Adam Smith

Adam Smith

There is a version of Adam Smith that fits on a necktie. That Smith, worn for decades in the capitals of the West as the badge of a creed, proved that greed is good, that markets run on selfishness, and that government is the natural enemy of prosperity. Against the necktie stands an awkward piece of evidence: the first sentence Smith ever published. "How selfish soever man may be supposed," begins The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, "there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it." Fellow-feeling, the book goes on to argue, is not an ornament of human nature but one of its load-bearing walls, present even in "the greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society." Smith never retracted a word of it. He kept revising the book through six editions, and in 1790, fourteen years after The Wealth of Nations had made him the most famous economic thinker in Europe, he published the last and largest revision, as if to make it impossible for posterity to claim he had outgrown his moral philosophy. Posterity claimed it anyway. This room exists to put the two books back together.

Two books, one system. Nineteenth-century German scholarship coined a name for the supposed contradiction, das Adam Smith Problem: how could the philosopher of sympathy in 1759 become the economist of self-interest in 1776? The problem dissolves the moment each book is allowed to answer its own question. The Theory of Moral Sentiments asks how creatures equipped with fellow-feeling come to judge conduct, their own included. The Wealth of Nations asks how millions of strangers, most of whom will never meet, manage to feed and clothe one another. The famous sentence about the butcher, the brewer, and the baker (WN I.2) is not a hymn to selfishness; read in place, it is an analysis of persuasion among equals. A person in need of dinner does not beg, Smith observes, but offers a bargain: give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want. Addressing the other party's interest is a way of taking the other party seriously, of treating him as an agent with purposes of his own rather than as an instrument of mine; only a beggar, Smith says, depends chiefly upon benevolence, and even the beggar bargains. Commerce, in this picture, is what regard for others looks like once it is stretched across a society too large for affection to reach. His closest friend Hume had made sympathy the engine of morals; Smith made exchange the form sympathy takes among strangers.

The man within the breast. The Theory of Moral Sentiments builds morality out of an act of imagination. We cannot feel what another feels; we can only imagine ourselves in his situation, and the imagined feeling, when it matches the original, is approval in embryo. Judging ourselves requires one more fold: we imagine how our conduct would appear to a fair observer who is neither its author nor its victim, "the man within the breast, the supposed impartial spectator," and conscience is the voice of that internalized witness. The doctrine threads between two alternatives Smith found wanting: the innate moral sense of his teacher Francis Hutcheson, which made conscience an organ, and the pure practical reason that Kant, an attentive reader of the book, would later enthrone. For Smith the spectator is a social achievement that outgrows society. We first see ourselves in the mirror of other people's reactions; we end by judging the mirror itself, because what we come to want is not praise but praiseworthiness. "Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely" (TMS III.2), and the whole possibility of moral integrity under a hostile crowd, of the innocent man condemned and the demagogue applauded, hangs on that distinction. Behind the analysis stands the Stoic discipline of self-command Smith admired in Marcus Aurelius and his school: the spectator is calm precisely where we are loud.

What this room reads. The corpus carries Smith's English originals, both public domain. The Wealth of Nations is complete: all five books of the 1776 text in the Project Gutenberg edition (ebook 3300). The Theory of Moral Sentiments arrives inside a Victorian omnibus, The Essays of Adam Smith (Alex. Murray and Co., London, 1872; Gutenberg ebook 58559), which prints the sixth-edition text of 1790, including the late Part VI, Of the Character of Virtue, together with the pieces Smith's friends Joseph Black and James Hutton edited from his manuscripts and published in 1795: the History of Astronomy, the Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages, and the essays on the Ancient Physics, the Ancient Logics and Metaphysics, the Imitative Arts, and the External Senses. So the room reads not only the two famous books but the working papers of Smith's philosophy of science. Not here: the Lectures on Jurisprudence and on Rhetoric, which survive as student notes published much later, and the correspondence; the chat will say so when a question turns on them. Citation convention: the Theory of Moral Sentiments by part, section, and chapter (TMS I.i.1, TMS III.2, TMS VI.ii), the Wealth of Nations by book and chapter (WN I.2, WN IV.2, WN V.1), the essays by title.

