the founder of the science of economics, or political economy as it was called in his day.
Smith’s reputation today rests on his theory that a free-market economy driven by rational self-interest and with minimal interference from the government would lead to economic well-being. As he wrote in the Wealth of Nations, a quote with which many of us are familiar: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages”. These ideas, which gave birth to laissez faire, appear to contradict a basic premise in The Theory of Moral Sentiments — that an individual’s tendency to look after his self-interest is tempered by a natural sympathy towards others which prevents us from causing harm to them. This debate, however, has never been fully resolved.
Nicholas Phillipson explains early in his book, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, that the bulk of primary data about Adam Smith is found in his own published and unpublished texts. A few weeks before his death in 1790, Smith requested his friends and executors to destroy all his lecture notes, thus, writes Phillipson, ensuring that “no materials should remain for his biographers but what were furnished by the lasting monuments of his genius”.
Apart from his own written works, two sets of students’ notes of his lectures at the University of Glasgow, discovered in later centuries, have contributed significantly to our understanding of Smith’s philosophy.
This means that Smith’s biography must be first and foremost one which traces the development of his mind and character through his text. “It is the story of a philosopher who, with the help of vast erudition, an excellent memory and taste for reasoning en systéme constructed texts that would help make the complexities of the modern world intelligible and manageable”, writes Phillipson.
Nicholas Phillipson himself has a formidable reputation as a leading scholar of the Scottish Enlightenment, the age which threw up some of the most brilliant minds of 18-century Scotland, foremost among them being David Hume, James Boswell and Smith. It is important to note that Phillipson’s approach is that of an intellectual biographer and not one who has set out to assess Smith’s works. His chief interest, therefore, is in the development of the mind of Adam Smith.
Adam Smith was born in 1723 to a middle-class family in Kirkcaldy, a small port town on the Firth of Forth in Scotland. His father died a few months before he was born and he was brought up by his mother, who would remain his constant companion until her death at the age of 90. Between 1731 and 1737, Smith was a pupil at Kirkcaldy Burgh School. One of the best secondary schools in Scotland, Kirkcaldy Burgh provided a classical education based on translation and exposition. In this early chapter, called “A Kirkcaldy Upbringing”, Phillipson seeks to discover the early influences that shaped Smith’s mind. His school curriculum included the Stoics, Cicero’s ethics and Addison’s Essays. These ancient and contemporary classics provided Smith with a simple but sophisticated way of looking at society and also the moral and intellectual skills to live sociably, a key tenet in Smith’s philosophy.
Smith’s college education began in 1737, and he would spend the next nine years as a student of Glasgow University and Oxford. This phase of Smith’s life has remained largely undocumented. So, the biographer examines the social milieu and the vigorous commercial life of Glasgow which he believes would have influenced Smith’s development. It is interesting to notice that this part of the biography is almost entirely “conjectured history”, a phrase Phillipson uses to describe Smith’s preferred method of teaching and writing. As in the case of Smith, so in that of Phillipson, the conjectures emerge from their deep erudition and scholarship.
In 1740 Smith left for Oxford and matriculated at Balliol College. Here he felt himself to be “a stranger in a strange land”. Much later, in the Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote bluntly, “In the university of Oxford the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up all together even the pretence of teaching”. Fortunately, Balliol possessed an excellent library and Smith must have spent many hours “in the congenial task of teaching himself”. It was also at Oxford that Smith had his first exposure to the writings of David Hume, who would become and remain his closest friend until Hume’s death in 1776. Hume is regarded by many as the greatest philosopher who has ever written in the English language and his works would profoundly influence Smith’s own thinking.
Beginning 1746, Smith devoted himself to lectures on diverse subjects at Edinburgh and later at Glasgow, where he would hold the chair of Professor of Moral Philosophy. We know little about Smith’s lectures apart from the information found in the students’ notes. What we do know is that his teaching made him into something of a cult figure, a professor whose portrait bust was bought by students at local bookstores.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments was published while he was teaching at Glasgow. Phillipson comments that the book “offered a powerful conjecture about the nature of the civilising process, about the ways in which ordinary human beings engaged in the business of ordinary life, set out to satisfy their moral needs, and about the way in which some citizens acquire that sense of fitness… which makes it possible for them to aspire to a life of virtue”.
The next phase of Smith’s life begins in 1764 when he ended his teaching career and left for the European continent as tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch. According to Phillipson “it was an offer not to be refused”. He would earn a substantial salary and was assured a good income in retirement. He spent three years in Europe where he was already known and respected for his scholarship.
Smith returned to Kirkcaldy in 1767 and spent the next seven years working on the draft of the Wealth of Nations. Two chapters in Phillipson’s biography are devoted to this famous book, one on the making of the Wealth of Nations and the second about the book itself. A passage from Phillipson needs to be quoted in full to illustrate the significance of this book: “The message Smith wished to convey was implicit but clear. In a country whose politics and governance was in the hands of the landed and mercantile classes, it was the job of philosophers, who understood the principles of political economy, to safeguard the public interest by educating their masters. Never before had the Ciceronian ideal of the philosopher-statesman seemed so challenging and so urgent”.
Smith lived his last years in Edinburgh. In this period he acquired the status of a public figure and begun to generate the mythology that has surrounded him ever since. He also had to deal with two personal losses — the death of David Hume and that of his mother. With Hume’s death Smith was forced to abandon the grand design of developing the “Science of Man” that the two had conceived.
In the final pages of his book Phillipson sums up Smith’s contribution to human thought: “For all its scope, ambition and daring, the philosophy is the work of a modest man who set out to reflect on a simple, apparently unremarkable characteristic of human nature — our desire, when all things are equal, to improve our own lot, that of our families and that of the civil society to which we belong”.
Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life is a richly detailed biography which requires a certain degree of intellectual grappling. But what it yields to the reader is a fine exposition of one of the greatest thinkers about morality and society, ideas that continue to influence human thought and action.
Aloke Roy Chowdhury is the editor of Deccan Books. He can be contacted at alokeroy@hotmail.com [1]
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