Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand of God

Brendan Long

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032148380
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000536386
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Religion
• Index: Economics

This book contributes to the 'new view' reading of Adam Smith, providing a historically and contextually rich interpretation of Smith's thought. Smith built a moral philosophy on the foundations of a natural theology of human sociality. Examination of his life, relationship with David Hume and use of divine names shows that he retained a progressive form of Christian theism. The book interrogates the metaphor of the 'invisible hand' and highlights the importance of the religious dimension of Adam Smith's thought for his moral philosophy, his jurisprudence and his economics. It reflects on the contemporary relevance of a theological reading of Smith and lays the ground for further inquiry between economic and religious perspectives.

1Searching for the real Smith

DOI: 10.4324/9781003241379-1

One can make a credible argument that philosophers rule the world, centuries after they are dead. The dominant influences on our daily lives often appear to be closely connected to the tidal forces of economic growth or recession. However, this is a somewhat myopic perspective. It can be argued that what really governs and leads us are the myriad influences of those minds who have broken open new ways of thinking, developed new categories of reflection and discourse, and built new highways of knowledge upon which we travel so freely that we imagine that everybody has always walked on them. They govern us often as ghosts, for their thoughts may need to incubate in centuries of human endeavour before they come to maturity and sit easily in our thoughts. Yet such great thinkers, the philosophical and often the religious minds, have formed the real infrastructure of the world, the bricks and mortar of our universe of human discourse, the very words and constructs that are taught to our children who will in turn teach to their children. In this way, perhaps, philosophers rule the world from the grave.

In the pantheon of these ruling minds, a place is set for Adam Smith. He is the champion of the economic paradigm, which has become such an important, arguably even a dominant, conceptual framework in describing and explaining the complex dynamics of the world we now live in. Smith used to be seen as an icon of the ‘West’, but now all points of the compass point to his legacy in a discipline which has come to drive so much of our everyday discourse and has such a direct influence on our lives. This may be the reason why there is currently such a renaissance in Smithian scholarship. The influence of economics may be the reason why there is a desire to delve deeper into his thought.

What is particularly interesting, however, is that the renewed interest in Smith is not primarily driven by economic writers. The primary driver of the renewed interest in Smithian studies seems to represent an attempt widen the inquiry into his thought. We seem to have developed a hunger to look deeper into his writings and seek to account for its more ultimate philosophical moment. It is as if we are asking ourselves the question: Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, we say we know him but do we really know him?

I would want to say that we know him much less well than we think. My Adam Smith is a shy and reticent Scot who is the most unlikely augur of the oracle of the wealth of nations. My Adam Smith is not an extraordinary innovative mind in the league of Hume, Kant, Hegel or Marx, though he loved the former as his closest friend and influenced the thoughts of the others. The Smith I know is a man who formed an account of the human person, an anthropology, which crystallised persuasively many ways in which we typically and fundamentally behave. He certainly has told us about homo-oeconomicus, how the economic man and woman appear to behave. However, he has also done much more than this. He has grounded this explanation on a moral anthropology of human action that is implicated with a theological perspective.

Smith is an author much more often quoted than read and there is a case that he now needs to be re-read. Smith was a philosopher and natural theologian, and an author on natural philosophy, jurisprudence and political economy. Yet economists are often ignorant of the philosophical, ethical, theological, political and legal aspects of Smith’s thought. Is it no more than pure nostalgia to muse on what the nature of the economic discipline might now be if the holistic anthropology held by Smith had been embraced?

The conventional view of Smith is that he may or may not have had religious views, but this is of little moment for his definitive contribution to the development of economic thought. It is a neat sidestep: let us take the parts of the Smithian corpus that seem to fit best with our current understanding and leave the thornier issues, like whether he believed in God, to those who are interested in reading such philosophical footnotes. However, such a position simply elides from Smithian studies the most interesting and troubling aspects of the written corpus. Was his system of thought, which has to be seen as a highly successful body of work, actually inspired by a religious viewpoint, and if so, what are the implications for economics and theology? Is there, in Smith – the prophet of economics, an engagement of the two viewpoints, which have now apparently agreed to an amicable divorce? Is there in this re-reading of Smith the seeds of some reconciliation of these past partners or at least the possibility of a more functional relationship? If so, how would this work?

Approaching these questions takes us on an interesting journey. There are turns and roundabouts in the path of reading Smith’s theism, numerous edits to his work, missing texts and some lost works rediscovered. There is his fascinating relationship with Hume and that so powerful metaphor of the Invisible Hand (hereafter abbreviated as the IH). The answer to the question of Smith’s theism has to matter. Some might say ‘if you’re a believer you’re a believer and if you’re not why bother with the detail on this point?’ However, if Smith was inspired by religious ideas, and his ideas matter, then the grounds of his inspiration also matters. If Smith remains important then what made Smith Smith must also remain important.

This work takes the position that side-stepping of Smith’s theism has led to an impoverishment in Smithian studies.¹ The process has also tended to reinforce the perception of harmony between Smith and contemporary philosophy of economics. Smith’s natural theology of society based on the interplay of sympathy and conscience (as outlined in detail in Chapter 5) is not the sort of ‘well behaved’ variable that fits nicely into the positivist methodology underlying contemporary economic theory. However, an alternative reading of Smith is also being presented which emphasises the role of teleology and natural theology in Smith’s writings. The work seeks to contribute to this renewal of interest in the religious aspects of Smith’s thought. The argument is that any account of Smith’s work that seeks to be authentic to his thought has to deal with the question of the import of the theological inspirations of the Smithian corpus and his natural theology of society. To many contemporary philosophical thinkers, natural theology is now seen as an intellectual cul de sac. Moreover, economics and theology are seen as long estranged lovers. This is not a religious work and not explicitly motivated by theological imperatives. But I am puzzled as to why Smith has been canonised as a secular saint or portrayed as an agnostic or an atheist. As I read Smith, this is to do violence to his thought, which is ultimately an attempt to produce a coherence theory of human nature that deals with the tension between altruistic love of neighbour, a Christian interpretation of morality, and the reality of self-love through a complex narrative of unintended human action which is part of a providential plan written into the moral fabric of human relations.

If this argument succeeds then the faith that economists have in Smith is misplaced. It is not misplaced because Smith is unfaithful to the broad tenants of economic policy that form mainstream economics, for he is clearly not unfaithful to these tenants, but rather one of its greatest evangelists. It is misplaced rather because it fails to assimilate the complexity of Smith’s moral philosophy and the bivalency he gives to the notion of self-love: it is potentially virtuous and vicious, good or evil.

The inquiry leads to some strong conclusions. At one level, it represents a call for contemporary philosophy of economics to return to its source in the moral philosophy which is a complex synthesis of individual’s moral constitution and the role that it plays in the development of the common good. The discipline of economics needs to again draw from the deep well of moral philosophy that has nourished and grounded the discipline rather than to draw from a shallow well of a pseudo-scientistic positivism. The enduring appeal of the Smithian corpus is not its interesting, if somewhat discursive, narrative of how economic processes have progressed and evolved into modern economic processes. The charism, the true spirit of the Smithian corpus, is that this account is grounded in a moral philosophy, and this reader of Smith contends, a particular variant of natural theology. Smith does not just tell us, or maybe does not even tell us, how the system of economic relations works. Rather he offers us an account of why it works. His descriptive narrative of human moral behaviour does not just say how but why human beings interact positively, spontaneously and unintentionally in economic relations for the common good. Smith presents a social and personal anthropology of the common good. It is also argued that there is implicit in his work a latent theodicy: an openness to the issue of evil or poor moral action implicated in economic affairs, even if Smith demurs from developing this argument, leading to a real point of unresolved tension in the Smithian corpus. From this line of argument, it follows that the world of Smith is a more interesting world than the world of the contemporary economist, it is more real, more human, richer philosophically. As the conceptual edifice of economic theory rapidly expands, locked within the gravitational force of an ethical utilitarianism that Smith rejects, the distance between the accounts of the human subject embedded in modern economics and the human subject in Adam Smith increases. It may be time to narrow this distance – an opportune time to reflect anew on the thought of the real Smith.

Table 1.1 Primary works by Smith

Date	Code	Abbreviated title	Notes on referencing and dating assumptions
1740–1744	ES	Of the External Senses	There is some evidence that Smith wrote this before he had access to Hume’s critique of Berkeley suggesting a dating of sometime towards the beginning of his studies at Balliol, say 1740–1744. It is noted that Brown (1992) prefers a dating of 1758–1759.
1746	HA	History ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1 Searching for the real Smith
• 2 A synopsis of the corpus
• 3 Situating Smith: Personal and intellectual influences
• 4 Smith’s Christian faith?
• 5 Smith’s natural theology of society
• 6 The invisible hand
• 7 Smith’s Christian God
• 8 Why Smith’s theism matters today
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• References
• Index