10. Carlyle, Anecdotes and Characters, p. 30.
11. Cameron, Bank of Scotland, pp. 45–6.
12. [David Hume], ‘A True Account of the Behaviour and Conduct of Archibald Stewart, Esq. Late Lord Provost of Edinburgh’, reprinted in J.V. Price, The Ironic Hume, pp. 154–74.
13. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 37–44.
14. MacInnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart 1603–1788, pp. 204–5, 211–13.
15. W. Crosse, ‘Some considerations by way of Essays upon the means of civilizing the Highlands’ (1748), NLS MS S201.
16. Pinkerton, ed., The Minute Book of the Faculty of Advocates. Vol. 2: 1713–1750, p. 225.
17. SRO GD110/963/7. I am very grateful to David Raynor for this reference.
18. [H. Home], Essays upon Several Subjects concerning British Antiquities, Introduction.
19. Lieberman, ‘The Legal Needs of a Commercial Society: The Jurisprudence of Lord Kames’, and Phillipson, ‘The Civic Leadership of Post Union Scotland’.
20. Home, Elements of Criticism, Introduction.
21. Allardyce, ed., Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century: From the MSS of John Ramsay, Esq. of Ochtertyre, vol. i, pp. 194–5.
22. Quoted in Shapin, ‘Property, Patronage and the Politics of Science: The Founding of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’, p. 10.
23. Allardyce, Scotland and Scotsmen, vol. i, pp. 204–5.
24. Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, p. 385.
25. Tytler, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, vol. i, p. 218.
26. EPS, pp. 259–61.
Notes on Sources
This chapter develops my own work on Edinburgh’s post-Union history, the gist of which is to be found in ‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, and in ‘Politics, Politeness and the Anglicisation of Early Eighteenth-Century Scottish Culture’. On the Union debate see A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707, edited by J. Robertson. A very dated introduction to Edinburgh’s clubs and societies is to be found in D.D. McElroy’s Scotland’s Age of Improvement: A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literary Clubs and Societies. Edinburgh University lacks an extended modern history but see D.B. Horn, A Short History of the University of Edinburgh 1556–1889 and Anderson, Lynch and Phillipson’s The University of Edinburgh: An Illustrated History. The history of the Church and moderate Presbyterianism is the subject of R.B. Sher’s seminal Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh. For the history of the legal profession, see my The Scottish Whigs and the Reform of the Court of Session 1785–1830. Colin Kidd’s Subverting Scotland’s Past. Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity deals brilliantly with the challenge the Highland problem presented to Scots law. Lord Kames’s role as a cultural entrepreneur is still not properly studied but A.F. Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames and I.S. Ross’s Lord Kames and the Scotland of his Day are both essential reading.
5. SMITH’S EDINBURGH LECTURES: A CONJECTURAL HISTORY
1. Tytler, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, vol. i, pp. 266–7.
2. Ross, p. 86.
3. Tytler, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home, vol. 1, pp. 266–7.
4. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, p. 115.
5. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, vol. 2, p. 22n.
6. LR, Intro., p. 12.
7. LR, p. 26.
8. LR, p. 42.
9. LR, p. 8.
10. LR, p. 203.
11. LR, p. 9.
12. LR, pp. 9, 203–4.
13. LR, p. 204.
14. LR, pp. 223–4.
15. LR, p. 5.
16. LR, p. 55.
17. LR, pp. 56–7. Cf. Mandeville’s devastating character sketch in ‘A Search into the Nature of Society’ in The Fable of the Bees, pp. 331–3.
18. LR, p. 63.
19. LR, pp. 111–12.
20. LR, pp. 142–6.
21. LJ, pp. 352, 494.
22. [Henry Home], Essays upon Several Subjects concerning British Antiquities, pp. 4, 24.
23. Sklar, Montesquieu, ch. 1 and Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, ch. 2.
24. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, p. 310.
25. Ibid.
26. Cited in Kapossy, ‘Virtue, Sociability and the History of Mankind’, p. 244.
27. Stewart, p. 275n.
28. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, p. 3.
29. Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, pp. 197–215.
