prior probability

Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold.)

Adam Smith left Oxford “for good” in August of 1746,^[1] and he eventually “fixed his residence at Edinburgh,”^[2] where he began to deliver a series of “freelance lectures on English composition and literary criticism” somewhere in the Athens of the North.^[3]But what was the college dropout doing during the span of time between his departure from Oxford in August of 1746 and his move to Edinburgh in 1748? Also, when did Smith make his fateful move to Edinburgh? If it was not until the summer or fall of 1748, a total of two years might be “lost”!

Alas, Smith’s biographers are of no help. To begin, all we are told in Dugald Stewart’s Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith is that, “[a]fter a residence at Oxford of seven years” (i.e. July 1740 to August 1746), the young Smith “returned to Kirkcaldy, and lived two years with his mother; engaged in study, but without any fixed plan for his future life” and that “he resolved to return to his own country, and to limit his ambition to the uncertain prospect of obtaining, in time, some one of those moderate preferments, to which literary attainments lead in Scotland.”^[4]

Smith’s other oft-cited biographer, John Rae, adds one extra detail to Stewart’s bare-bones account of Smith’s lost years. Rae reports that “Smith returned to Scotland in August 1746, but his name remained on the Oxford books for some months after his departure, showing apparently that he had not on leaving come to a final determination against going back.”^[5] So, was the young Smith planning on possibly returning to his formal studies at Balliol College at some point? If so, he must have changed his mind, for according to Rae, “Smith concluded that the best prospect for him was after all the road back to Scotland. And he never appears to have set foot in Oxford again.”^[6]

Neither Nicholas Phillipson (2010) nor Ian Simpson Ross (2010), however, shed any light on this chapter of Smith’s life. In fact, both biographers skip the year 1747 altogether. The only thing Ross (2010, p. 74), for example, has to say is that Smith “went back to Kirkcaldy” in 1746 and then “went off to do the work that led to his world fame as a man of letters.”^[7] Phillipson (2010, p. 72) is even more terse. He simply tells us that “Smith left Oxford in late August 1746 and returned to Scotland” before changing the subject to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-46 and proceeding to describe Henry Home’s “instrumental [role] in launching Smith’s career in 1748 by means of an invitation to deliver two series of lectures in the capital [Edinburgh], on rhetoric and on jurisprudence.”^[8] 

For his part, E. G. West (1969, p. 44), without citing any supporting evidence, claims that Adam Smith spent these lost years writing some of the essays that would later be published posthumously in Smith’s Essays on Philosophical Subjects: “Much of these two years [i.e. 1746 to 1748] he spent writing. It is probable that in this period he wrote some of the belles-lettres and the essays on astronomy, ancient physics, logic and metaphysics.”^[9] But to quote Glory Liu (2022, p. xvii): “Smith left Oxford for Scotland in 1746. We know next to nothing of what happened between then and 1748 ….” In short, most of Smith’s biographers simply leapfrog from Smith’s decision to ditch Oxford in August of 1746 directly into Smith’s fateful move to Edinburgh in 1748.

But what happened in 1747? How did a college dropout with no prospects become a leading light of the Scottish Enlightenment, the man who would change the world by bringing down mercantilism and championing free trade?

Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold.)

“Adam Smith was enrolled in Balliol College for six academic terms: July 1740 to August 1746. But his Oxford period poses more questions than answers. First and foremost, what was the young scholar studying during this time? Was he really ‘studying theology with the intent of becoming an Episcopalian pastor’?[1] Is there any evidence of Smith using the Balliol College library or the primary Oxford library, the Bodleian, during his years at Oxford?[2] Also, why did he continue to hold his Snell Exhibition and continue receiving a stipend until 1749, i.e. for three additional years after leaving Oxford in 1746?[3] Lastly, was Smith ever awarded a degree by Balliol College?

