It seems to be the peculiar talent of the French nation, to arrange every subject in that natural and simple order, which carries the attention, without any effort, along with it. The English seem to have employed themselves entirely in inventing, and to have disdained the more inglorious but not less useful labour of arranging and methodizing their discoveries, and of expressing them in the most simple and natural manner.7
It was in this Anglo-French spirit of combining discovery and experimentation with methodizing that Smith had set out to create his own science of man. Developing and perfecting his Glasgow lectures on jurisprudence and on the arts and sciences, absorbing them into the intellectual framework of the systems he had developed in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, reviewing once again the arguments of the earlier works in the light of the later, would, in Smith’s perfectionist hands, have become a vast intellectual undertaking, made vaster still by the fact that he was a slow worker. It was certainly not a task for a sick and valetudinarian man.
For a biographer, the trouble with this act of archival self-concealment is that it was an attempt to cap a life that was already badly documented. Next to nothing is known about the circumstances of Smith’s childhood in Kirkcaldy, his student days at Glasgow and Oxford and the evidently formative years spent launching his philosophical career in the aftermath of the battle of Culloden, which had brought a bloody end to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. His career as an active and influential philosophy professor at Glasgow from 1751 to 1764, at a time when his university was making a bid to turn itself into the model of an enlightened seat of learning, and his subsequent career as a Commissioner of Customs are both exiguously documented. This lack of institutional data would matter less if Smith had been a better correspondent. As it is, only 193 letters written by him and 129 letters written to him have survived, and more than half of these belong to the later period of his life, following the publication of the Wealth of Nations. No doubt this is partly because he destroyed his letters just as he destroyed his notes, to preserve his privacy. He told David Hume’s publisher in 1776 that he disapproved of the plan to publish some of his old friend’s correspondence because it would encourage dealers ‘[to] set about rummaging the cabinets of all those who had ever received a scrap of paper from him. Many things would be published not fit to see the light to the great mortification of all those who wish well to his memory.’8
Not that Smith needed to worry overmuch about the posthumous publication of unwelcome correspondence. He was himself a notoriously bad correspondent who only wrote letters when there was business to be done or when he was goaded into it by his friends. Even then, although his letters are good enough, they are not the work of a Hume or a Boswell, a Voltaire or a Diderot, of a man, in other words, who loved correspondence for its own sake and regarded it as a form of conversation that mattered almost as much as the company of friends. There is a general lack of visibility in Smith’s life. Unlike Hume, Smith had a strictly limited taste for city life, salon culture and even, one suspects, the company of his friends, and it was only after the publication of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, when he was fifty-three, that he began to generate the gossip and table-talk which continues to shape our understanding of his character. Indeed, it is not until 1787 when James Tassie made two medallions of him that we have any idea of what he looked like. It is only possible to make sense of Smith’s life if one accepts that he was a private and self-sufficient man who spent long periods in Kirkcaldy and Glasgow away from the social and political worlds that generate the materials upon which biographies generally rely, content to spend his life with the only woman who mattered, his mother.
How then is Smith’s biography to be written? Some say, Don’t try; any attempt at biography will simply turn into a broken-backed account of his ideas and the world in which he lived. But that really won’t do. Biography never has been and never will be an exact science. All any biographer can do is use the materials at his disposal to construct a credible life-story which will throw light on his subject’s life and works. But because biographies only come to life when one can hear the subject speak, and because the bulk of the primary data about Smith is to be found in his published and unpublished texts, this means that his biography must be, first and foremost, an intellectual biography, one which traces the development of his mind and character through the making of those texts, one that is set in a country that was generating its own forms of Enlightenment. And it is here that the biographer is in luck, for Smith’s attempts at self-concealment were to be less successful than he intended. By the time he resigned the Moral Philosophy chair at Glasgow in 1764, his lectures had begun to attract world-wide attention and it was probably inevitable that sets of student notes would begin to turn up. So far there have been two such finds, in 1895 and in 1958. The first is a set of student notes of a section of the lectures on jurisprudence he probably gave in 1763–4, the last year of his professorship, when he was forty-six. The second are sets of notes of the lectures on rhetoric and the lectures on jurisprudence he gave in 1762–3. Neither is quite complete, though both are substantial and seem to be the work of students who were anxious to get as full a version of Smith’s lectures as possible. In other words, they probably represent Smith’s thought at the stage at which it was ready to be developed into two of the treatises that were projected but never completed.
