Much of Hutcheson’s political thinking was inspired by the radical Whiggery of the previous century and must have sounded dated to many of his Glasgow students. His strikingly radical thinking about the rights of resistance to unwelcome kings looked back to the republicanism of Algernon Sidney and to George Buchanan’s alarming views that subjects had a right to change their rulers whenever they felt like it. Like the radicals of a previous generation he spoke of the need for agrarian laws, frequent elections and rotations to curb the threat of oligarchy. He too believed that the future of liberty lay with the middling ranks and particularly with the gentry, whose minds were uncorrupted by excessive wealth or poverty and who possessed the capacity for sharing in the values of the Christian Stoic Enlightenment to which he was committed.
Smith was to be indebted to Hutcheson for inspiration as much as for philosophy. Hutcheson’s moral philosophy gave him an introduction to the problem which was to be of central and continuing importance to his own. For, like Hobbes, Pufendorf and Hutcheson, Smith’s interests in rhetoric, jurisprudence, ethics and political economy were continually to return to questions about sociability and the processes of social exchange on which society, the progress of civilization and an understanding of the role of government in fostering the civilizing process depended. Hutcheson’s subtle, nuanced analysis of the workings of the moral sense showed Smith that the study of sociability and society must begin with the process of social interaction as it is experienced in everyday life, and should revisit those classic and fundamental questions about the origins of those ideas of justice, political obligation and morality on which the citizen’s capacity for sociable living depends. His interest in the citizen’s need to be reassured that his ideas of morality were right as well as convenient, as well as his interest in the duties of government in fostering the development of societies which were virtuous as well as sociable, was to raise profound questions about the relationship between our never-ending desire to satisfy our moral and intellectual needs, and the material needs that animate social existence. These too were questions which would preoccupy Smith for the rest of his life.
But Smith was never able to subscribe to Hutcheson’s belief in the reality of the moral sense, which was derived from the latter’s convictions about the essential benevolence of human nature and the deity, both of which Smith found unphilosophical. He was to find Hutcheson’s image of the benevolent virtuous citizen too arcane to supply him with a general theory of sociability. And, perhaps above all, he was to find Hutcheson’s thinking short on historical vision, harking back to the world of Pufendorf and the radical Whigs of the late seventeenth century and those debates about the benevolence and selfishness of human nature that were beginning to seem redundant. For unlike the historically minded literati of Edinburgh, Hutcheson seemed relatively unaware of the transformations which were overtaking the state system in Europe and the transformational power of commerce that Mandeville had so brilliantly satirized. It was a weakness that for all his sensitivity to the moral life of well-placed citizens had meant that Hutcheson was strikingly insensitive to the changing nature of political power and the problems of government in the modern world. They were matters which had exercised Pufendorf, and were ones to which Smith would return.
3
Private Study 1740–46: Oxford and David Hume
Smith left Glasgow in May 1740, shortly before the end of the academic year. He was, apparently, ‘of a cachetic [debilitated] habit, his appearance was ungracious, and his address awkward. His frequent absence of mind gave him an air of vacancy, and even of stupidity’, but he was well regarded, and according to the Professor of Greek he was ‘a very fine boy as any we have’.1 He went home to Kirkcaldy to see his mother and to prepare for what he knew would be a long stay at Oxford. He had been awarded a Snell exhibition worth £40 per annum, which would allow him to spend up to eleven years at Balliol College.2
Smith cannot have gone to Oxford with particularly high expectations. The reformist Whig circles in which he moved in Kirkcaldy and Glasgow had long regarded Oxford as a faction-ridden sump of Jacobite and high Anglican zealotry and as a by-word for academic incompetence. ‘We see Whigs engag’d against Whigs, Tories against Tories, Masters against Doctors and Heads of Colleges, Senior Fellows against Junior Fellows, one College against another College, and many Colleges against themselves’, wrote Nicholas Amhurst, one of Oxford’s sharpest critics, in 1721. Worse still, this was a period in which Oxford’s low reputation for teaching and scholarship – gleefully exaggerated in the Whig press – became a matter of national scandal. The idle, ignorant and venal don who ‘lives and moulders away in a supine and regular course of eating, drinking, sleeping and cheating the juniors’ became a national figure of fun.3 The curriculum ‘in some measure defective, since we are obliged to adhere so much to the rules laid down by our forefathers’ and still heavily dependent on ‘the old scholastic learning’ continued to be taught, according to the Regius Professor of History David Gregory, ‘because nothing else has been substituted in its place’.4
Throughout the early decades of the century, the threat of a Royal Visitation had hung over Oxford, as it had hung over the Scottish universities. But Oxford had managed to preserve its distance and its inglorious academic reputation from government interference, exasperating more radical Whigs like Lord Egmont who thought that the present system ‘makes the Fellows lazy, whereas when pinched in their circumstances and without prospect of College livings, they would study hard to go out in the world’.5 With the experience of six years of Balliol behind him, Smith would agree. In the Wealth of Nations, he used the same Whig language to suggest that these weaknesses were symptoms of a systemic failure in a university he came to despise and whose competence contrasted strikingly with Scottish practice. The interest of the Oxford professor who lived on a university salary and not on student fees, he commented,
is, in this case, set as directly in opposition to his duty as it is possible to set it. It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does, or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as interest is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit. If he is naturally active and a lover of labour, it is his interest to employ that activity in any way, from which he can derive some advantage, rather than in the performance of his duty, from which he can derive none … In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the publick professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.6
Oxford’s historians have always complained that this party political language exaggerated the university’s weaknesses and overlooked the efforts of worthy individuals trying to teach an antiquated and unrewarding curriculum. But it is hard to think that either the university or, for that matter, Balliol had much to offer Smith by way of teaching. The college’s fellowship was a mixed and mediocre bunch. While one of Smith’s friends liked his tutor ‘as I profitted very much by his superintending my studies’, another had to put up with a tutor who was notorious for extracting fees from students and not teaching at all, and a third friend, Matthew Beattie, liked his tutor well enough, but admitted that his education was largely self-directed.7 Nor was the strongly Jacobite college a particularly congenial place for studious Presbyterian Whigs. Tied fellowships and local loyalties had linked Balliol to the Tory-Jacobite south-western counties of England. In 1688, five of its fellows had been expelled as non-jurors; in 1745, the Master of the college refused to sign the Oxford ‘Association’, which was supposed to demonstrate the county’s loyalty to the Hanoverians. To make matters worse, Balliol did not make Snell exhibitioners feel particularly welcome. The Snell exhibition itself had long been a subject of feuding between Glasgow and Balliol. It had been establi
shed in 1677 by John Snell’s bequest which had endowed twelve exhibitions to allow students of Scottish universities to study at the college for periods of up to eleven years. Snell’s will, however, was riddled with ambiguities, not the least of which was the requirement that the exhibitions should be given to those who were prepared to read for Holy Orders in the Church of England and to join the Episcopalian Church in Scotland, a provision which was nullified in 1738, two years before Smith’s election. Balliol was constantly criticized for leaving exhibitions unfilled and using the revenue for its own purposes. Exhibitioners constantly complained that they were badly treated. Indeed, in 1744, when they complained to the Glasgow Senate of rudeness and of being left with the worst rooms, Balliol’s Master retorted that as the Scots had ‘a total dislike of the College’ they had better go elsewhere.8
What then did Smith want of Oxford? Dugald Stewart thought that he was being prepared for a career in the Church of England, an option which would have been ruled out if a contemporary’s view that ‘he had early become a disciple of Voltaire’s in matters of religion’ is to be credited.9 Margaret Smith, who must have taken advice from her son’s legal guardian, William Smith, the Duke of Argyll’s secretary, as well as from the Oswalds, was probably told that the Snell exhibition would give him time to work on his own until something turned up, a tutor’s post in a noble household, perhaps, or a professorship at a Scottish university. What is more, because William Smith lived at Adderbury, Argyll’s residence in Oxfordshire, he would not only be able to keep an eye on his relation but might well be able to introduce him to the Duke himself. At all events, Smith’s first known letter, written to his guardian shortly after his arrival at Oxford, suggests that he had few illusions about what was in store for him.
Oxford 24 Aug. 1740
Sir
I yesterday receiv’d your letter with a bill of sixteen pounds inclos’d, for which I humbly thank you, but more for the good advice you were pleased to give me: I am indeed affraid that my expences at college must necessarily amount to a much greater sum this year than at any time hereafter; because of the extraordinary and most extravagant fees we are obligd to pay the College and University on our admittance; it will be his own fault if anyone should endanger his health at Oxford by excessive Study, our only business here being to go to prayers twice a day, and to lecture twice a week. I am, dear Sir
Your most Oblig’d Servant
Adam Smith10
Smith was characteristically unforthcoming about his time at Oxford. Only three laconic letters from this period have survived, in one of which he apologized to his mother – as he was to apologize so often – for being a bad correspondent. ‘I am quite inexcusable for not writing to you oftener,’ he wrote in July 1744. ‘I think of you every day, but always defer writing till the post is just going, and then sometimes business or company, but oftener laziness, hinders me.’11 Balliol’s Battells Book suggests that he was in almost continuous residence, living modestly but reasonably comfortably on his Snell exhibition, which was topped up from 1742 by a Warner exhibition, worth £8. 5s. p.a. and by periodic help from his family. What lectures he attended, even the name of his tutor, is unknown. Nor do we know what access he had to books and libraries. As a future bibliophile he presumably bought as many books as he could afford, probably relying on Edinburgh booksellers to supply him by mail order as well as on the Oxford book trade. But libraries would have been a problem. The undergraduate library at Balliol would have been inadequate for his purposes and the College Library and the Bodleian Library were only open to Masters of Arts, though friendly dons could have borrowed books on his behalf. What seems more likely is that William Smith arranged for him to use the excellent library at Adderbury, eighteen miles from Oxford.
