The Adam Smith Review Volume 7

Fonna Forman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780367867898
• eBook ISBN: 9781135092559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Adam Smith's contribution to economics is well-recognised but in recent years scholars have been exploring anew the multidisciplinary nature of his works. The Adam Smith Review is a refereed annual review that provides a unique forum for interdisciplinary debate on all aspects of Adam Smith's works, his place in history, and the significance of his writings to the modern world. It is aimed at facilitating debate between scholars working across the humanities and social sciences, thus emulating the reach of the Enlightenment world which Smith helped to shape.

The seventh volume of the series contains contributions from specialists across a range of disciplines, including Christopher Berry, Maureen Harkin, Edith Kuiper, N.B. Leddy, Catriona Seth, Henry C. Clarke, Deidre Dawson, Dionysios Drosos, Ioannis A.Tassopoulos, Jeremy Jennings, Ryan Patrick Hanley, Fotini Vaki, Spiros Tegos, Nicholas J. Theocarakis, Chandran Kukathas, Donald Winch, Fonna Forman, Craig Smith, Nicholas Phillipson, Chad Flanders, Emily Nacol, Andrea Radasanu, Rachel Zuckert, Michael L. Fraser, Ian S. Ross, Daniel B. Klein, Douglas J. Den Uyl, James A. Harris, Geoffrey Kellow, Paul Dumouchel, Jan Horst Keppler, Paul Oslington, Adrian Walsh, Spencer J. Pack, and Dennis C. Rasmussen.

Topics examined include:

• Smith and Women
• Adam Smith in Greece
• Nicholas Phillipson's Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life
• Michael L. Fraser's The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today

Symposium

Adam Smith in Greece

Guest editor: Dionysios Drosos

Impartial spectatorship and moral community in Adam Smith’s vision of the Enlightenment¹

Dionysios Drosos

The historical, political, social, intellectual, and spiritual context of the Scottish Enlightenment gave rise to a range of particularly subtle and delicate approaches to the so-called “moral crisis,”² during that “short” eighteenth century of modernization and improvement, between the Act of Union and the French Revolution.³ Many variants of Scottish thought of this period commonly questioned the terms of compatibility between the traditional values and manners and the rising ethos of commerce and selfishness. Hence the persistent and much debated issue of corruption. We can trace this concern in the lectures of Gerson Carmichael and the writings of Francis Hutcheson, as well as in the Essay of Adam Ferguson, and the sermons of Hugh Blair. Even the more modern and anglicized David Hume did not fail to show a slight disquiet in his essay “Of Public Credit” concerning the political corruption entailed by the growing public debt.

Underlying this “moral crisis” are the problems of the transition from community to society. Summarizing a posterior typology introduced by Tönnies, I understand society as a form of socialization between independent and separated individuals, free from any commitment other than their own good. It is the realm of private property, individual interest and contractual obligations. By community, in its broader sense, I understand any form of societal bond that escapes strict individualization. Societal bonds of that kind are of family relations, hierarchical relations (religious or secular), and relations of people tied together in the pursuit of a common good or a common cause. What underlies all these cases is the denial of individual independence and equality. Such forms, prevailing in the pre-modern era, met with the fierce critique of the moderns.

In modern societies, although there is always a remainder of such forms, they are subordinated and dispersed.⁴

Nevertheless, next to this remainder⁵ there is still a range of social bonds between equally free and independent individuals, which are not reducible to the contract form: language, first of all, commonsensical standards of ethics, judgments of merit, common notions of justice and equity, and shared values.

What is particularly Scottish in this respect is the vivid interest to explore the relevance of such forms in modern society. This interest had nothing to do with any kind of nostalgia for the obsolete and outdated traditional communal forms. It is rather the interest for what is common among independent and equal individuals, in terms of moral sentiments of mutual recognition.⁶

If Adam Smith represents a culminating point in this train of thought, as I believe he does, it is not only for pointing out the advantages of modern independence and freedom,⁷ and the corruptive effects of the division of labor, but also for his celebrated “alienation passage” in Book V of the Wealth of Nations (WN II, V.i.f. 50.).⁸ What I think is of more interest is that we could trace in Adam Smith’s work a genuine endeavor to rehabilitate the notion of community (in the sense defined above) within the context of modern civilized society. The very sense of “civilized society” entails this idea of moral community among free and equal persons communicating and developing their sentiments through sympathy. And this, not merely by conceding some “annexed” qualifications to a supposedly optimistic, commercial progressivism.⁹

Scottish Enlightenment: the modernization of society and the community of the literati