These lecture notes are transforming our understanding of Smith’s philosophy. They help us to relate the social theory and the ethics of the Theory of Moral Sentiments to the political economy of the Wealth of Nations by putting both in the wider context of Smith’s unrealized science of man. They alert us to the depth and complexity of Smith’s thinking about the formation of the human personality and the progress of society. They elaborate Smith’s thinking about the ways in which self and society are shaped by the distribution of property and the systems of law and government that exist to preserve them. They alert us to the fact so often overlooked by students of Smith’s political economy, that the human beings who inhabit the types of society about which he writes are driven by moral, intellectual and aesthetic as well as material needs. But the notes are of considerable biographical value too for the light they shed on Smith’s intellectual development. For although they record the lectures he gave at the end of his professorial career, it is clear that their roots lie deeper in his past, and almost certainly in the later 1740s, when he was in his late twenties launching his philosophical career in Edinburgh with courses on the same subjects. While no notes of these Edinburgh courses have survived, it seems reasonable to suppose that they contained Smith’s first thoughts on the finished articles, and that they can be read as the work of a formidably ambitious young thinker, ready to take on the leading moral philosophers of Scotland and France, prepared to offer a friendly though radical critique of the philosophy teaching of Scotland’s two leading universities and confident enough to be able to see himself as the heir of Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf, who had set out to develop philosophical accounts of the principles of law and government which would be of use to the rulers of modern Europe. So there is still biographical work to be done by historians who are interested in the development of Smith’s mind and character.
What is more, it is work of a sort that would surely have met with Smith’s approval. Although he was impatient with biographers who were over-preoccupied with what he would have regarded as the trivia of everyday life – what, one wonders, would he have made of his pupil James Boswell’s Life of Johnson? – he knew very well that there were things to be learned about an author’s character from his style and use of language. In the Lectures on Rhetoric he reminded his students that texts were rhetorical performances which could be studied for the light they threw on an author’s methods of persuasion and on the character he wished to present to his readers; indeed part of what he liked to call his ‘system’ was to take the form of a sophisticated gloss on the old rhetorician’s adage, ‘le style, c�
�est l’homme même’ – ‘the style is the man’. It was an invitation to his students and those who were interested in his character to attend to his rhetoric as well as his ideas, and to the circumstances in which they were first delivered.
This, then, is the story of a tough-minded, ambitious young philosopher and his encounters with the intellectual world in which he found himself. It is the story of a man born into the middling ranks of Scottish society at a remarkable moment in the history of his class and nation, a man who would be known to his contemporaries as solitary as well as sociable, and more than a touch eccentric, and a man who generated affection as well as respect. It is the story of a philosopher who with the help of vast erudition, an excellent memory and a taste for reasoning en système constructed texts that would help to make the complexities of the modern world intelligible and manageable. And this is why this story takes the shape of an intellectual biography.
1
A Kirkcaldy Upbringing
Adam Smith was born, or baptized, on 5 June 1723 in Kirkcaldy, then, as now, a small, decent, unprepossessing port on the Firth of Forth. Like so many members of the Scottish intelligentsia, his family belonged to the middling ranks of Scottish society. Both of his parents came from the minor gentry and had connections with the law, the army and the world of office-holding on which the routines of Scottish public life and politics depended. Smith’s father, Adam Smith senior, was clearly a man of some ability and ambition. Baptized in 1679, he belonged to the Presbyterian gentry of north-east Scotland. He was educated for the law at Aberdeen and Edinburgh and grew up in the turbulent world of Scottish politics between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Act of Union of 1707. It was a time when the Crown and the Scottish nobility were engaged in an internecine struggle to control the machinery of Scottish government, when the Kirk was riven with doctrinal and ecclesiological disputes, when Scottish trade was being dislocated by international war and English competition, and when the entire fabric of Scottish political life was being unsettled by a rapidly deteriorating pattern of Anglo-Scottish relations and by constant (and by no means unjustified) fears that Scotland’s political independence was being compromised by the English. In 1705, at the age of twenty-six, Smith became secretary to the new Secretary of State, the Earl of Loudon, a leading member of the Presbyterian nobility. Two years later he was appointed Clerk of the Court Martial in Scotland, a highly responsible office which must have given him a close insight into security matters and into the political state of the country at a time when Jacobitism was rife and the future of the Revolution Settlement and the Protestant succession was in question. In 1714 he was appointed Controller of Customs at Kirkcaldy, the most important port in Fife and a significant source of customs revenue. By 1723 he was earning around £300 per annum, a fairly substantial income by contemporary standards, and was actively campaigning for promotion to take him back to Edinburgh and the heartland of Scottish politics. He was clearly an ambitious and up-and-coming man.
In 1710, Smith married Lilias Drummond, the daughter of Sir George Drummond of Milnab, a wealthy and prominent Edinburgh politician and one of the Scottish commissioners who had negotiated the Act of Union. They had one son, Hugh, a sickly child, who seems to have worked in the customs at Kirkcaldy until his death in 1749 or 1750. Lilias Smith died sometime between 1716 and 1718. In 1720 Smith remarried and once again married well. His second wife was Margaret Douglas, the daughter of a substantial and well-connected Fife laird who had sat in the old Scots Parliament. Again it was a short marriage. Smith died in January 1723, six months before the birth of his second son, Adam. Margaret Smith never remarried. Her husband had left her comfortably off and she was to spend most of her long life in Kirkcaldy among her family and friends, and most of that life was to be devoted to her son. He for his part was to spend long periods of his life at home in Kirkcaldy. It was there that he went to school, there he returned for many of the long vacations he enjoyed as a student and professor at Glasgow, and there that he wrote much of the Wealth of Nations between 1767 and 1773. And when after the publication of his masterpiece he was made a Commissioner of Customs in 1778 and had to move to Edinburgh, he took his eighty-four-year-old mother with him and set up home in Panmure House in the Canongate. His relationship with his mother could not have been closer. Dugald Stewart recalled that she treated him with ‘an unlimited indulgence; but it produced no unfavourable effects on his temper or his dispositions: and he enjoyed the rare satisfaction of being able to repay her affection, by every attention that filial gratitude could dictate, during the long period of sixty years.’1 Indeed the Earl of Buchan commented that ‘the three great avenues to Smith were his mother, his works and his political opinions. The conquest of him was easy through any of these channels.’2 When she died in 1784, Smith told his publisher William Strahan:
Tho’ the death of a person in the ninetieth year of her age was no doubt an event most agreable to the course of nature; and, therefore, to be foreseen and prepared for; yet I must say to you, what I have said to other people, that the final separation from a person who certainly loved me more than any other person ever did or ever will love me; and whom I certainly loved and respected more than I shall ever either love or respect any other person, I cannot help feeling, even at this hour, as a very heavy stroke upon me.3
Margaret Smith’s devotion had been amply repaid.