“By way of background, Smith was awarded a Snell Exhibition in March of 1740. The Snell was a coveted scholarship allowing a select number of Glasgow University students to study at Oxford. This award was founded by the bequest of Sir John Snell in 1677,[4] and under the terms of his original bequest, the recipients of this award were required to study theology, take holy orders in the Anglican Church(!), and return to Scotland.[5] Although Smith eventually returned to Scotland, he never joined the clergy. In fact, it is also unclear if he was even awarded a degree by Oxford at all.[6] On the original cover page of Smith’s second great work, The Wealth of Nations, which was first published in 1776, Smith’s post-Oxford law degree and his membership in the Royal Society of London are prominently displayed: ‘Adam Smith, LL.D. and F.R.S.’ (Smith was awarded a Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) degree by the University of Glasgow in 1762,[7] and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in May of 1767.[8]) By contrast, the original cover page of the first edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759 (i.e. after Smith had attended Oxford but before receiving his LL.D. from Glasgow), makes no reference to a degree.

“But of all these college-era enigmas, perhaps the most significant one is Smith’s fateful decision in August of 1746 to ditch Oxford. More specifically, did this decision, perhaps the most momentous inflection point in the Scottish scholar’s life, have anything to do with his views on religion? Did Smith experience a crisis of faith? Did he perhaps undergo a reverse conversion, so to speak, from religion to natural philosophy? Although Smith’s religious views are unclear at best, if he was ever a devout believer at any time in his life, wouldn’t it have been while he was still young and impressionable? When Smith left Oxford for good, he was 23.”

In other news, I got to see an amazing rocket launch (Blue Origin’s impressive “New Glenn” rocket) earlier this morning from Cape Canaveral Beach, where I had a direct line of sight to the launch pad. I posted a recording of the first stage of the launch on YouTube (below the fold):

Nota bene: Below is a short excerpt from Chapter 4 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society:

Adam Smith, an up-and-coming professor of jurisprudence and moral philosopher when he published the first edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, borrows many legal locutions to describe the moral machinations of his impartial spectator. Among other things, Smith uses the words “appeal” (TMS, III.ii.32), “judgements” (III.ii.33), “jurisdiction” (III.iii.5), “sentence” (III.ii.32), and “tribunal” (III.ii.33) whenever he is discussing the figure of the impartial spectator. But the term he uses most often to describe his imaginary being is the word “judge.” Sometimes the word judge is capitalized. Most of the time, however, it is not. In Chapter 3 of Book III of TMS, for example, Smith describes his impartial magistrate as an “examiner and judge” (III.i.6), a “great judge and arbiter” (III.iii.4), an “awful and respectable judge” (III.iii.25), and “the immediate judge of mankind” (III.ii.32), that is, with a lower-case j. But at the same time, in several other passages in TMS (see TMS, II.iii.2, III.ii.33, & III.iii.43), Smith capitalizes the word “Judge” (upper-case J). What’s going on?

Also, what kind of judge (or Judge!) is the impartial spectator? Does this imaginary magistrate refer to a mental or internal process, a fiction of our moral imaginations (our inner voice or conscience), or is he an actual external entity, a deity, or godlike “beholder,” to borrow Daniel Klein, Nicholas Swanson, and Jeffrey Young (2025)’s formulation? At first glance, Smith appears to propound the first of these two possibilities in Book III of TMS. By way of example, Smith refers to the “higher tribunal” of our own consciences in the following passage:

But though man has, in this manner, been rendered the immediate judge of mankind, he has been rendered so only in the first instance; and an appeal lies from his sentence to a much higher tribunal, to the tribunal of their own consciences, to that of the supposed impartial and well-informed spectator, to that of the man within the breast, the great judge and arbiter of their conduct. (TMS, III.ii.32)

But in the very next paragraph (!), Smith describes this higher tribunal as an all-seeing Judge (capital J) or deity/godlike entity:

In such cases [i.e. when people think we are guilty of an offense we, in fact, did not commit] the only effectual consolation of [a] humbled and afflicted man lies in an appeal to a still higher tribunal, to that of the all-seeing Judge of the world, whose eye can never be deceived, and whose judgments can never be perverted. (TMS, III.ii.33)

Notice how Smith drops the word “supposed” when he capitalizes the word “Judge,” but notice too how he deploys the same set of legal metaphors (that of magistrate and tribunal) to refer to two different entities—either to the man within the breast or to a godlike entity—depending on whether the word “judge” is capitalized or not. For Smith, then, there are fallible and imperfect “judges” and infallible and perfect “Judges.” The judge of the lower-case j is the man within the breast, while the capital J Judge is God or a “beholder.”[1] But this observation, in turn, poses a puzzle. Specifically, why are there not one but two (!) types of impartial spectator in Smith’s moral framework? Was the Scottish moral philosopher and jurisprude being esoteric or unclear on purpose? If so, why?