The Scottish Enlightenment, for all its advocacy for improvement and progress, was not meant to be built by making a tabula rasa of the past. Not all the inherited institutions, practices and beliefs were dismissed; some aspects of them underwent a trial of selection and transformation in a critical public discussion between independent individuals in search of a common language and a new enlightened common sense. This was a very fruitful process which resulted in a transformation of the inherited “capital” of moral sentiments. In this perspective, a new form of civil life, a new form of civilization was molded, and the modern question of social coherence was posed in terms of ethics and manners, not compromising either the aspirations of freedom and equality or the prevalence of private property. In other words, the coherence question of modern society was explored in terms that were compatible with but not reducible to contract relations. And as the benefits of civilization are neither indivisible nor the object of any kind of contract, but shared in common, in this sense, and this only, I think it legitimate to use the seemingly “counterfactual” term of modern community within society to describe one of the most intriguing aspirations of Scottish Enlightenment, and Adam Smith in particular.¹⁰

The engagement of Scotland in the process of modernization and progress is certainly a movement of dissolution of the traditional community forms in the context of the modernization of society; what the Scottish thinkers named “commercial society” or “civilized society.” What permits us to see the originality of the Scottish version of Enlightenment is not the survival of some “remnants” of communal forms in the development of a moral community within civil society. Such a community was by no means a community based on a common ideal, or a common creed, or a common cause, prevailing over and above individual moral personality and individual ends.¹¹

After the Act of Union there was no room for a project of national independence; or if there was one, none of the protagonists of the Enlightenment was a partisan of it: all of them were engaged in the process of modernization of Scotland under the government of the United Kingdom. Moreover, after the Act of Toleration there was no room either for any sort of common project of religious character. We don’t find among the Scottish thinkers of the Enlightenment any proponents of the traditional authority of the Church in political, educational and moral subjects. But we do find many members of the clergy who are proponents of the emancipation from such authority. Nevertheless, there were three characteristics of this movement that distinguish it from any other version of Enlightenment:

1 The so-called literati, the Enlighteners of Scotland, formed a kind of enlightened community, which was of paradigmatic value for the broader society.¹²

2 The main tenets of their theories (for all their variety and diversification) were centered on the exploration of common human nature and common sense, and were not engaged in abstract schemes or ideal, rationalistic constructions.

3 Especially in Adam Smith’s idea of one’s accountability to a well-informed and impartial spectator, we find the traces of an aspiration to the modernization of the grounds of morality, not by dissolving any kind of community and relying exclusively on the practical rationality of the isolated individual, but by transforming the actual moral community into an open and enlightened one.

The impartial spectator as internalized moral community

Where in Adam Smith’s work can we identify the characteristics of such an endeavor towards a modern conception of moral community? Is it in the famous additions made in the sixth edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, where we meet with an attempt on his part to incorporate in his schema a range of classical values and virtues?¹³ Of course it is. But, my argument here is that it is Smith’s way of doing this that provides a possibility of modern understanding of moral community. And this lies at the very core of Smith’s moral theory: we cannot form an idea of the modern moral community without understanding the dynamics of the impartial spectator, which the aforementioned additions bring forth.

What is of major importance in Adam Smith’s theorizing of moral sentiments is his distinctive use of the concept of the impartial spectator. For Smith, the impartial spectator accomplishes a twofold operation:

• one of moral judgment, as he scrutinizes actions and actors, and gives his approbation or disapprobation according to the measure in which the observed conduct is or is not at a distance from the partiality and self-preference of the agent;

• one of indirectly motivating moral development, since, the agent anticipates and takes into consideration the impartial spectator while deliberating about an action.¹⁴

Everyone in everyday life is ceaselessly switching roles and participating in this process, as both an agent and a spectator.¹⁵ The workings of spectatorship are interactive; not only conduct, behaviors, and persons are evaluated, but the very moral consciousness of the agents is incessantly molded so as to approximate the spectator’s standards. But is this process of molding just an adaptive and conforming one? Well, yes and no. Yes, as far as real spectators only are taken into consideration. No, if an ideal spectator has a substantial part in this process. And the more Adam Smith’s conception of spectatorship matures, the more this is the case.

