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Rethinking Das Adam Smith Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Richard Teichgraeber III
Richard Teichgraeber III*
Affiliation:
Newcomb College, Tulane University
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Extract

During the last decade, there has been a steady growth in scholarship concerning the moral and philosophical dimensions of Adam Smith's economic theory. The reasons are various: a determination to take Smith out of the dark shadow cast on him by Karl Marx, the perceived intellectual impoverishment of socialism, and an historical concern for tracing the peculiarly Scottish dimensions of the Wealth of Nations (1776). This renewed interest in Smith appears to be more than a sudden intellectual fashion. The now completed publication of the “Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith” provides the basis for the work of systematically reconstructing Smith's intellectual career. Most students of Smith would agree that at the moment this work of reconstruction has just begun.

One of the curious features of recent Adam Smith scholarship has been its perfunctory treatment of “das Adam Smith Problem,” a problem that once seemed at the very center of understanding the moral and philosophical dimensions of Smith's work. In the last decades of the nineteenth century a group of German scholars coined that phrase to describe what they saw as a possibly fundamental break between the assumptions that guided Smith's first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and those that supported the economic theory of his later work, the Wealth of Nations. On the one hand, Smith's explanation of moral judgment was based upon the psychological principle of “sympathy,” a capacity inherent in every individual which allows a person to “enter into” the situation of another and thereby bring his own “sentiments” into accord with those of his fellow.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , Spring 1981 , pp. 106 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1981

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References

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the tenth annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Atlanta, April 18-21,1979. My thanks to Nan Keohane, John Pocock, Roger Emerson, Donald Winch, Nicholas Phillipson, Daniel Singal, John Dwyer, and Roger Mason for comments that aided in my revision of that essay.

1 Among recent English-language studies, the following are worthy of mention: Campbell, Thomas D., Adam Smith's Science of Morals (London, 1941)Google Scholar; Meek, Ronald L., Smith, Marx, and After (London, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Macfie, A.L., The Individual and Society (London, 1967)Google Scholar; Foley, Vernard, The Social Physics of Adam Smith (West Lafayette, 1976)Google Scholar; Anspach, Ralph, “The Implications of the Theory of Moral Sentiments for Adam Smith's Economic Thought,” History of Political Economy, Spring 1972, 9(1), pp. 176–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Smith's place in the Scottish Enlightenment is currently the topic of a lively controversy. For the present state of the debate, see the separate essays of Phillipson, Nicholas, Winch, Donald, and Pocock, J.G.A. in Wealth and Virtue: Political Economy and the Scottish Englightenment, eds. Hunt, I. and Ignatieff, M. (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar.

2 Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 volumes, eds., Campbell, R.H. and Skinner, A.S. (Oxford, 1976), I, 26–27Google Scholar. All references are from this edition, hereafter: WN.

3 See Oncken, August, “Das Adam Smith-Problem,” Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft, ed. Wolf, Julius, Jahrgang, I (Berlin, 1898), 25-33, 101-8, 276–87Google Scholar; Zeyss, Richard, Adam Smith und der Eigennutz (Tübingen, 1889)Google Scholar. For Paszkowski and the broad course of the debate about das Adam Smith Problem, I rely primarily on Morrow, Glenn R., The Ethical and Economic Theories of Adam Smith (New York, 1923), pp. 1–12Google Scholar.

4 Cannan, Edwin (ed.), Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms (Oxford, 1896)Google Scholar.

5 Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. and intro. Raphael, D.D. and Macfie, A.L. (Oxford, 1976), p. 342Google Scholar. All references are from this edition, hereafter: TMS.

6 Clark, J.M., et al., Adam Smith, 1776-1926 (Chicago, 1928), pp. 116-55, 156–79Google Scholar.

7 In his article on Smith, Adam for the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Vol. 14, 322–29Google Scholar, Viner tempered and retracted some of his earlier conclusions. (My thanks to Donald Winch for this point.)

8 Cropsey, Joseph, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (The Hague, 1957)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Ibid., pp. 5-55, 92-101.

10 Cumming, Robert D., Human Nature and History (Chicago, 1969), Vol. IIGoogle Scholar, esp. chaps. 13 and 14.

11 Ibid., pp. 174-78, 213-20.

12 Skinner, Andrew S., A System of Social Science: Papers Relating to Adam Smith Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar. Skinner himself describes his work as “a modest commentary;” see p. 3.

13 This is a position implied or stated in the following works that have appeared in bicentennial publications: Wilson, Thomas, “Sympathy and Self-interest,” in The Market and the State, ed. Wilson, Thomas and Skinner, Andrew S. (Oxford, 1976), pp. 73–99Google Scholar; Sowell, Thomas, “Adam Smith in Theory and Practice,” in Adam Smith and Modern Political Economy, ed. O'Driscoll, Gerald D. Jr., (Ames, 1979), pp. 3–18Google Scholar; Raphael, D.D., “The Impartial Spectator,” in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Skinner, Andrew S. and Wilson, Thomas (Oxford, 1975), pp. 83–99Google Scholar.