In a recent paper, Daniel Klein, Nicholas Swanson, and Jeffrey Young (2025, pp. 321-322) all but concede that Adam Smith paints a confusing and conflicting picture of the impartial spectator in TMS,[2] for they identify a wide variety of competing motives that Smith may have had for being intentionally evasive or esoteric on this score: pedagogical, strategic, and even theological. (To be continued …)

[1] See Klein, D., Swanson, N., and Young, J. (2025). The impartial spectator rises. Econ Journal Watch, 22(2): 296–326..

[2] Cf. Medema, S. (2023). Review of R. P. Malloy, Law and the Invisible Hand (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 45(4): 686–689, at p. 688: “… the spectator encounters what seem to be insuperable difficulties as an operational concept owing to its essential ambiguity and indeterminacy. To be blunt, who is he/she/them? Everyone has their own idea of the impartial spectator…. Or, to put matters another way, there is no impartial spectator, only conflicting visions of such.”

I will resume my series on my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society, in my next post. Today, however, I want to honor the brave and idealistic men who tried to liberate their beloved Cuba on this day 65 years ago (17 April 1961), when a paramilitary force consisting of 1,400 Cuban exiles (the legendary Brigade 2506) launched their heroic but doomed attempt overthrow Fidel Castro’s dictatorship, doomed in large part because JFK cancelled crucial air strikes as the invasion was taking place. Although the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1746 Battle of Culloden (see yesterday’s post) are separated by over two centuries (or 215 years, to be exact), the eerie parallels between both “lost causes” are not lost on me. (On this note, following the example of Scotland’s union with England, perhaps Cuba, and not Canada, should become the 51st U.S. State?) Either way, may my Cuban brothers and sisters be free and prosperous one day soon!

I will resume my series on “Das Adam Smith Problematic?” in the next day or two, but in the meantime, I want to commemorate the 280th anniversary of the Battle of Culloden, which took place on this day (16 April) in 1746, when a rag-tag Scottish army under the command of “the Young Pretender”, Bonnie Prince Charlie (Charles Edward Stuart), was decisively defeated by a British government force led by the Duke of Cumberland, thereby ending the ill-fated Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Hat tip to Alanna MacTavish (University of Aberdeen) for reminding me of this historic event during her talk on “Jacobitism and Reformed Scholasticism” at last weekend’s annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) in Philadelphia!

Nota bene: Below is another short excerpt from Chapter 3 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (The works cited are included below the fold.)

“[Das Quesnay-Problem] refers to an internal contradiction in Physiocracy—an influential school of political economy led by the French polymath François Quesnay—the tension between laissez-faire and despotism in pre-revolutionary France…. On the one hand, the Physiocrats were champions of free markets and economic freedom, or in the eloquent words of Walter Bagehot, this new school of laissez-faire economists ‘delighted in proving that the whole structure of the French laws upon industry was wrong; that prohibitions ought not to be imposed on the import of foreign manufactures; that [subsidies] ought not to be given to native ones; that the exportation of corn ought to be free; that the whole country ought to be a fiscal unit; that there should be no duty between any province; and so on in other cases.’ (Bagehot 1876, p. 32) But at the same time, the Économistes, starting with Quesnay himself, had ‘an eager zeal for … despotism,’ for they wanted to accomplish their radical free market reforms ‘by the fiat of the sovereign.’ (ibid., p. 35) How does Adam Smith resolve this tension between ‘natural liberty’ and free markets on the one hand and the reality of centralized power and hereditary monarchy on the other? In short, what is the relationship between democracy and capitalism? (see generally Friedman 2002) Is democracy a necessary or sufficient condition for Smith’s system of natural liberty? Or to borrow an actual historical example …, if Smith had to choose just one of the following three places to live in the 20th century—Juan Perón’s Argentina, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, or Augusto Pinochet’s Chile—which of these despotic Latin American regimes would he have chosen? A hard choice indeed!”

