23 Jan Adam Smith. After “The Wealth of Nations”, people began to see the world around them from a different view. (ROBERT L. HEILBRONER)
What sort of man was this urbane philosopher?
“I am a beau in nothing but my books,” was the way Adam Smith once described himself, proudly showing off his treasured library to a friend. He was certainly not a handsome man. A medallion profile shows us a protruding lower lip thrust up to meet a large aquiline nose and heavy bulging eyes looking out from heavy lids. All his life Smith was troubled with a nervous affliction; his head shook, and he had an odd and stumbling manner of speech.
This absent-minded professor was born in 1723 in the town of Kirkcaldy, County Fife, Scotland. Kirkcaldy boasted a population of fifteen hundred; at the time of Smith’s birth, nails were still used as money by some of the local townspeople. When he was four years old, a most curious incident took place. Smith was kidnaped by a band of passing gypsies. Through the efforts of his uncle (his father had died before his birth), the gypsies were traced and pursued, and in their flight they abandoned young Adam by the roadside. “He would have made, I fear, a poor gypsy,” says one of his early biographers.
From his earliest days, Smith was an apt pupil, although even as a child given to fits of abstraction. He was obviously destined for teaching, and so at seventeen he went to Oxford on a scholarship—making the journey on horseback—and there he remained for six years. But Oxford was not then the citadel of learning which it later became. Most of the public professors had long ago given up even a pretense of teaching.
Since instruction was the exception rather than the rule, Smith spent the years largely untutored and untaught, reading as he saw fit. In fact he was once nearly expelled from the university because a copy of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature was found in his rooms—Hume was no fit reading matter, even for a would-be philosopher.
In 1751—he was not yet twenty-eight—Smith was offered the Chair of Logic at the University of Glasgow, and shortly thereafter he was given the Chair of Moral Philosophy. Unlike Oxford, Glasgow was a serious center of what has come to be called the Scottish Enlightenment, and it boasted a galaxy of talent. But it still differed considerably from the modern conception of a university. The prim professorial group did not entirely appreciate a certain levity and enthusiasm in Smith’s manner. He was accused of sometimes smiling during religious services (no doubt during a reverie), of being a firm friend of that outrageous Hume, of not holding Sunday classes on Christian evidences, of petitioning the Senatus Academicus for permission to dispense with prayers on the opening of class, and of delivering prayers that smacked of a certain “natural religion.”
The disapproval could not have been too severe, for smith rose to be dean in 1758. Unquestionably he was happy at Glasgow. In the evenings he played whist—his absent-mindedness made him a somewhat undependable player—attended learned societies, and lived a quiet life. He was beloved of his students, noted as a lecturer—even Boswell came to hear him—and his odd gait and manner of speech gained the homage of imitation. Little busts of him even appeared in booksellers’ windows.
It was not merely his eccentric personality that gave him prestige. In 1759 he published a book that made an instant sensation. It was entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and it catapulted Smith immediately into the forefront of English philosophers. Theory was an inquiry into the origin of moral approbation and disapproval. How does it happen that man, who is a creature of self-interest, can form moral judgments in which self-interest seems to be held in abeyance or transmuted to a higher plane? Smith held that the answer lay in our ability to put ourselves in the position of a third person, an impartial observer, and in this way to form a sympathetic notion of the objective (as opposed to the selfish) merits of a case.
The book and its problems attracted widespread interest. In Germany das Adam Smith Problem became a favorite subject for debate. More importantly, from our point of view, the treatise met with the favor of an intriguing man named Charles Townshend.
Townshend is one of those wonderful figures with which the eighteenth century seems to abound. A witty and even learned man, Townshend was, in the words of Horace Walpole, “a man endowed with every great talent, who must have been the greatest man of his age, if only he had common sincerity, common steadiness, and common sense.” Townshend’s fickleness was notorious; a quip of the times put it that Mr. Townshend was ill of a pain in his side, but declined to specify which side. As evidence of his lack of common sense, it was Townshend, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, who helped precipitate the American Revolution, first by refusing the colonists the right to elect their own judges and then by imposing a heavy duty on American tea.