But Smith had not gone to Oxford to be taught. What he needed and what he got was time and space to distance himself from his Glasgow education and to develop his own interests. According to Dugald Stewart, this meant developing his abiding interest in politics, polite literature, the history of ideas and ‘the improvement of society’:
The study of human nature in all its branches, more particularly of the political history of mankind, opened a boundless field to his curiosity and ambition; and while it afforded scope to all the various powers of his versatile and comprehensive genius, gratified his ruling passion, of contributing to the happiness and the improvement of society. To this study, diversified at his leisure hours by the less severe occupations of polite literature, he seems to have devoted himself almost entirely from the time of his removal to Oxford; but he still retained, and retained even in advanced years, a recollection of his early acquisitions, which not only added to the splendour of his conversation, but enabled him to exemplify some of his favourite theories concerning the natural progress of the mind in the investigation of truth, by the history of those sciences in which the connection and succession of discoveries may be traced with the greatest advantage.12
It must have been at Oxford that he began to acquire what was to be an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of contemporary literature on the constitutions of the polities of the ancient and modern worlds, and to develop his lifelong interest in studying these constitutions for the light they shed on the manners and customs of peoples living in different ages and at different times. More particularly, this must have been the period in which he set out to master the voluminous and complex literature on the principles of human nature which had been developed in France in the previous century. Later in life he remembered teaching himself French, presumably by using the same method David Miller had used to teach him Latin and Greek in Kirkcaldy, by translating from French into English and back again.13 Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696) was an essential resource for a serious young philosopher on account of its extraordinary sceptical review of ancient and modern philosophy. Descartes, Malebranche and Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Racine and Marivaux would have given him access to the subtleties of that dark, complex, Augustinian view of human nature on which so much of recent French philosophy and literature was built and on which Pufendorf and Mandeville had drawn. It was a view which stressed the ‘weaknesses of human nature’, the frailty of reason, the delusive power of the imagination, the turbulence of the passions and the difficulty of living virtuously in a corrupt world without the consolations of religion. Like Hutcheson, Smith was to find this outlook on human nature uncongenial and even silly. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments he described La Rochefoucauld’s libertine denial of the reality of moral distinctions as elegant, superficially plausible and wholly pernicious (a remark he later withdrew in deference to the protests of a later Duc de La Rochefoucauld whom he knew and liked).14 He regarded Pascal’s moving analysis of the nature of human wretchedness as the work of a ‘whining moralist’.15 But what mattered about this sort of analysis was the psychological subtlety that these philosophers brought to the study of human nature and their insight into the nagging complexity of psychological need.
Such writers had famously written for an intelligent, educated and generally well-born elite, and they had only occasionally looked beyond their rarefied private world to that of ordinary human beings who were engaged in the pursuit of wealth, power and amour-propre, or self-esteem, seemingly blissfully unaware of their wretchedness. In an essay which Mandeville and Smith must have known, Pierre Nicole marvelled at the way in which even the most contemptible of passions like greed could animate our amour-propre, and in a way which would unintentionally serve the public good much better than random acts of charity.
We find, for example, almost everywhere when we are travelling, men who are ready to serve those who pass and have lodgings ready to receive them. We dispose of their services as we wish; we command them and they obey us and make us believe that it gives them pleasure to serve us. They never excuse themselves from rendering any service demanded of them. How could such behaviour be more admirable if it were animated by the spirit of charity itself? It is greed which m
akes them act, and they do so with such a good grace that one believes one does them a favour by employing their services.
Think how much charity would be required to build a whole house for another man, to furnish it completely and then hand him the key. Greed does this quite joyfully. What a degree of charity would be needed to go search for medicines in the Indies, or abase oneself to the vilest services, and the most painful? Greed does all this without complaining.16
As we shall see, while Smith never doubted that beneficent actions might well be influenced by the basest of passions, he was more interested in our desire to be seen as acting in a way which others approve of and which we approve of ourselves. Smith’s interest in the material, moral and intellectual needs of the human species at different stages of its development and in our longing for self-respect was to be of the utmost importance in shaping his moral philosophy. There was much to be learned on this subject from contemporary French literature. Smith greatly admired Racine and thought Phaedre ‘the finest tragedy, perhaps, that is extant in any language’.17 As he saw it, Racine had followed Euripides’ excellent practice of using prologues to explain the plot so that ‘we may be free to attend to the Sentiments and Actions of each scene’,18 clearing the ground for the central dramatic purpose of showing the characters struggling to control the passions which threatened to destroy their lives and honour. But Phaedre was no Euripidean heroine, responding to claims of a code of honour that transcended that of ordinary mortals. The Phaedre who interested Smith in the Theory of Moral Sentiments was the woman who addresses herself to an audience of ordinary spectators and is able to make them sympathize with her incestuous love for her son and even love her, ‘notwithstanding all the extravagance and guilt which attend it. That very extravagance and guilt may be said, in some measure, to recommend it to us,’ Smith commented. ‘Her fear, her shame, her remorse, her horror, her despair, become thereby more natural and interesting. All the secondary passions, if I may be allowed to call them so, which arise from the situation of love, become necessarily more furious and violent; and it is with these secondary passions only that we can properly be said to sympathize.’19
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