Nota bene: I have blogged about this puzzle before: see here. Below, however, is a revised and corrected excerpt from Chapter 3 of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (“Cole 1958 refers” to Arthur H. Cole’s classic 1958 paper “Puzzles of the “Wealth of Nations”, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 1–8.)

Arthur H. Cole was an economic historian at Harvard and the head librarian of the Harvard Business School. [For more information about Cole’s life and work, see here (Wikipedia) and here (Irwin Collier’s archive).] In 1958, he wrote a paper titled “Puzzles of the ‘Wealth of Nations.’” Although Professor Cole’s paper refers to puzzles (plural), the author ends up identifying only one puzzle, but it is a big one. Was Adam Smith a misanthrope?

To this end, Cole (1958, p. 3) shows how “Smith gives much evidence of a pretty low opinion of mankind in general.” Among others, Smith calls out “the usual idleness” of apprentices (WN, I.x.a.8) and the “sneaking arts” of underling tradesmen (IV.iii.b.8). The Scottish scholar also castigates “weak and wondering travellers” (V.i.d.17) and “stupid and lying missionaries” (ibid.). Smith rebukes “the absurd prescriptions” of doctors (II.iii.31) as well as “[l]uxury in the fair sex” (I.viii.37); and he is unable to “reckon our soldiers the most industrious set of people among us” (I.viii.44).

But Smith reserves his greatest invective for politicians, i.e. “that insidious and crafty animal” (IV.ii.39), and for merchants and manufacturers, whose “avidity” (IV.viii.4), “clamour and sophistry” (I.x.b.25), and “mean rapacity” (IV.iii.c.9) impede the progress of commerce. Cole’s conclusion is that Smith had bad things to say about almost everyone. Well, almost everyone. By comparison, Smith has good things to say about the “judicious operations” of English bankers and the “delightful art” of gardening. He commends “the wholesome and invigorating liquors of beer and ale,” and he also praises the “chairmen, porters, and coalheavers in London” as well as “those unfortunate women who live by prostitution” as “the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions ….” [WN, I.xi.b.41, quoted in part in Cole 1958, pp. 7-8.]

Cole’s puzzle is therefore this: what are we to make of this Smithian pattern of general condemnation sprinkled with such limited praise? Or in the words of Arthur Cole:

One lesson seems sufficient: when some specially vigorous judgment is quoted from the great Scotsman—that a politician is an “insidious and crafty animal,” or tradesmen are capable of “sneaking arts”—it will be appropriate to reflect that this thorn came from a bouquet full of rather thorny roses. Whether Adam Smith deliberately put such prickly blossoms there—for literary effect—or in his premature cantankerousness didn’t realize that such barbs were being placed all through the book—this question each admirer of the Scotsman may answer for himself. (Cole 1958, p. 8)

Happy Monday! Now that we have concluded my detailed chapter-by-chapter survey of The Wealth of Nations (see my post from 11 April), I want to conclude this extended series of elaborate blog posts — by my count, 78 substantive posts in all, not including my 20 additional posts on Book IV, Chapter 2 from around this time last year! — on a more general and personal note by sharing what Adam Smith and his magnum opus mean to me. Smith scholar Maria Pia Paganelli once wrote, “We pose questions to Adam Smith. And he still answers, even if both the questions and answers change over time.” [1] I, however, think it’s the other way around: Adam Smith poses questions and problems to us, and he leaves it up to us to provide our own answers. And on this note, my colleague and friend Salim Rashid and I have both been collaborating on a new project, which is now tentatively-titled Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics, and Society (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), in which we explore some of the many questions, open problems, and unresolved mysteries that Smith poses to us today, not just in The Wealth of Nations, but also in his other great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as well as in the two books he was purportedly working on his entire life but never published — one on jurisprudence, the other on the arts. Starting tomorrow, then, I will begin a new series of blog posts in which I explore the most important questions that Adam Smith poses to us today. In the meantime, help us pick out a book cover.

[1] Paganelli, M. (2015). Recent engagements with Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment. History of Political Economy, 47(3): 363–394, p. 363

In other news, my streak of consecutive days blogging hit 1776 days while I was in Philadelphia this weekend! See here.

P.S.: I also overheard this beautiful ballad for the first time — fittingly enough — somewhere in the City of Brotherly Love, where I have been attending a joint meeting of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society (ECSSS) and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS).