This analysis, which allowed Smith to show that the systems of public and private law that had developed throughout Europe had been designed to service the needs of a feudal civilization based on principles which were very different to those developing in a commercial age, enabled him to offer some trenchant criticism of outdated laws and customs such as those relating to primogeniture and entail, which had been introduced in the feudal age as a means of preventing the dissipation of great estates and were now obstructing the progress of a civilization which was based on very different principles. These were questions which he clearly knew were of immediate interest to modern lawyers and would shortly be debated by Edinburgh’s Select Society.42
Smith was particularly interested in the progress of government and in the seemingly natural tendency of judges and administrators to regularize and systematize the administration of law and government and to refine a people’s sense of justice. Learning the necessity of the rules of justice, learning to refrain from violence even when one’s own interests were at stake, was much easier when it was possible to think of justice as a system on whose integrity the security of life and property depended. For Smith a love of system – in speech and manners, in the management of domestic, business and public affairs, in the arts and sciences – was one of mankind’s primary characteristics, an aesthetic sentiment that had its roots in the imagination and our natural desire to understand and improve the world. To be sure, a sceptic like Hume might be deeply ambivalent about a mental disposition that could all too easily breed religious fanaticism and political zealotry. For Smith, however, imagination and the love of system were two of the most powerful resources that had rescued humanity from extinction and had made progress possible. In the last resort they were faculties on which security, virtue and happiness depended.
But the sense of justice was also deeply influenced by the way in which a country’s laws were administered, and it was this that formed the subject of the third and in many ways most remarkable section of the course. This dealt with ‘police’ and was devoted almost entirely to ‘bon marché or the cheapness of provisions, and having the market well supplied with all sorts of commodities. This must include not only the promoting a free communication betwixt the town and the country, the internall commerce as we may call it, but also on the plenty or opulence of the neighbouring country.’43 In this, ‘the most important branch of police’, Smith was to complete his theory of human nature and lay the groundwork of the system of political economy he was to develop in his two masterpieces, the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations. He was to do so in a way that marked him out as a philosopher of improvement and a pupil of Hutcheson who was, nevertheless, developing radically different ideas about liberty and the pursuit of happiness to those of his teacher.
Like Shaftesbury and Locke, Hutcheson had belonged to an older generation of Whigs who had taken the conventional path of maintaining that it was the duty of the legislator to promote virtue and a sense of liberty, as well as to provide the good government needed to check the growing economic and political power of the nobility, a class whose ‘ambition, vanity, insolence, and … unsociable contempt of the lower orders, as if they were not of the same species, or were not fellow-citizens with them’ was a patently intolerable obstacle to justice.44 Their rack-rented estates and their political corruption were immiserating the poor, threatening the powers of the commons and opening up the horrible prospect of a constitutional slide into hereditary aristocracy – ‘among the very worst forms of government’.45 Like most of the older radical Whigs, Hutcheson looked forward to the day in which it would be possible for a virtuously minded parliament to hold the powers of the nobility in check by means of agrarian laws, rotations of office and frequent elections. However, he also went on to suggest, controversially, that this could be helped by promoting trade, manufactures and commerce. For economic growth would promote industry and employment among the poor and would provide the merchant and manufacturer with the sort of wealth that would encourage beneficence and the easy social relations on which virtue and liberty ultimately depended. This was an attempt to counter Mandeville’s notorious claim that promoting economic growth depended on exploiting our capacity for luxury and conspicuous consumption. Was it really true, Hutcheson asked, ‘that luxury is necessary or useful to encourage arts and manufactures?’46 Were not habits of industry and temperance in employers and employees and a desire to live well in a state of ‘sober plenty’ more favourable to virtue and liberty and the progress of industry and commerce? And would not a man who chose to live his life in this prosperous but temperate and benevolent condition ‘generally [make] a greater consumption than a prodigal of equal fortune; who is often punished with a long tract of diseases and penury, for the extravagance of a few years’?47 Under the right conditions, commerce surely had the power to create a class which would be wealthy and virtuous enough to check the powers of the nobility and to secure the liberties and prosperity of a free polity. Hutcheson’s thinking was speculative in the extreme, a radical dream which might have made limited sense to those living in the prosperous but puritan mercantile world of Glasgow, but one which sounded old-fashioned and utopian in the context of the ruthlessly competitive consumer culture of Mandeville’s London. Nevertheless it was a critique which Smith would develop in his own way to open up his discussion of police and use as the bedrock on which his political economy would ultimately be based.
What was striking and original in the lectures on police was Smith’s insistence that political stability and a sense of justice were intimately connected with ‘the proper means of introducing plenty and abundance into the country, that is, the cheapness of goods of all sorts. For these terms plenty and cheapness are in a manner synonimous, as cheapness is a necessary consequence of plenty.’48 Smith went on to consider the meaning of opulence and plenty and what he described as ‘the naturall wants of mankind’, developing the conjecture about need and improvement he had proposed as the basis of his lecture on the origins of language. The outcome was a powerful response to Mandeville’s account of the progress of opulence that had proved so troublesome to his old teacher. ‘Man,’ said Smith, ‘has received from the bounty of nature reason and ingenuity, art, contrivance, and capacity of improvement far superior to that which she has bestowed on any of the other animalls, but is at the same time in a much more helpless and destitute condition with regard to the support and comfort of his life.’49 His creativity was a function of his indigence. He learned to cook because he found raw flesh difficult to digest. He learned to make clothes and build huts because he was too frail to live like the beasts. ‘The same temper and inclinations which prompted him to make these improvements push him to still greater refinements.’ Disgust with a ‘rude and slovenly’ way of life had driven him to seek ‘more elegant nicities’ and to value things for aesthetic rather than functional reasons, and it was this that provided a standard of value which powered the civilizing process Mandeville had described in such sardonic terms. For ‘in a certain view of things all the arts, the sciences, law and government, wisdom, and even virtue itself tend all to this one thing, the providing meat, drink, rayment, and lodging for men, which are commonly reckoned the meanest of employments and fit for the pursuit of none but the lowest and meanest of the people’.50
Smith’s discussion of need also shows him distancing himself from Hume. Hume had shown that the origins of all our social sentiments, our senses of justice, political obligation, morality and beauty, could be explained in terms of sympathy and need. In the lectures on jurisprudence, Smith had set those insights in an anthropological, or, as contemporaries thought of it, a historical framework. At one level that had meant elaborating Hume’s discussion of the multiplicity of needs by applying it to the experience of different types of civilization. At another, it had meant demonstrating the overriding importance of the means of subsistence and private property in bringing political societies into existence. But what h
ad been built into this discussion had been Smith’s profound insights into the importance of security and good government in releasing that love of improvement on which the progress of civilization depended. It was that sense of security that encouraged citizens to seek the conveniences as well as the necessities of life, and which encouraged magistrates and rulers to regularize the systems of law and government on which continued security and progress depended. It would have been perfectly possible for a metaphysician or a pedant to claim that the motivation for such behaviour was selfishness or benevolence, but Smith detected a more immediate, less speculative motive at work in the behaviour of a significant number of people – an aesthetic sensibility, which led them to seek convenience or order because it was beautiful and satisfying for its own sake as well as for any benefit it might bring oneself or others. It was a response to circumstances with beneficial if unintended consequences for the progress of civilization, behaviour which Smith in one of his more poetical moments would attribute to the workings of the Invisible Hand.
In the reported version of the lectures, Smith was to use this discussion of need and improvement as the basis for a remarkable conjectural history of the progress of opulence, which provided the foundation of much of the thinking about the duties of government that is to be found in the Wealth of Nations. What is more, as Dugald Stewart noticed, it is clear that he had already reached important radical conclusions about the nature of those duties in his Edinburgh lectures. We do not and probably never will know whether those conclusions were reached in the same way in 1751 as they were to be in 1763, but it seems reasonably certain that Smith realized that in these lectures on police he was entering new territory in a new way. Characteristically this took the form of showing that a relatively commonplace paradox about the effects of economic growth on society could be resolved in a way which would have the most profound consequences for understanding economic development. Locke had posed the paradox in its classic form by observing that ‘a King of a large and fruitful Territory there [America] feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England’,51 resolving the paradox by observing that civilized societies, unlike savage societies, used land productively. For Smith, the paradox ran deeper, and the way in which he resolved it laid the foundations for the sort of conclusions he was able to claim as his own in 1755. Locke, he argued, had overlooked the enormous inequalities which were characteristic of all improved societies, and their effects on the poorest members of the population. Unlike the artisan, the poor labourer
has all the inconveniencies of the soil and the season to struggle with, is continually exposed to the inclemency of the weather and the most severe labour at the same time. Thus he who as it were supports the whole frame of society and furnishes the means of the convenience and ease of all the rest is himself possessed of a very small share and is buried in obscurity. He bears on his shoulders the whole of mankind, and unable to sustain the load is buried by the weight of it and thrust down into the lowest parts of the earth, from whence he supports all the rest. In what manner then shall we account for the great share he and the lowest of the people have of the conveniencies of life[?]