30. Moore, ‘Natural Rights in the Scottish Enlightenment’.
31. Stewart, pp. 321–2. The text of the paper is now lost.
32. LJ, p. 5.
33. LJ, p. 7.
34. LJ, p. 17.
35. LJ, pp. 14–16.
36. LJ, pp. 208–9. See also p. 338.
37. LJ, pp. 221, 218.
38. LJ, pp. 208–35.
39. LJ, p. 264.
40. LJ, p. 252.
41. LJ, p. 260.
42. Between 1754 and 1764 the Select Society debated questions relating to the desirability of entails on four occasions, on the value of primogeniture and female succession on five occasions and the question of whether aristocracy or democracy posed a greater threat to liberty on three occasions. Advocates Manuscripts, NLS, 23.1.1.
43. LJ, p. 6.
44. Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, vol. ii, p. 255.
45. Ibid.
46. Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, p. 307.
47. Ibid., p. 308.
48. LJ, p. 333.
49. LJ, p. 334.
50. LJ, p. 338.
51. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, pp. 296–7.
52. LJ, p. 341.
53. EUL MSS. La II 451/2. The possibility that they met in the winter of 1749–50 cannot be ruled out.
54. Rae, p. 33.
55. EUL MSS. La II. 451/2.
Notes on Sources
Historians have treated this formative period in Smith’s intellectual career very gingerly on account of the exiguous and often equivocal data about the circumstances in which Smith gave his lectures and the content of the lectures themselves. This data certainly can be read in a variety of ways and I am very grateful to David Raynor for having devoted so much time and trouble to a sceptical scrutiny of the conjectural account given here. However, our conversations and correspondence have convinced me that my account of the circumstances in which Smith lectured on rhetoric and jurisprudence, of the vexed question of whether he gave one course – on rhetoric, to which he may have added lectures on jurisprudence in 1749–50 – or two distinct courses, one on rhetoric and another on jurisprudence, is as plausible as any other and has the additional advantage of being supported by my account of the intellectual milieu in which the lectures were given. In matters as important as this, biographers must be prepared to conjecture if they are to have any hope of providing a coherent account of their subjects’ lives and the development of their thought and if they are to generate fresh thinking on important biographical matters. Anyway, as Henry Home once said to James Boswell, ‘with that spring of thought, that kind of sally for which he was ever remarkable, “You’ll not go to hell for conjecturing” ’ (Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, p. 36).
On Smith’s rhetoric S.J. McKenna’s Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety has transformed a neglected and important field. See also W.S. Howell, ‘Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric: An Historical Assessment’. I have found Q. Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes particularly suggestive. On Smith’s theory of language, see C.J. Berry, ‘Adam Smith’s Considerations on Language’ and M. Dascal, ‘Adam Smith’s Theory of Language’, and, for the w
ider context, Hans Aarsleff’s classic The Study of Language in England 1780–1860.
On Smith’s jurisprudence and its place in the history of western political thought, Istvan Hont’s Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective is of fundamental importance. I have also learned much from K. Haakonssen’s The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith. See also D. Lieberman’s ‘Adam Smith on Justice, Rights, and Law’, in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith.
6. PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY AT GLASGOW, 1. 1751–9
1. Corr., p. 100.
2. Corr., pp. 334–6.
3. Corr., pp. 4–5.
4. Devine, The Tobacco Lords, p. 11.
5. Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, p. 364.
6. Cited in Peters, ‘Glasgow’s Tobacco Lords’, pp. 364–6.
7. Gibson, The History of Glasgow, pp. 114, 120.
8. WN, p. 374.
9. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, pp. 379–90.
10. Thomson, An Account of the Life, Lectures and Writings of William Cullen, vol. i, p. 46.
11. Walker, ed., The Correspondence of James Boswell and John Johnston of Grange, p. 7.
12. Corr., pp. 5–6. Jardine, Outlines of Philosophical Education, p. 26.
13. Corr., pp. 5–6.
14. James Wodrow–Samuel Kenrick, 21 January 1752, Wodrow–Kenrick Correspondence. Dr William’s Library MSS 24.157 (16).
15. Jardine, Outlines of Philosophical Education, p. 24.
16. Ibid., pp. 85ff.
17. ‘Book of the Foulis Exhibition 1913’, Proceedings of the Glasgow Bibliographical Society, vol. ii, 1913, pp. 70–73.
