(The Muir portrait, circa 1800, unknown author. Wikimedia Commons)
(Above is an audio recording of the blog post)
The context in which Adam Smith was working is important for understanding his view that ‘every man becomes in some measure a merchant’ in commercial society. This remark should be understood in terms of his thinking’s place in the nursery of social scientific analyses. To illustrate this, we should note that he also says that among the ‘state of society’ of shepherds ‘every man is, in the same manner, a warrior’ (WN V.i.a.3, p. 690). In both cases, Smith’s point is analytical and descriptive. It should not be read as a ringing moral endorsement of either situation. Indeed, Smith took history to hold the ‘data for a science of society’ (Smith, 2020, p. 18) and a key aspect of his thinking is his recognition of historical change. Commercial society is only one type of distinctively modern kind of society. The others, identified in his Glasgow lectures on jurisprudence, follow in rough historical sequence: ‘hunting, pasture, farming, and commerce’ (LJ 150, p. 459). Smith’s undertaking was to understand modern commercial society in the same way that he undertook to understand these other historical phases. Human life takes on a distinctive shape in each, and their evaluation will turn on their relative ability to realize peaceable coexistence.
Smith’s political economy was part of a broader system of morals developed in his earlier The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759); this was a system grounded in a theory of the imagination together with a distinctive approach to sympathy, our ability to understand the situation of the other individual, which is foundational to his entire moral theory. It is spectators who sympathize, and Smith’s concept of the ‘impartial spectator’ represented a creature of our own imagination, whose impartiality underwrites our ability to form disinterested judgments about our own conduct. The impartial spectator does not simply represent the voice of established social norms, for it is Smith’s doctrine, as reinforced in his letter to Gilbert Elliot of 10 October 1759, that while ‘our judgments concerning our own conduct have always a reference to the sentiments of some other being’ real ‘magnanimity and conscious virtue can support itselfe under the disapprobation of all mankind’ (Smith, 1987, Corr. 40, p. 49). In other words, established social norms can be corrupt and the impartial spectator is able to imagine contrary to them. The moral sentiments of approval and disapproval are grounded in the ‘strongest and most vigorous passions of human nature’ (TMS V.2.1, p. 200). Human passions are a universal foundation. Hence, a science of human nature is possible based on recognition of this universal foundation.
The ideal of Enlightenment and the work of the impartial spectator is ongoing, both require support: Enlightenment is an activity, and while the judgement of the impartial spectator is always provisional, it is nevertheless improving:
There exists in the mind of every man, an idea of this kind, gradually formed from his observations upon the character and conduct both of himself and of other people. It is slow, gradual, and progressive work of the great demigod within the breast, the great judge and arbiter of conduct. … Every day some feature is improved; every day some blemish is corrected (TMS VI.iii.23, p. 247).
Just as a it is proper to the role of a magistrate to act ‘in the character of an impartial spectator’ (LJ ii.90, p. 104) in their ministering of justice, so too must ordinary citizens be able to employ impartial judgments if they are to act justly, and it is just this kind of imaginative ability that is under threat in the citizenry as a result of the division of labour. If workers suffer a degradation under the division of labour to the extent that they cannot engage in the kind of imaginative act generative of the impartial spectator, then a system of state funded education must be provided in order counteract what effectively constitutes a threat to a stable society and to the enlightening process itself.
For Smith, it is the situation that we perceive others to be in that is key in his account of sympathy, which ‘constitutes the basis for all assessment of the behaviours of others’ (Haakonssen, 2005, p. 962). He says, ‘Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from the situation which excites it’ (TMS I.i.a.10, p. 12); and it is the imagination that enables us to get a sense of the other’s situation. Again, he says, it is ‘By the imagination [that] we place ourselves in his [the other person’s] situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them’ (TMS I.i.1.3, p. 9. Square brackets: my additions). A populace incapable of imagining, by virtue of degradations brought on by the division of labour, and so incapable of placing themselves in the situation of the other is dangerous. Such people are lacking in that fundamental moral dimension of human life, and as a result, may enact various threats to civility.
Although there is no parallel intent or work in Smith to something like Rousseau’s Emile (1762), Rasmussen and others have shown that Smith agreed with Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment worries on several fronts. In particular, and as noted, he worried that commercial society would necessarily produce inequalities and that the division of labour could ‘exact an immense cost in human dignity by rendering people feeble and ignorant’ (Rasmussen, 2013, p. 55). Smith’s great worry, and in this he was in step with the leading figures of the French Enlightenment rather than Rousseau, was that the degradation of the workforce brought about by the division of labour would lead to ‘enthusiasm and superstition’, and as a result, to the ‘most dreadful disorders’, ‘faction and sedition’, and ‘wanton or unnecessary opposition to the measures of government’ (Smith WN V.i.f-g.61, p. 788). Diderot’s aim for the Encyclopédie (1751 – 1772) was to take ‘the world as his school and the human race as his pupil’ (Diderot, as cited in Rasmussen, 2013, p. 57), while Montesquieu aimed to help his readers to ‘cure themselves of their prejudices’ (Montesquieu, as cited in Rasmussen, 2013, p. 57). For these figures (like Smith) education and critical inquiry formed a central part of the civilizing and enlightening process.
Like Montesquieu, who believed in placing science and the liberal arts ‘within reach of all minds’, Smith held the view that education and critical thinking could undermine, if not necessarily eradicate, religious superstition and bigotry. The result of the formal educative process to be enacted by government and enforced (Smith’s word is ‘impose’, WN V.i.f.54, p. 785) if necessary, would be the enhancement of human well-being and the shoring up of society, enabling peaceable coexistence.
References
Haakonssen, K. (2005). ‘Smith, Adam (1723-90)’, in E. Craig (ed.) The Shorter Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge.
Rasmussen, D.C. (2013). ‘Adam Smith and Rousseau: Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment’. In Berry, C. J., Paganelli, M. P. and Smith, C. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, A. (1976a). The Theory of Moral Sentiments, (eds) D.D. Raphael and A.L Macfie, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Glasgow edition. Reprinted, Liberty Press.
Smith, A. (1976b). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (eds) R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Glasgow edition.
Smith, A. (1978). Lectures on Jurisprudence, (eds) R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael and P.G. Stein, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Glasgow edition.
Smith, A. (1987). Correspondence of Adam Smith, (eds) E.C. Mossner and I.S. Ross, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Glasgow edition.
Smith, C. (2020). Adam Smith, Cambridge: Polity.
