Adam Smith

Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a Scottish philosopher — not an economist, a distinction that matters — whose two books founded both modern moral psychology and modern political economy. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) explains morality through sympathy and the impartial spectator; The Wealth of Nations (1776) explains national wealth through the division of labor, exchange, and the critique of mercantilism. The “father of capitalism” label is accurate but “dangerously misleading” (IEP): Smith never used the word capitalism, called his subject “commercial society,” and treated the market as one component of a larger theory of human interaction — one whose moral foundations he had already built in the earlier book.¹

Life

Born in Kirkcaldy, Fife; his father (a customs comptroller) died before his birth. Glasgow College at thirteen, then Balliol College, Oxford — which he loathed, finding the professors idle; his love of Glasgow’s engaged teaching and his contempt for Oxford’s sinecures run straight into his later arguments about education and incentives. Lectured at Edinburgh (1748), then held the chairs of Logic (1751) and Moral Philosophy (1752) at Glasgow — the chair previously held by his beloved teacher Francis Hutcheson. These Glasgow years were, by his own account, “by far the most useful and therefore by far the happiest and most honorable period” of his life; The Theory of Moral Sentiments grew out of his lectures there. His closest intellectual bond was with David Hume, senior by a decade — they were “closer… than with any other figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.”²

In 1764 he resigned to tutor the young Duke of Buccleuch, traveling in France for two years among the philosophes (Quesnay and the physiocrats, Voltaire’s circle) — conversations that fed directly into the Wealth of Nations. He then retired to Kirkcaldy for a decade of slow writing (“a slow a very slow workman, who do and undo everything I write at least half a dozen of times”), publishing WoN in 1776. He ended his career as a commissioner of customs in Edinburgh — a free-trader administering tariffs, an irony he seemed to enjoy. He revised TMS through six editions (the 6th, 1790, adding Part VI on virtue) and WoN through four; he always thought TMS the better book. On his deathbed he had sixteen volumes of unpublished manuscripts burned.³

The two books as one project

Smith’s project is Newtonian: find the simple principles that govern the moral and social world the way gravity governs the physical. TMS finds them in sympathy — the imagination’s capacity to change places in fancy with another — and the impartial spectator it grows into; WoN finds them in the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange and the division of labor it drives. The 19th-century “Adam Smith Problem” (TMS = altruism, WoN = egoism, therefore contradiction) is rejected by virtually all modern Smith scholars: in both books, humans are social creatures whose self-interest operates inside a web of sympathy, propriety, and institutional restraint. The butcher serves you from self-love — but the society that makes the transaction possible, decent, and prosperous is held together by everything TMS describes.⁴⁵

The real Smith vs the caricature

Passages that don’t fit the libertarian mascot:

• On merchants: “the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind” (WoN IV.3). Their interest “never exactly the same with that of the public.”
• On workers: “the liberal reward of labour… is the natural symptom of increasing national wealth”; high wages increase industry (WoN I.8).
• On rent: landlords “love to reap where they never sowed” (WoN I.6).
• On the division of labor’s human cost: the worker confined to a few simple operations “generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become” — Smith’s argument for public education as the necessary corrective (WoN V.1.3).
• On the state’s duties: defense, justice, and “public works and public institutions” that no individual would find profitable to build (WoN V.1).
• On talent: “the difference… between a philosopher and a common street porter… seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education” (WoN I.2) — a radically egalitarian, anti-aristocratic premise.

Relationships

• impartial-spectator / sympathy — his moral psychology, spun out as concept pages
• sophie-de-grouchy — his French translator and sharpest early critic; her Letters on Sympathy answer TMS
• Hume, Hutcheson — the Scottish Enlightenment triangle he worked inside
• bullshit-jobs — the “stupid and ignorant” passage is the 1776 root of the critique of meaningless labor; Graeber radicalizes it
• invisible-hand — the phrase, its two actual occurrences, and its modern distortion

Sources

• 1759 — The Theory of Moral Sentiments
• 1776 — The Wealth of Nations
• Adam Smith (1723—1790)

Footnotes

1. Adam Smith (1723—1790) ↩

2. Adam Smith (1723—1790) ↩

3. Adam Smith (1723—1790) ↩

4. Adam Smith (1723—1790) ↩

5. 1759 — The Theory of Moral Sentiments ↩