The clue seems to be the concept of self-command. It is in our nature, Smith argues, to endeavor not only to be praised, but also to be praiseworthy. If to be praised always entails a real spectator, to be praiseworthy entails a persistent quest for an ideal spectator to whom we feel accountable. Is such an ideal spectator a person? In Smith’s conception of Justice, where God is conceived as the ultimate tribunal of judgment, the appeal to the highest tribunal is understood as a profound need of human hearts for perfect justice. It is rather moral conscience that requires God’s judgment and not the other way around. Human moral consciousness therefore, the “man within,” is what is mainly at stake in Smith’s argumentation for an ideal spectator.¹⁶ And it is human moral conscience that is never satisfied until a perfect judgment is pronounced; a demand that tends to transcend the limitations of our less than perfect condition (TMS II ii.3).¹⁷ So there is a craving for moral perfection inherent in human nature¹⁸ and it is independent of any particular religious confession. And it is this that gives rise to the search for the sympathy of an impartial spectator; and God is conceived in the image of perfect spectator and not vice versa.¹⁹

Smith conceives the abovementioned interactive process of action and spectatorship as a social process of mutual education. Could this be considered as just a process of imitating behaviors that are validated as conformable to the given standards of a society? Is it merely a process of proliferating attitudes and manners agreeable to the established values of a historical age? I think such an interpretation would not do justice to Smith’s conception of impartial spectatorship as a vehicle for judging our own conduct.²⁰ Neither is the impartial spectator another name for public opinion; if it were, Smith would not have been shocked by public opinion in the famous Jean Calas case (TMS III.2.11).

The dynamics of distancing from public opinion, that is from the prejudices of the real community, should alert us not to identify Smith’s portrayal of the reliance on the judgments of the impartial spectator as any kind of conformism with actual public opinion, and, moreover, not to mistake Smith’s conception of moral community with any received idea of traditional community.²¹

Self-command and moral conscience

The workings of ideal spectatorship²² seem to be in a permanent tension with the inherited or established standards of the real moral community. More than this, the very hypothesis of accountability to an ideal spectator entails the engagement to an ideal of betterment and perfection of the moral manners of the community; it points to a process of common moral development in actu.

In the sixth edition of the TMS, self-command is insisted upon as being the most important of virtues constituting the par excellence attitude of one who is wise and virtuous and who, to the best of his ability, endeavors to become the impartial spectator.²³ This is the virtue from which every other single virtue derives its dignity and merit. Of course this is conceived as a duty by the self-conscious few, because the bulk of mankind is attracted to the charmed life of the great, the rich and the powerful. So there is a persistent tension between acting by self-deception and acting with an elevated moral consciousness. There is a tension between a morally and mentally developed élite and the bulk of mankind. But these two orders are not isolated or enclosed in themselves; there is a mutual interplay between their points of view.²⁴ This is produced by a process of continuous intermingling of real and ideal appraisals and recognitions, as the formation of social-self unfolds, step by step, through the participation of the individual in successive orders and societies, ranging from family, friends, acquaintances and ranks to country and universe. And although in each of those social agglomerations self-deceit and moral conformity suffice for its maintenance and coherence, there is always a tendency to infringe upon the limits of each constricting form of sociality to the next broader one, and so on.²⁵

So we experience a never-ending process of enlightening common sense towards a not yet experienced ideal. The moving force in such a process is the workings of the ideal spectator, that is, of the wise and virtuous engaged in this process of broadening and enriching moral consciousness. This engagement is not limited to their own self-satisfied, self-sufficient or self-congratulating excellence. This section of mankind in a way stands apart but is not exempted from the common traits of human nature, which are to distinguish oneself and to communicate one’s sentiments and views to earn the approbation of others. And as Smith insists, these are the most prominent of all human characteristics.²⁶

This conception gives communication a preeminence in the development of moral conscience.²⁷ So, although the judgments of the wise and virtuous do not commonly meet the views of the vast majority, the former never fail to endeavor to persuade and gain the appraisal of others. This is a mark of their belonging to the most elementary form of community: the community of human nature.²⁸ If this is true, the virtuous and wise aspiration to become the ideal spectator equals the aspirant’s responsibility to enter the heart of common moral consciousness; of course his wisdom should prevent him from being a “man of system,” projecting a perfection unattainable through his feeble and weak nature. But his aspiration never fails to prompt him to dedicate himself to the effort of criticizing, amending and ameliorating the material of common sense: that is, the received ideas, the prejudices of the past, as well as the moral sentiments corrup...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• From the editor
• Andrew Skinner: a personal appreciation
• Cropsey memorial
• Symposium: Smith and women
• Symposium: Adam Smith in Greece
• Symposium: Nicholas Phillipson’s Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life
• Symposium: Michael L. Frazer’s The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today
• Articles
• Book reviews
• Notes for contributors