14 TMS, p. 20.

15 In the “Glasgow Edition” these are now printed with Cannan's material as Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. Meek, R.L.et al.Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar.

16 Winch, Donald, Adam Smith's Politics (Cambridge, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See esp. chaps. 5-8.

17 Forbes, Duncan, “Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce, and Liberty,” in Essays on Adam Smith, pp. 179–201Google Scholar.

18 Adam Smith's Politics, p. 144; also see pp. 164-87.

19 I should note that scholars have frequently emphasized the significant continuities between the Renaissance and the eighteenth century. Some literary critics still speak of the eighteenth century as the “Silver Age” of the Renaissance. However, in tracing the changing meaning of those words that held particular significance for Renaissance humanists and for one of their eighteenth-century admirers in Scotland, my concern here will be to show that the continuities are not everywhere as deep as we may think.

20 See Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume One, The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar. I have borrowed extensively from Skinner's account of “virtue” (esp. pp. 88-100) in what follows.

21 Home, Thomas A., The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville: Virtue and Commerce in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1978), p. ixGoogle Scholar. Also see Pocock, J.G.A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, esp. pp. 423–505Google Scholar.

22 Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I, 73-74, 108–9Google Scholar.

23 TMS, p. 63.

24 TMS, p. 153.

25 TMS, p. 77.

26 TMS, pp. 76-77.

27 TMS, p. 321.

28 TMS, p. 18.

29 WNI, 341-42.

30 TMS, p. 339.

31 TMS, pp. 9-10 and pp. 20-21. My account of sympathy here takes issue with Lamb, Robert Boyden, “Adam Smith's System: Sympathy not Self-interest,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXV, no. 4, (Oct.-Dec., 1974), 671–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 TMS, pp. 21-22.

33 TMS, p. 22.

34 Also see TMS, pp. 85-86: “… though among different members of society here should be no love and affection, the society, though less happy and agreeable, will not necessarily be dissolved.” In the famous “invisible hand” passage in the Wealth of Nations, Smith asserted that in a free market economy every individual would seek his own personal gain above all else. Here there would be no consciously altruistic or benevolent motives governing man's conduct. The activity of manufacturing and trade certainly creates social relationships. But if every man “intends only his own securtiy,” can we not say that he thereby remains a stranger to his fellow men? See WN, p. 456.

35 TMS, p. 22.

36 TMS, p. 154.

37 Polity and Economy, p. 100.

38 For more on this point, see Cumming, Robert D., Human Nature and History, II, 216–18Google Scholar. Smith's account of moral rules is in TMS pp. 327-40.

39 TMS, pp. 328-29.

40 TMS, p. 328.

41 TMS, p. 339.

42 TMS, p. 340.

43 TMS, p. 330.

44 TMS, pp. 78-79.

45 TMS, pp. 308-10.

46 TMS, p. 79.

47 TMS, p.79.

48 TMS, p. 79. I do not mean here to hint at the old equation of “sympathy” and “benevolence.” Like sympathy, resentment is a non-rational or “natural” sentiment in human relationships. In this respect there may be no categorical distinction between the two. It is clear, however, that Smith explained the psychology of our desire for justice as retributive. In doing so, he wants to show that it is sustained by “negative” motives that should find no place in the realm of personal morality.

49 TMS, p. 82, my emphasis.

50 Lectures, ed. Caiman, , p. 3Google Scholar.

51 Selby-Bigge, L. A. (ed.), Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals rev. Nidditch, P.H. (3rd ed., Oxford, 1975), p. 184Google Scholar.

A full account of Adam Smith's “negative” view of justice would begin with the natural law jurisprudence of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). The key work is De jure belli ac pacis (1625), where we find that Grotius was of two minds about justice. In some instances, he talked of justice in its generic sense: it was the inclusive “virtue” that stood for every moral virtue. It was that “sovereign virtue” that expressed our concern to achieve equity for every virtuous man. In other places, however, Grotius defined justice of a more constricted nature. It was simply that special virtue that rendered to another that which was his due. Justice was an exclusive, rather than an inclusive, virtue. And this was essentially the notion of justice whose psychological underpinnings Adam Smith explained in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. On Grotius, see two recent very important studies: Tuck, Richard, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979) esp. pp. 58–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Tully, James, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge, 1980), esp. pp. 81–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The same ambivalently two-sided definition of justice is to be found in Francis Hutcheson, perhaps the foremost disciple of Grotius in Scotland, as well as Smith's teacher at the University of Glasgow, 1731-40. See e.g., his discussions of justice as both a “sovereign” and an exclusive virtue in A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747), pp. 67-68 and 103–4Google Scholar.

52 Hirschman, Albert O., The Passions and the Interets: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), p. 100Google Scholar.

53 Les anciens politiques parloient sans cesse de moeurs et de vertu: les nôtres ne parlent que de commerce et d'argent.” The translation here is from The Social Contract and Discourses, trans, and intro. Cole, G.D.H. (New York, 1950), p. 161Google Scholar.