Smith’s historic answer was that, ‘The division of labour amongst different hands can alone account for this.’52
By 1762 Smith was to press his insights into the economic consequences of the division of labour further by arguing that the progress of the division of labour is controlled by the market, and it was on this proposition that the economic analysis in the Wealth of Nations would be based. It is impossible to know how near he was to gaining this historic insight in 1750–51. A Glasgow student reported that Smith had told him he had first met David Hume at that time, when Hume was working on his Political Discourses and on essays on the theory of commerce that Smith was to find particularly useful.53 We do not know whether he knew about these essays in 1750–51, or even whether he was in a position to make use of them then. Nevertheless, his assertion in 1750–51 that ‘Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things’ suggests that he was already thinking about the effects of government actions on the progress of the division of labour, and on the process of exchange upon which it depended. It was this line of thinking that allowed him to fire the first of his famous attacks on monopolies, and other restrictions on trade, manufactures and agriculture, claiming that governments could carry out their primary duty of promoting justice and encouraging the spread of sociability most effectively by removing obstacles to the progress of the division of labour. If this is indeed what Smith accomplished in 1750–51, he was not only laying the foundations of a new sort of jurisprudence but also thinking about the effects the means of subsistence, property and government had on the process of social and economic exchange and the progress of civilization. If that is so, he was laying the foundations for the two great enterprises to which he would devote himself as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow.
The two series of public lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence were a landmark in Smith’s career, establishing him as a leading member of the younger literati of ministers and lawyers around whom the intellectual life of the capital would increasingly revolve. This was when he became friends with Hugh Blair, with the formidable historian and future Principal of Edinburgh University, William Robertson, with Edinburgh’s future Professor of Moral Philosophy, Adam Ferguson, with John Home, the dramatist and future political agent to the Earl of Bute, with members of the medical community and with William Cullen, another of Home’s protégés who was appointed Professor of Medicine at Glasgow in 1751 and was to become one of Smith’s closest friends. His lectures left their mark on the literati’s intellectual life. Blair acknowledged important debts to Smith’s rhetoric lectures in developing his own highly influential course, Smith having loaned him the text of his own course and having once commented ‘He is very welcome, there is enough left.’54 Whether or not Robertson heard the lectures on jurisprudence or was loaned Smith’s text, the outcome was less happy. According to the antiquarian George Chalmers, one of Smith’s Glasgow students told him that Smith thought that Robertson ‘had borrowed the first vol. of his hist[ory] of Cha[rles] 5 from them as Every Student Could testify’.55 Above all, this was the period in which Smith met David Hume, the man whose work had already enormously influenced his own. Thus began a friendship which was to ripen into one of the closest and most fruitful of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Smith’s lectures and the circle in which they placed him made it entirely fitting that he should have shortly found himself formally recognized as one of the leading members of the younger Edinburgh literati. In 1752 he was appointed vice-president of the relaunched Philosophical Society and, two years later, became a founder-member of the Select Society, two societies which were to provide Edinburgh’s enlightenment with its institutional and ideological definition. By that time he had also become one of the most notable and innovative members of the Faculty of Glasgow University.
6
Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, 1. 1751–9
Smith gave the last of his Edinburgh lectures in the early spring of 1751 and probably returned to Kirkcaldy to prepare himself for his new appointment as Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Glasgow. The post had fallen vacant the previous November on the death of his old professor John Loudon and there was an immediate contest to replace him. There were two candidates: Smith, and another of Francis Hutcheson’s former pupils, George Muirhead. Muirhead was a serious candidate. Hutcheson had backed him for the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy chair in 1746 and David Hume thought him a suitable replacement for Smith when Smith was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1752. Muirhead was appointed Professor of Oriental Languages at Glasgow in 1753 and Professor of Humanity a year later, and was regarded as a proper candidate for the Moral Philosophy chai
r when Smith resigned in 1763.1 Like Smith, he came from Fife. But Smith’s Edinburgh reputation, coupled with James Oswald’s lobbying, Home’s backing and the Duke of Argyll’s probable support, was enough to secure Smith a unanimous election and the appointment was duly announced in the Glasgow Courant of 7 January 1751. Shortly after, Smith went to Glasgow to sign the Confession of Faith before the Glasgow Presbytery, to take ‘the usual oath de Fideli’ and to deliver an inaugural dissertation, ‘De Origine Idearum’ (now lost), before returning to Edinburgh to complete his lectures, leaving the new Professor of Civil Law, Hercules Lindesay, one of his sponsors, to finish Loudon’s logic and metaphysics course. The whole business was settled quickly and competently. What soured the moment was the unwelcome discovery that the election had generated the sort of professorial backbiting that was all too characteristic of this most enlightened of British universities.
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