18. Scott, p. 149.
19. Denina, Essay on the Revolutions of Literature, reprinted in the Scots Magazine (1764).
20. Carlyle, Anecdotes and Characters of the Times, p. 38.
21. WN, p. 267 and note 12.
22. The Defects of an University Education and its Unsuitableness to a Commercial People, p. 16.
23. [W. Thom], The Motives which have determined the University of Glasgow to desert the Blackfriars Church and betake themselves to a Chapel …
24. [W. Thom], The Scheme for Erecting an Academy in Glasgow, pp. 33–4.
25. There is an authoritative account of Smith’s book-collecting and the subsequent history of his library in Adam Smith’s Library: A Catalogue, ed. Mizuta, pp. xvii–xxiii.
26. Allardyce, ed., Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, p. 403n.
27. Richardson, Discourses on Theological and Literary Subjects, pp. 507–8.
28. Rae, p. 50.
29. Stewart, pp. 274–5.
30. Allardyce, ed., Scotland and Scotsmen, vol. i, pp. 462–3.
31. Stewart, pp. 275–6.
32. St James’s Chronicle, Saturday, 31 July 1790.
33. Walker, ed., Correspondence of James Boswell and John Johnston of Grange, p. 7.
34. Sinclair, Sketches of Old Times and Distant Places, p. 9.
35. Allardyce, ed., Scotland and Scotsmen, vol. i, p. 463.
36. Rae, p. 61.
37. Ross, p. 214.
38. Corr., p. 25.
39. Corr., p. 12.
40. Corr., pp. 9–10.
Notes on Sources
Scott, Campbell and Skinner, Stewart and Ross are essential sources for this period in Smith’s academic career. For the history of the university, see the notes to chapter 2. For Glasgow’s clubs and societies, see J. Strang, Glasgow and its Clubs. For the remarkable Foulis Press see P. Gaskell’s A Bibliography of the Foulis Press and J. Maclehose’s The Glasgow University Press.
7. THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS AND THE CIVILIZING POWERS OF COMMERCE
1. WN, p. 790.
2. Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, p. 261.
3. Hume, ‘Of Money’, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, p. 281.
4. Hume, ‘Of Interest’, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, p. 300.
5. Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, pp. 270–71.
6. Ibid.
7. Smith’s two reviews are published in EPS, pp. 232–54.
8. Hume’s list of the founders of modern philosophy is to be found in the introduction to the Treatise, p. xvii. It reads ‘Mr. Locke, my Lord Shaftsbury, Dr. Mandeville, Mr. Hutchinson, Dr. Butler, &.
9. It is perhaps worth noting that an enterprising small-time Edinburgh printer, W. Gray and W. Peter, reprinted the ninth edition of the Fable of the Bees in 1755.
10. EPS, pp. 250–51.
11. TMS, p. 9.
12. TMS, p. 9. In Cicero, the agonies of the rack are invoked in order to show that even the worst pain will seem less acute if we feel we are suffering for a noble cause. For Smith, we like to feel that these agonies will be mitigated by sympathy. Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, ed. H. Rackham, Loeb Classics (London, 1914), pp. 261–3.
13. TMS, p. 16.
14. TMS, p. 19.
15. TMS, p. 41.
16. LJ, p. 497.
17. Corr., p. 43.
18. TMS, pp. 51–2.
19. TMS, p. 50.
20. TMS, p. 82.
21. TMS, p. 82.
22. TMS, p. 83.
23. TMS, pp. 84–5.
24. TMS, pp. 113–14.
25. TMS, p. 83.
26. TMS, p. 342.
Notes on Sources
The literature on the Theory of Moral Sentiments is vast. The best short introductions are D.D. Raphael’s important introduction to the edition of the TMS cited here and K. Haakonssen’s introduction to the Cambridge edition of 2002. Raphael’s ‘The Impartial Spectator’ is also essential reading.
