11 - Adam Smith’s Politics

Summary

THE POLITICS OF “PUBLIC SPIRIT”

Adam Smith did not write any single comprehensive treatise on politics as such. He belonged to no particular established “school” of political thought. He espoused no specific political system. Yet, he was an enormously important and innovative political thinker, and it should never be overlooked that he was involved in politics or was in the employ of government for a significant portion of his mature years. Smith's political thought and his political activities deserve more attention than they have generally received from authors who have tried to take the measure of his contribution to modernity.

Smith was a systematic man, both a critic and a constructor of systems in thought. He was sharply critical, however, of the sort of reductive enthusiasm that enslaves thinkers to their systems. He specifically attacked the “man of system” whose love of the beauty of his own conceptual constructs blinds him to their limitations. In political practice, he was a methodical and conscientious bureaucrat and a typically civic-minded member of that extraordinary intelligentsia which gave meaning and force to the idea of the “Scottish Enlightenment.” In the area of theory, his legacy to posterity includes a radically innovative conception of a system of political economy whose significance for modernity can hardly be overstated, and systems of morals and jurisprudence which must be taken into account in any complete assessment of his political thought. None of them, however, should be seen as coextensive with it.