But his political shortsightedness notwithstanding, Townshend was a sincere student of philosophy and politics, and as such a devotee of Adam Smith. What is more important, he was in a position to make him an unusual offer. In 1754, Townshend had made a brilliant and lucrative marriage to the Countess of Dalkeith, the widow of the Duke of Buccleuch, and he now found himself casting about for a tutor for his wife’s son. Education for a young man of the upper classes consisted largely of the Grand Tour, a stay in Europe where one might acquire that polish so highly praised by Lord Chesterfield. Dr. Adam Smith would be an ideal companion for the young duke, thought Townshend, and accordingly he offered him five hundred pounds a year plus expenses and a pension of five hundred pounds a year for life. It was too good an offer to be declined. At best Smith never realized more than one hundred seventy pounds from the fees which, in those days, professors collected directly from their students. It is pleasant to note that his pupils refused to accept a refund from Dr. Smith when he left, saying that they had already been more than recompensed.
The tutor and His young Grace left for France in 1764. For eighteen months they stayed in Toulouse, where a combination of abominably boring company and Smith’s execrable French made his sedate life at Glasgow look like dissipation. Then they moved on to the south of France (where he met and worshiped Voltaire and repulsed the attentions of an amorous marquise), thence to Geneva, and finally to Paris. To relieve the tedium of the provinces, Smith began work on a treatise of political economy, a subject on which he had lectured at Glasgow, debated many evenings at the Select Society in Edinburgh, and discussed at length with his beloved friend David Hume. The book was to be The Wealth of Nations, but it would be twelve years before it was finished.
In 1766 the tour was brought to an abrupt halt. The duke’s younger brother, who had joined them, caught a fever, and despite the frantic attentions of Smith (who called in Quesnay), died in a delirium. His Grace returned to his estates at Dalkeith, and Smith went first to London, and then to Kirkcaldy. Despite Hume’s entreaties, there he stayed, for the better part of the next ten years, while the great treatise took shape. Most of it he dictated, standing against his fireplace and nervously rubbing his head against the wall until his pomade had made a dark streak on the paneling. Occasionally he would visit his former charge on his estates at Dalkeith, and once in a while he would go to London to discuss his ideas with the literati of the day. One of them was Dr. Samuel Johnson, to whose select club Smith belonged, although he and the venerable lexicographer had hardly met under the most amiable of circumstances.
Smith met as well a charming and intelligent American, one Benjamin Franklin, who provided him with a wealth of facts about the American colonies and a deep appreciation of the role that they might someday play. It is undoubtedly due to Franklin’s influence that Smith subsequently wrote of the colonies that they constituted a nation “which, indeed, seems very likely to become one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.”
In 1776, The Wealth of Nations was published. Two years later Smith was appointed Commissioner of Customs for Edinburgh, a sinecure worth six hundred pounds a year. With his mother, who lived until she was ninety, Smith lived out his bachelor’s life in peace and quiet; serene, content, and in all likelihood absent-minded to the end.
And the book?
The Wealth of Nations is not a wholly original book, but it is unquestionably a masterpiece.
A glance at the index compiled for a later edition by Cannan shows the range of Smith’s references and thoughts.
In fine print the index goes on for sixty-three pages; before it ends it has touched on everything: “Riches, the chief enjoyment of, consists in the parade of; Poverty, sometimes urges nation to inhuman customs; Stomach, desire for food bounded by narrow capacity of the; Butcher, brutal and odious business.” When we have finished the nine hundred pages of the book we have a living picture of England in the 1770s, of apprentices and journeymen and rising capitalists, of landlords and clergymen and kings, of workshops and farms and foreign trade.
The Worldly Philosophers: The Great Economic Thinkers
ROBERT L. HEILBRONER
