The Scottish moral philosopher whose Theory of Moral Sentiments grounded ethics in sympathy and the impartial spectator and whose Wealth of Nations founded modern political economy, providing the conceptual framework within which markets, division of labor, and the moral basis of commercial society have been continuously debated.
adam-smith
Scottish moral philosopher and political economist (1723–1790), professor at Glasgow and confidant of David Hume, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments grounded ethics in sympathy and whose Wealth of Nations founded the modern discipline of political economy, providing the framework within which commercial society has been understood for two centuries.
Life
Adam Smith was born in early June 1723 — his baptism is recorded for 5 June — in Kirkcaldy, a small port town across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. His father, also Adam Smith, was a customs official who had died some months before his son's birth; his mother Margaret Douglas, of the local gentry, raised him as her only surviving child. A often-repeated story has the four-year-old Smith briefly abducted by Romany travelers and recovered by his uncle, an episode John Rae's standard biography (Life of Adam Smith, 1895; reprinted 1965) treats as essentially factual.
Smith entered the University of Glasgow in 1737 at fourteen, the conventional Scottish university entrance age. The Glasgow philosophy faculty under Francis Hutcheson was the most important center of moral-philosophical teaching in eighteenth-century Britain. Hutcheson's lectures — conducted in English rather than Latin, an innovation Smith would continue — introduced Smith to the moral-sense tradition derived from Shaftesbury, the Stoic ethical inheritance Hutcheson had assimilated, and the integrated treatment of jurisprudence, ethics, and political economy that Smith would later develop.
In 1740 Smith won a Snell exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent six unhappy years. The Oxford academic culture of the mid-eighteenth century was widely regarded as moribund; Smith later wrote in the Wealth of Nations that the Oxford professors had "for these many years given up altogether even the pretence of teaching." His time was spent largely in private reading in the Bodleian. He returned to Kirkcaldy in 1746 without completing his Oxford degree.
The philosophical career began with a series of public lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, then on jurisprudence, delivered in Edinburgh in 1748–51 under the sponsorship of Henry Home (later Lord Kames). The lectures attracted attention; in 1751 Smith was elected professor of Logic at Glasgow, transferring the next year to the more prestigious chair of Moral Philosophy that Hutcheson had once held.
The Glasgow years (1751–64) produced Smith's first masterpiece. The Theory of Moral Sentiments appeared in 1759 and was immediately recognized as a major work. Smith continued to revise it through six editions; the revised sixth edition (1790), the year of his death, integrated lessons learned from the Wealth of Nations and represents Smith's final statement of his moral philosophy.
In 1764 Smith accepted a lucrative position as private tutor to Henry Scott, third Duke of Buccleuch, accompanying the young duke on a Grand Tour of France and Switzerland. The two years in Toulouse, Geneva, and Paris — where Smith met Voltaire (whom he regarded as the most brilliant man of the century), Turgot, Quesnay, d'Alembert, Diderot, Helvétius, and other figures of the French Enlightenment — shaped the Wealth of Nations, on which Smith began work during this period. The Buccleuch annuity that the tutoring earned him (£300 per annum for life) gave Smith the financial independence to spend the next decade in Kirkcaldy composing the great work.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in two large quarto volumes on 9 March 1776 — the year, by coincidence, of the American Declaration of Independence. The book sold out the first edition in six months and was immediately recognized as a major work; the philosophical and policy debates it has continued to generate are largely the history of subsequent economic thought.
The last years were occupied by Smith's duties as Commissioner of Customs in Edinburgh (a position the Duke of Buccleuch helped secure for him in 1778), by the sixth edition of the Moral Sentiments, and by his executorship of the literary remains of David Hume, Smith's closest friend, who had died in 1776. Smith's letter to William Strahan describing Hume's last days — "upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit" — generated more controversy among the religiously orthodox than the Wealth of Nations had done. Smith died on 17 July 1790 in Edinburgh, of complications from chronic intestinal disease, aged 67. He instructed his literary executors Joseph Black and James Hutton to destroy the great majority of his unpublished manuscripts (the surviving fragments include the Essays on Philosophical Subjects published in 1795).
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
The Moral Sentiments (1759; final ed. 1790) develops the ethical theory of sympathy and the impartial spectator. The central insight: human moral judgment arises through the imaginative capacity to enter into the situation of another person, feel a corresponding sentiment, and compare the felt sentiment with the original. We approve of feelings and actions when our sympathetic feeling matches the original feeling; we disapprove when there is a mismatch.
The theory's distinctive move is the doctrine of the impartial spectator. We do not judge moral action by simple consultation of our own sympathies (which are partial, biased toward those close to us) but by imagining what an impartial spectator — unconnected to the parties, fully informed, capable of full sympathy with each — would judge. The impartial spectator is the supreme moral judge whose verdicts constitute conscience. The internalized impartial spectator, gradually constructed in moral development through repeated acts of sympathetic projection and self-examination, is what Smith identifies with the moral self.
The theory integrates the moral-sense tradition (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson) with Hume's philosophy of mind and with the Stoic tradition Hutcheson had transmitted. Smith was sharply aware of the differences from his friend Hume's account in the Treatise and the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: Smith's sympathy is imaginative rather than infectious; the impartial spectator gives moral judgment a critical distance that Humean sympathy could not provide.