The Stoic dimensions of Smith’s thinking, over-emphasized in my view, are discussed by Raphael, and by V. Brown, Adam Smith’s Discourse. Canonicity, Commerce and Conscience, Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith’s System of Liberty, Wealth and Virtue, and G. Vivenza, Adam Smith and the Classics: The Classical Heritage in Adam Smith’s Thought. The nature of his engagement with Rousseau is discussed by E.G. West in ‘Adam Smith and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality: Inspiration or Provocation?’ and brilliantly by M. Ignatieff in The Needs of Strangers.
Much attention has been paid to the problem of setting Smith’s moral theory in wider contexts. As their titles suggest, T.D. Campbell’s Adam Smith’s Science of Morals and A.S. Skinner’s A System of Social Science view the TMS as part of an attempt to place the study of morality on a scientific basis. J. Dwyer in The Age of the Passions: An Interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment Culture views Smith’s theory in the context of the Scots’ interest in sensibility and sentiment. D. Marshall in The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot considers the theatricality built into the language of sentiment. Two important works, C. Griswold’s Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment and S. Fleischacker’s A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith, rightly remind us that Smith’s moral theory is first and foremost a theory of ethics.
8. PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY AT GLASGOW, 2. 1759–63
1. Corr., p. 39. This sounds like a reasonable business arrangement, although it is worth noting that the profits to be made out of philosophy were strikingly less favourable than those available to a successful historian. It was the History of England that made Hume a rich man. On the returns of authorship see Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book, ch. 3. On the publication history of the Theory of Moral Sentiments see his ‘Early Editions of Adam Smith’s Books in Britain and Ireland, 1759–1804’.
2. Corr., p. 35.
3. Corr., p. 40.
4. Corr., pp. 33–6.
5. James Wodrow–Samuel Kenrick, 10 July 1759, Wodrow–Kenrick Correspondence, Dr William’s Library MSS 24.157 (33).
6. Diary of George Ridpath, 1755–1761 (Edinburgh, 1922). Cited in On Moral Sentiments: Contemporary Res
ponses to Adam Smith, ed. J. Reeder, pp. 30–32. James Wodrow–Samuel Kenrick, 10 July 1759, Dr William’s Library MSS 24.157 (33).
7. David Raynor makes the case for attributing the review to Hume in ‘Hume’s Abstract of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments’. Raphael and Sakamoto reinforce it in ‘Anonymous Writings of David Hume’.
8. Annual Register (1759). Reprinted in On Moral Sentiments, ed. Reeder, pp. 50–57.
9. Corr., pp. 46–7.
10. On Moral Sentiments, ed. Reeder, pp. 33–50.
11. Corr., p. 43.
12. Corr., p. 49.
13. On Moral Sentiments, ed. Reeder, p. 66.
14. Corr., pp. 54–5.
15. Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, p. 148.
16. Stewart, p. 292.
17. Corr., p. 27.
18. Corr., p. 38.
19. What follows based on Corr., pp. 41–73.
20. Corr., p. 30.
21. Corr., p. 29.
22. Corr., p. 29.
23. Corr., pp. 31–2.
24. Corr., p. 70.
25. Corr., p. 84.
26. Corr., p. 98.
27. Namier and Brooke, The History of Parliment, ‘Fitzmaurice, T.’
28. Stewart, p. 347.
29. Brown, ‘Adam Smith’s First Russian Followers’.
30. It is suggestive that the only recalcitrant colleague who made him lose his temper was the Professor of Natural History John Anderson, a natural frondeur who had a gift for personalizing every issue and who seems to have marked out Smith as a target. Anderson claimed that ‘their high words frequently brought them very near to blows’, Samuel Kenrick–James Wodrow, 22 February 1785, Wodrow–Kenrick Correspondence, Dr William’s Library MSS 24.157 (92).
31. Scott, p. 213.
32. Stewart, p. 300.
33. LJ, p. 401.
34. LJ, p. 401.
35. LJ, p. 404.
36. LJ, p. 487. It should be noted that although the first set of lecture notes of 1762–3 provides a fuller and more comprehensively illustrated discussion of Smith’s jurisprudence than the notes of the revised later version, which is dated 1766, it is incomplete; one of the volumes of the student’s notes is missing. The second set of notes is complete, although it provides a more streamlined, less densely illustrated account of Smith’s theory, and is the one that is cited here.
37. LJ, p. 487.
38. LJ, pp. 488–9.
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