One phrase, three appearances. Every occurrence of the words "invisible hand" in Smith's entire corpus is in this room's files, and the inventory is instructive, because the phrase appears exactly once per work. In the History of Astronomy it is "the invisible hand of Jupiter," and it names a superstition: early peoples invoked the god only for the irregular events of nature, never for the ordinary ones. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS IV.1) the rich, meaning only their own conveniency and the gratification of their own vain desires, are led by an invisible hand to distribute nearly the same necessaries of life that an equal division of the earth would have produced. In the Wealth of Nations (WN IV.2) the merchant who prefers domestic industry, intending only his own security and gain, is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." What the three passages share is not a theology of markets but a thesis about unintended order: social outcomes are mostly by-products, and a serious observer studies the by-products rather than the intentions. Smith never says the by-products are always benign, and the same Wealth of Nations is a catalogue of malign ones. People of the same trade seldom meet, "but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public" (WN I.10); masters are always and everywhere in a tacit combination to hold wages down, and sometimes to sink them (WN I.8); merchants and manufacturers are an order of men "whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public," who have on many occasions "both deceived and oppressed it" (WN I.11). The system of natural liberty is an argument against the captured state, made on behalf of consumers and the laboring poor, the two groups in the book with no lobby.

The pin factory and its wound. The Wealth of Nations opens not with markets but with the division of labor: ten workers in a pin factory, dividing about eighteen distinct operations among them, produce thousands of times what ten isolated craftsmen could (WN I.1). Two chapters later comes the most radical sentence in the book: the difference between a philosopher and a common street porter, Smith argues, seems to arise "not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education" (WN I.2). Talent is mostly downstream of the division of labor, not its cause, and the philosopher has no standing to condescend. Then, in Book V, Smith turns the analysis against itself with a candor his disciples have rarely matched: the man whose whole life is spent performing a few simple operations "generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become," and in every improved society the great body of the people must fall into this condition "unless government takes some pains to prevent it" (WN V.1). The remedy he prescribes is public education at public expense. Marx, who read these pages closely, built the theory of alienation on Smith's diagnosis while rejecting his remedy as a palliative; Hegel, lecturing on political economy at Jena, folded the division of labor into the architecture of civil society. The first analyst of industrial productivity was also the first analyst of its psychic cost, and he put both in the same book.

Systems as machines of the imagination. The History of Astronomy, drafted early and kept in his desk for decades, may be the most startlingly modern thing Smith wrote. Philosophy, it argues, is born not of practical need but of a sequence of feelings: surprise at the unexpected, wonder at the inexplicable, admiration for the order a theory restores. A scientific system is "an imaginary machine" invented to connect in the fancy the disjointed appearances of nature; systems succeed not by being final but by soothing the imagination more completely than their rivals, and Smith narrates the succession from Eudoxus to Newton with the detachment of a naturalist describing successive species. He even catches himself, in the closing sentence, slipping into talk of Newton's principles as "the real chains" that bind nature rather than inventions of thought, and he leaves the slip standing as evidence for his own thesis. The same epistemic humility governs his politics. The man of system, he writes in the late Part VI of the Moral Sentiments, imagines "that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board," forgetting that in the great chess-board of human society "every single piece has a principle of motion of its own" (TMS VI.ii). That sentence is not a brief against reform, which Smith spent two books proposing; it is a brief against the planner's fantasy of frictionless obedience.

Economics claims Smith as a founder, and the claim is just, but it has cost him his standing as a philosopher, the way a parent can disappear into the fame of a child. Put the two books back side by side and a single project emerges: a natural history of how order arises among beings who are neither angels nor brutes, who want to be loved and want to be lovely, who bargain with strangers and answer to the man within the breast. The room's standing invitation is to read him against the necktie: put the invisible hand beside the conspiracy of the dealers, the pin factory beside the stupefied workman, the praise beside the praiseworthiness, and ask what kind of social order an impartial spectator could approve. That question did not retire with its author. It runs through Mill's liberalism and Marx's critique and every modern argument about what markets are for, and it keeps this Scotsman, born three hundred years ago in a customs town on the Firth of Forth, among the necessary philosophers: the one who insisted that the wealth of nations is a question inside moral philosophy, and never the other way around.