The sixth edition (1790) added material, particularly the new Part VI on the character of virtue and the revised discussion of self-command and the influence of fortune. Recent scholarship by Charles Griswold (Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 1999), Knud Haakonssen, Ryan Hanley, Samuel Fleischacker, and others has produced major reinterpretations that reject the older view of Smith as a thinker whose moral philosophy was inconsistent with his political economy (the adam-smith-problem of late nineteenth-century German scholarship).
The Wealth of Nations
The Wealth of Nations (1776) is structured in five books. Book I treats the division of labor, the origin of money, the components of price and rent, and the natural rates of wages, profit, and interest. Book II treats capital, its accumulation and employment. Book III treats the historical progress of opulence in different European societies. Book IV treats the mercantile system (the dominant policy framework of the period, which Smith critiques sustainedly) and the agricultural systems of the physiocrats. Book V treats the revenue of the sovereign — public finance, taxation, public debt.
The central theoretical contributions of the work:
The division of labor as the source of the increased productivity that distinguishes commercial societies from earlier forms of economic life. The famous pin factory example in Book I, chapter 1, illustrates how specialization can multiply productivity many times. The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market, since specialization requires the ability to exchange one's product for others.
The invisible hand, a phrase that appears only once in the Wealth of Nations (Book IV, chapter 2) but that captures Smith's recurring argument: individuals pursuing their own gain are led, by the structure of market exchange, to promote outcomes that benefit society in ways no participant intended. The argument is not the celebration of unrestrained self-interest the later libertarian tradition sometimes reads into it; Smith presents it within a framework of justice administered by the state, with extensive discussion of necessary public goods and exceptions to the rule.
The critique of mercantilism (the period's dominant trade policy, focused on accumulating bullion through export surpluses) occupies a large portion of Book IV. Smith argues that wealth consists not in money but in the annual produce of land and labor, that exchange creates rather than redistributes value, that the colonial monopolies and trade restrictions of the period destroyed value rather than creating it. The free-trade conclusions — qualified, in Smith's actual presentation, by exceptions for defense, retaliation, gradual transition, and other practical considerations — became one foundation of the nineteenth-century liberal economic policy framework.
The role of the state in commercial society is more extensive in Smith than the libertarian reception sometimes acknowledges. The state must provide defense, justice, certain public works and institutions that markets will not supply (Smith specifies education, public health, road and bridge infrastructure), and the framework of property rights and contract enforcement within which markets can operate. The taxes that fund these provisions should be levied on principles of equity, certainty, convenience, and economy that Book V develops in detail.
The Lectures on Jurisprudence
Student notes from Smith's Glasgow lectures on jurisprudence — the so-called Lectures on Jurisprudence (A) and (B) of 1762–64 — were discovered and published in the twentieth century (the standard scholarly edition is by R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein in the Glasgow Edition of Smith's Works, 1978). The lectures reveal Smith's integrated treatment of jurisprudence and political economy and the historical-sociological method he applied to both. The four-stage theory of social development (hunting, pastoral, agricultural, commercial societies) that the lectures develop is the framework within which the Wealth of Nations historical-comparative analysis operates.
Reception
Smith's nineteenth-century reception was dominated by the Wealth of Nations read as the foundational work of classical political economy. Malthus, Ricardo, Mill, and the entire mainstream of nineteenth-century economic thought worked within a framework Smith had constructed. The Manchester School of free-trade liberalism claimed Smith as patron, often without much attention to the qualifications his actual presentation included. Karl Marx, writing his critique of political economy in the 1840s–60s, took Smith as the principal classical antecedent whose framework had to be revealed and superseded.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments was largely eclipsed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the economic reception of Smith; the adam-smith-problem of late nineteenth-century German scholarship (Lujo Brentano, Witold von Skarżyński) treated the moral and economic works as inconsistent, with the moral theory's emphasis on sympathy supposedly contradicting the economic theory's reliance on self-interest. The twentieth-century recovery, driven by scholars including Glenn Morrow, Jacob Viner, and (later) D. D. Raphael, A. L. Macfie, Knud Haakonssen, Charles Griswold, Samuel Fleischacker, Maria Pia Paganelli, and Emma Rothschild (Economic Sentiments, Harvard University Press, 2001), has restored the Moral Sentiments as a major work and the two great books as parts of an integrated philosophical project.
The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford University Press, 6 vols. and supplementary volumes, 1976–87) is the standard scholarly text.
Significance
Smith's importance is dual. As moral philosopher, the Theory of Moral Sentiments offered the most worked-out account of sympathy-based ethics produced in the eighteenth century and a model of moral psychology — the construction of conscience through the internalized impartial spectator — that continues to inform contemporary work in moral philosophy. As political economist, the Wealth of Nations founded modern economic analysis: the framework of division of labor, market exchange, capital accumulation, and the relation of policy to economic activity that has been the subject of every subsequent reformulation of economics. The integrated philosophical project that the two works together constitute — a moral psychology of sympathy and judgment, a political economy of commercial society, and a sociology of historical development through stages — remains one of the major intellectual achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment and of modern social thought generally.