Introductory Comments
Adam Smith’s importance as a political thinker has been underestimated, due, in part, to the misplaced perception that his political project lacked coherence and even the belief that he evinced no interest in politics. A key aim of this book is to challenge those perceptions and show that Smith does have a politics but that it has been obscured by his attempts to make the art of governing less ideological, more social-scientific and, most of all, more productive of good effects. Although he showed some interest in conventional political science topics, his main concern was to reconfigure the art of governing according to a new set of methods, values and concerns. It is no use trying to read into the text what we ourselves might expect to discover but to try and allow Smith himself to come through. What he offers is a rich, subtle and original edifice well worth the trouble.
Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a leading figure of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ and, among other things, Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He is best known as a pioneer of political economy but he was also a moral philosopher with a deep interest in social theory and human psychology. Smith’s first major work was the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) (hereafter referred to as TMS) but he is better known for An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) (hereafter referred to as WN), which secured his reputation as the parent of modern economics. Smith’s most influential ideas relate to his theory of ‘natural liberty’ and the free market and his belief in the positive effects of self-interest. There is enormous and unabated interest in Smith’s thought partly because he remains—rightly or wrongly—the most important touchstone for the liberal, free market project. But it is also because his work is so rich and therefore capable of bearing multiple interpretations.
This book is about Smith’s political thought and especially his ‘political economy’—‘the science of a statesman or legislator’—an important and hitherto underdeveloped ‘branch’ of statecraft that was not an enterprise separate from politics but the most important aspect of it (WN, IV: 428). Not only could politics not be siloed off from economics, it could not be siloed off from all the other human ‘sciences’ either; it was inextricably intertwined with his ethics, his social science, his historiography, his realist model of human psychology, his proto-sociology and even his deistic theology.
Although Smith’s politics has been described as ‘radical’ (McLean 2006) and even ‘revolutionary’ (Himmelfarb 1985: 46), particularly in its attitude to commercialism and the poor, his politics was not radical in the technical sense; for example, his critique of ‘capitalism’ and class privilege was not radical insofar as he in no way thought either should be transcended. But his politics was radical in the context of how political science was approached in his time. It was a call for government to radically shift its attention from the fortunes of economic, political and military elites to those of the people more generally and especially the poor. It was also a protracted diatribe against elite manipulation of the state, against corruption, Mercantilism, crony capitalism, prejudice, ‘enthusiasm’, blind nationalism and a preference for glory over welfare. He also asked people to think of the wealth of nations, not in terms of gold, a favourable balance of trade or the extent of conquered territory, but in more human terms: did the people enjoy sufficient freedom, security and social and political stability? Was everyone ‘tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged’? Was the population growing or declining? Had infant mortality rates risen to unconscionable levels? Were people paid enough? Were they enabled to live with dignity? Most of all, were they happy? The latter was, Smith insisted, a perfectly legitimate question for a political economist to pose and he repeatedly came back to that question as his standard.
In prosecuting his political economy Smith believed that he was engaged in an enterprise so noble and absorbing that its successful execution embodied an aesthetic dimension:
The perfection of police, the extension of trade and manufactures, are noble and magnificent objects. The contemplation of them pleases us, and we are interested in whatever can tend to advance them. They make part of the great system of government, and the wheels of the political machine seem to move with more harmony and ease by means of them. We take pleasure in beholding the perfection of so beautiful and grand a system, and we are uneasy till we remove any obstruction that can in the least disturb or encumber the regularity of its motions. (TMS, IV.i.11: 185)
This is exactly how Smith regarded the system of ‘natural liberty’ that was at the very centre of his political thought: as a beautiful system or machine that badly needed to be untangled from its myriad ‘obstructions’. However, in what reads like a pointed reminder to himself, Smith concludes this reflection with a caution that the single-minded pursuit of beauty, perfection and system in the context of a project that was more or less constituted by the human element could end in tears if one wasn’t careful. Perfection is all very well but, at the end of the day, ‘all constitutions of government’ are only as good as their tendency ‘to promote the happiness of those who live under them’. Indeed, ‘[t]his is their sole use and end’ (TMS, IV.i.11: 185; emphasis added). So, let us by all means make the system of government beautiful but, most of all, we should ensure that it is actually capable of promoting human flourishing and happiness.
Smith’s Purpose in Writing
Not all scholars have perceived in Smith’s thought a well-defined political project. Due to the cautious and sceptical strains in Smith, Èlie Halevy once decreed that Smith was interested neither in a science of politics nor in ‘the political bearing of his economic doctrines’ (Halevy 1934: 142). For John Robertson, Smith’s interest in social and economic progress and individual choice were not ‘particularly political goals’ (Robertson 1997), while E.G. West suggests that there is no ‘explicitly coherent analysis of political behaviour in Smith’s work’ (West 1976: 55). Other scholars have argued that Smith sought to subordinate, elide or ‘displace’ politics in order to make way for a fuller understanding of society and the economy (e.g. Wolin 1960; Singer 2004; Minowitz 1994). Some of these statements are partly true but none really captures completely what Smith was trying to achieve.
The political material that is found throughout all Smith’s major works was written to mesh with the concerns of his major published works, namely, economics, jurisprudence and moral philosophy. Since these disciplines are all cognate with political science (and were conceived by Smith himself as subfields of it), Smith had multiple occasions to introduce political themes, often discoursing at great length and in fine, practical detail.
For Smith, politics was not just about ideas: it was an activity as well. He was more than a scholar but was actively involved in framing government policy and was frequently called on to offer advice to government ministers. Apart from his years as a customs commissioner,1 he enjoyed friendships with MPs on both sides of the House—including Edmund Burke—and was closely associated with successive Prime Ministers of Britain (Ross 1995: xxxiv and passim). His economic doctrines were ‘adopted by leading politicians of both parties’; for example, William Pitt the Younger was a ‘known admirer of Smith’ and, on the basis of Smith’s published advice, ‘had promoted commercial treaties in order to bring about free-er trade’ (McLean 2006: 24, 22). All of this gave him ample scope to either sound out his ideas at the coal face or else apply his political ideas to practice. Smith’s advice was not limited to domestic concerns; for example, he was asked to advise the British government on the best course of action with regard to America. Smith saw himself as a public intellectual who wrote to influence governments and shift the political prejudices of the public. It is in these efforts and his interaction with many of the influential political figures of his day that he left behind vivid traces of his politics and where we discover that he was a political realist who understood all too well the constraints of real-world politics.
Smith’s political interests were broad and far more focused on the welfare of the poor, the disenfranchised and the ‘middling ranks’ of people than is commonly allowed: he was an important influence on successive reform movements for taxation, free trade, food security, mass education, labour laws, defence and the management and retention of the colonies. He was also a vociferous critic of many entrenched—but, to Smith’s mind, maladaptive—practices such as the poor laws, the corn laws, the low wages of the working poor , religious interference in politics, political corruption and the archaic laws controlling inheritance and workers’ rights. He was particularly vocal on the problem of public debt and worried that it would ‘in the long-run probably ruin all the great nations of Europe’ (WN, V.iii.10: 911). Smith himself saw a dominating theme of his social and economic writings—the ‘very violent attack upon mercantilism’—as politically controversial (The Correspondence of Adam Smith, Smith 1987, hereafter referred to as Corr.: 251), with its condemnation of arbitrary restrict...