Monday, Jul. 14, 1975
The Revolutionary of Oeconomy
He was the classic absent-minded professor, a philosopher so immersed in his studies that he often seemed to lose touch with life around him. At social gatherings, he would stand alone talking silently to himself, moving his lips and smiling--although, said a friend, if someone interrupted his reverie, "he immediately began a harangue." As a classroom lecturer, he would stutter and stammer for at least a quarter of an hour before hitting his oratorical stride. Contemporaries loved to talk about the night that he got out of bed absorbed in some theory and wandered 15 miles in his dressing gown before thinking to wonder where he was. Altogether, Adam Smith was scarcely the man to whom an ambitious moneymaker would turn for guidance on the intensely practical questions of how prices, profits and wages are determined.
Yet Smith devoted many of his meditations to just such questions, with startling results. He spent at least ten years writing a book that friends despaired of his ever finishing. Smith described himself as an agonizingly slow workman "who do and undo everything I write at least half a dozen times before I can be tolerably pleased with it." He worked out most of the wording on solitary walks along the windswept shores near his home town of Kirkcaldy, Scotland, then often dictated the results to an amanuensis. He finally published the work in March 1776, under the mouth-filling title An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and thereby laid the intellectual foundations of capitalism.
It was a rarely equaled example of the detached scholar's ability to explain and influence the world of affairs. Smith's absorption in economics, which he called "political oeconomy," was a product of sheer intellectual curiosity. That curiosity led him to read everything that he could find about money, to study statutes on trade, interview businessmen and visit workshops (The Wealth of Nations opens with a detailed description of a pin factory)--but not to practice what he preached. Though he considered the desire to accumulate wealth an overwhelmingly powerful motive for humanity in general, he chose for himself what he called the "unprosperous" profession of scholar and man of letters.
His biography consists of little more than a professor's resume: son of a collector of customs; student at Oxford; a popular lecturer at Edinburgh University; tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch; full professor of logic and then of moral philosophy at Glasgow; and author in 1759 of a philosophical treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. A bachelor, Smith relied on his mother and a maiden cousin to keep house; if any love affairs ever distracted him from his studies, they have gone unrecorded. "I am a beau in nothing but my books," he once remarked, while showing off his 3,000-volume library to a friend.
Though Smith was a quiet scholar, he was scarcely bloodless. He comes fully alive in his writings as a skeptical observer of human nature, a staunch advocate of political as well as economic liberty, and now and then something of a deadpan Scottish wit. Much of The Wealth of Nations is unreadable today, but the browser comes across unexpected bits of phrasemaking--for example, the first description of England as "a nation of shopkeepers." It was no compliment; Smith complained that only such a nation could follow so mean-spirited a policy as Britain's colonial exploitation of its American colonies.
Above all, the reader encounters an amazingly wide-ranging mind. Economics for Smith was only one interest of the philosopher--"whose trade it is not to do any thing, but to observe every thing." Accordingly, he discusses the intellectual underpinnings of government, education, religion, even artistic freedom (the state, he wrote, should give "entire liberty to all those who . . . would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing"). Among his opinions:
ON WORK AND LEISURE. Great labour, either of mind or body, continued for several days together . . . requires to be relieved by some indulgence, sometimes of ease only, but sometimes too of dissipation and diversion. If it is not complied with, the consequences are often dangerous, and sometimes fatal.
ON COLLEGE RULES. The discipline of colleges and universities is . . . contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters.
ON AUTHORITARIANISM. Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency. To attempt to terrify them, serves only to irritate their bad humour, and to confirm them in an opposition which more gentle usage might easily induce them . . . to lay aside.
ON LOTTERIES. The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery . . . because the undertaker could make nothing by it. In the state lotteries the tickets are really not worth the price, [yet] the soberest people scarce look upon it as a folly to pay a small sum for the chance of gaining ten or twenty thousand pounds . . . In a lottery in which no prize exceeded twenty pounds . . . there would not be the same demand for tickets.
ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS. In ancient times the opulent and civilized nations found it difficult to defend themselves against the poor and barbarous nations. In modern times the poor and barbarous find it difficult to defend themselves against the opulent and civilized.
ON HUMAN EQUALITY. The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of . . . The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom and education.
ON SYMPATHY. To seem not to be affected with the joy of our companions is but want of politeness; but not to wear a serious countenance when they tell us their afflictions, is real and gross inhumanity.
ON HAPPINESS. What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience?*
What could also be added to happiness was the sense of achievement--and by his death at 67 in 1790, Smith certainly had that. The Wealth of Nations went through five editions in his lifetime at a price equivalent to $65 a copy--many thousands of copies a year are still sold today--and won him a comfortable sinecure as commissioner of customs in Edinburgh. He was able to tell his aristocratic former patron, Statesman Charles Peter Townshend (whose stepson he had tutored), that he no longer needed the heavy subsidy that Townshend had been paying him in order to get by. More important than the money were the plaudits of his fellow intellectuals. It was already possible to say, as the British writer and archivist James Bonar did in 1894, that The Wealth of Nations had "probably secured its author as near an approach to immortality as can fall to any economic writer."
* The last two quotations are not from The Wealth of Nations, but from The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
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