Adam Smith : An Enlightened Life (original 2010; edition 2010)

Adam Smith is one of the most important figures in modern economic theory. In a very real sense, he provided the basis for the Industrial Revolution through his emphasis on the division of labor as the root of all economic progress. He is, however, more than an economist; his theories on the origin and nature of morality were instrumental in forming his economics, but they reached much farther than economics itself.

While there is little in the way of private writing on which to base anything, because Smith instructed that all his private papers be destroyed at his death, Nicholas Phillipson has written an able biography of the development of Smith’s ideas based on his public writings, his unpublished writings, and the notes of several of his students taken down in lecture. The story he tells is fascinating, describing the economic and political circumstances around Smith’s life.

The author begins, as with all biographies, in Smith’s childhood home and city, Kirkcaldy. Smith lived in the time when Scotland was moving from being a poor country reliant on spinning and meager farms for its economic basis through the industrial revolution, and so his education and thinking were grounded in the experience of those times. He began his life in trying to understand how this massive change came in his world. From here, Smith moved into teaching at a growing college that was closely tied to the town and the town’s business interests, so he once again remained on the economic side of academic life — or rather saw life through an economic and mercantile lens.

The economic history is well known, and well plied in various textbooks. What the author next brings to light is the most interesting: Smith’s ties to the Enlightenment. It is the combination of Enlightenment thinking and commercial growth that led to Smith’s ultimate quest, to explain the rise of the “moral sentiment,” or rather the rise of morality in human society. While many today consider the Enlightenment to be a wide growth of knowledge as science threw off the shackles of religion, the reality is far different.

The Enlightenment, in the end, was removing the Judeo-Christian foundation from science to replace it with another set of religious beliefs, a Deistic/Darwinistic world view that places man at the center of all things. When Smith applied Enlightenment thinking to the economic growth he had seen, he came to the conclusion that morality comes about in human communities because of the need for the rich to protect their goods from the poor — hence, all morality is essentially based on developing economies.

“Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor.” -quoted on page 174

Smith was essentially attempting to answer the question, “if there is no God, then why are there morals,” without asserting there is no God. Based on this biography, he didn’t want to argue against God directly, but rather to simply leave God out in the cold, a small, useless figure that doesn’t have any real impact in our actual lives. Man has built it all, from civilization to morals; God need not apply. While the division of labor, Smith’s fundamental addition to the body of economic theory, is useful and solid, his theory of morality attempted to find solidity in commerce where it could not be found in the various Enlightenment branches of Darwinistic thought.

This is a very solid and readable biography of a man who has impacted our modern worldview in ways very few people actually understand, and well worth reading. ( )

This book sorely tested my knowledge of Scottish history. Phillipson assumes his reader’s familiarity with the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Glorious Revolution and the 1707 Act of Union in such a generous way, that one feels complimented. He speaks to one as an equal.

But soon you have to set the book aside and catch up on some serious background study.

When Adam Smith wrote that the end of government “is to secure wealth and to defend the rich from the poor”, he was not making a disapproving statement. It was a commentary on the society he was living in. Adam Smith is recruited today as the patron of all manner of right wing causes, by people who highlight words that he wrote but have no knowledge of the context within which he wrote them. Smith was not an early participative democrat, and perhaps he would associate eagerly with the present promoters of free trade, free markets, lower taxes and less government interference. But the period in which he wrote was so different from our own that it is not possible to use his words as an early authority for such views. This happens, however, because Smith was writing for modern times when trade, monopoly, colonisation and taxation were gaining their modern meanings. (This is not the case with the Greek and Roman authors who were the foundation of Smith’s own education and also of his own teaching.) Smith walks through this book much more as a philosopher than as the founder of economics. He himself rated his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” as superior to the more well-known “Wealth of Nations”.
Smith burned all his private papers just before he died in 1790 so the modern prying biographer is at a disadvantage. But Phillipson convincingly puts Smith in his historical context. It lays out his intellectual antecendents (in Pufendorf, Hutcheson and Hume) and describes the way he was bought out of his professorship in Glasgow by a wealthy family who wanted a tutor to accompany their noble 19 year old son on a two year tour of Europe. Many parties and engagements, but also a lot of Greek and Latin. After Smith published the Wealth of Nations, the same family arranged for a well-paid job for Smith on the Customs Board. This was, however, also a lot of work and Smith was prevented from completing his planned philosophical writings before he died at the age of 67.

As an alleged intellectual fore bearer of the tea party movement, one is surprised to discover that Smith was no covenanter but privately an infidel, eager to keep well away from matters of religion. There is a doubly telling story on page 246 on what a dying David Hume imagined saying to Charon to delay his journey over the Styx – and how Smith altered his report of this to lessen controversy.

As a customs official, Adam Smith “was enraged by parliament’s willingness to encourage the importation of [cheap] foreign linen yard regardless of its consequences for domestic producers and the wages of the poor.” (p.264) South Africa’s tyre and textile manufacturers and unions may be overlooking a patron saint. ( )

A nice account of Smith's career and the economic environment of his times. However, I find the book rather superficial in its description of the intellectual ideas Smith dealt with. For example, much is made in the book of Smith's arguments with the French physiocrats regarding the primacy of land as the ultimate source of value in the economy. Phillipson does not explain the critical issues in this debate. (The critical issue is with regard to the generation of land rents as surplus value, much as Karl Marx thought of labour creating surplus value when combined with capital.) Instead of explaining the ideas that engaged Adam Smith, the author often quotes at some length various commentators who were Smith's contemporaries. But this was at times insufficient for me to really understand the points of contention. ( )

Gives a flavor of the Scottish Enlightenment and Smith's project for a science of Man. Shows the beginnings of modern economics as having moral and ethical concerns "How may an enlightened sovereign arrange for a just and prosperous polity?"
Talks about Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" which can be seen as an Enlightenment attempt to account for the virtues enabling establishment of civilized society among humans from a purely historical and secular perspective.
There's some hint of Smith's economic principles, including his hatred of monopoly and skepticism (to put it mildly) about the confluence of interests of the merchants and manufacturers with that of the public. It was not the author's intent to provide a precis or skeleton key to Wealth of Nations, which is too bad but not something we blame him for.

Makes an interesting companion to "A Wicked Company" which is more about the Parisian Salons and in particular the d'Holbach salon and its habitues.