Kirkcaldy is situated 10 miles north of Edinburgh. Its first and best historian, the Reverend Thomas Fleming writing in 1791, observed that ‘[it] is properly but one long street, with a few lanes of small extent opening on each side of it’.4 The town, with its long, winding, narrow street, more than two miles long, and the hugger-mugger of small closes and wynds that sprouted from it, was fairly typical of the old coastal burghs of Scotland. What was odd about Kirkcaldy was the length of the High Street, which earned it the nickname it still enjoys – the Lang Toun. This it owed to geography, for eighteenth-century Kirkcaldy was bounded to the south by the long sandy beaches of the Firth of Forth, which Fleming regarded as ‘a safe and agreeable walk; and by which the traveller may generally avoid the uneasy jolting of a long and rugged pavement’; to the north it was bounded by a series of sharply rising terraces that butted onto the estates of an interesting and important group of landed families with which the Smith family was closely connected.
Kirkcaldy had a long history of settlement.5 Its name is said to be derived from the Celtic ‘Culdee’ and there is evidence of Roman and early Christian settlement. By the fourteenth century it had become a town of some consequence, having acquired burgh status and the right to trade freely in Scotland and overseas. By the early sixteenth century there was a small harbour and the town was developing as a centre of regional trade, importing goods from England, Ireland and the Low Countries in exchange for locally produced coarse cloth, nails and salt, as well as raw materials such as hides, wool, herring, salmon, coal and timber. A century later its merchants had extended their reach to France and the Baltic. By 1644 it was a burgh with a population of around 4,500, a fleet of around 100 ships, a complex guild system and a town council. The old church of St Bryce, which Fleming rightly described as ‘a large unshapely pile’, had another wing tacked onto it to accommodate the town’s growing population. The Town House had been enlarged in 1678 to house the gaol, the town guard, the meal market and the weigh house. The burgh’s small but evidently prosperous elite were building themselves fairly substantial houses at the west end of the town. By 1688, the town’s tax returns suggest that it had become the sixth or seventh most important burgh in Scotland and its reputation as a trading port was at its height.
But the town’s economy was beginning to face difficulties, a victim of historic events that were changing the face of the British state. It had been occupied and heavily taxed by both the Royalist and Covenanting armies during the Civil War. Its trade was severely disrupted by the Dutch Wars of the Restoration, and more severely still by the wars in the reigns of W
illiam III and Anne. Worse still, the town suffered badly from the Union, which brought increased English competition, a new focus on the possibilities of trade with the Americas and the Caribbean, and the exceptionally high customs and excise duties levied on the Scots in order to bring their tax system into alignment with that of England, an exercise in which Smith’s father was probably heavily involved. The effects of these historic developments on Kirkcaldy’s mercantile economy were disastrous. The number of ships registered in the harbour fell from around 24 in 1673 to 3 in 1760. By 1755, the town’s population was 2,296, little more than half of what it had been a century before; its position as a centre of mercantile trade had collapsed.
It would be wrong, however, to think of Smith growing up in a town whose economy was in a state of terminal decline. His schooldays in the 1730s coincided with the first real signs that Kirkcaldy’s economy was beginning to develop in an entirely new direction. This was a direct result of the growth of the linen industry, which was to help transform the economy of eastern Scotland in the early years of the new Anglo-Scottish Union.6 It was an enterprise which interested merchants trading with England and the colonies, landowners concerned with rural unemployment and low rents and patriots interested in the regeneration of the economy of post-Union Scotland. It attracted the interest of the grandly named and aristocratic The Honourable the Society for Improvement in the Knowledge of Agriculture (1723–c.45) and the patronage of the Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufactures, an eighteenth-century quango set up in 1727 to invest the funds the Scots had been given to compensate them for the collapse of the Darien scheme, Scotland’s first and only exercise in colonization. In fact, the Board was to devote most of its time and resources to the linen industry. As the Fife freeholders told the Convention of Royal Burghs, ‘No-one can claim better rights than the public for [this money] to be employed for the purpose mentioned since it belongs to Scotland.’7
Nicholas Phillipson Page 2