Here, I will review the next two chapters of Paul Sagar’s 2022 book Adam Smith Reconsidered, beginning with Chapter 3, which is titled “Smith and Rousseau, after Hume and Mandeville” — four of my favorite 18th-century figures! The main subject of this chapter is one of Adam Smith’s earliest published works: a short essay that the young Scottish professor published in the Edinburgh Review in 1755 (available here via Google Books; see pp. 121-135). Among other things, Smith, who was 32 years old at the time he wrote his essay, reviews J. J. Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, an English translation of which is available here.

So, what did Smith think of Rousseau, and what influence did this reclusive Swiss author have on Smith’s intellectual development? In summary, the academic literature is sizable (see, for example, the collection of essays in this book, the cover of which is pictured below), and according to Sagar, the scholarly consensus is that Smith considered the Swiss scholar “a major intellectual interlocutor and challenger” (Sagar 2022, p. 116). Some scholars have even concluded that Smith wrote his first great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in direct response to Rousseau’s Discourse.

Professor Sagar, however, claims this consensus is wrong: Smith would have considered Rousseau’s ideas either obsolete or unpersuasive! According to Sagar, Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments was more influenced by David Hume, Bernard Mandeville, and others than by Rousseau. For my part, I won’t rehash the particulars of Sagar’s meticulous, if not tedious, line of reasoning. Instead, it suffices to say that by the end of Chapter 3 Sagar concludes that “the influence of Rousseau upon Smith is at best minimal and secondary” (Sagar, p. 141).

So, is Professor Sagar’s contrarian assessment correct? I hate to be that guy (again!), but there is one question that Sagar himself admits he is unable to answer. (On this note, see Sagar, p. 126.) Specifically, if the influence of the Swiss author on Smith really were de minimus, if Adam Smith viewed Rousseau’s ideas as “obsolete, or without force” (Sagar, p. 117), then why did the Scottish philosopher choose to review Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality in the first place? Alas, Prof Sagar’s own response to this query is telling: “we simply do not know why Smith reviewed Rousseau for his Scottish audience” (p. 126), it being “doubtful [that] we will ever have an entirely satisfactory answer” (ibid.).

The most plausible answer to the above question, however, is staring us in the face: the Scottish philosopher-professor reviewed Rousseau’s Discourse precisely because he (Smith) indeed took it seriously, at least in 1754 or 1755 when he first read Rousseau’s work. (The Discourse on Inequality was first published in Geneva in 1754.) After all, however feeble his arguments in the Discourse, Rousseau was a leading light of the great Enlightenment movement sweeping Western Europe, and Smith himself devotes half of his 1755 essay to one person: Rousseau! (See pp. 130-135 of this issue of the Edinburgh Review.) That said, it is entirely possible that Smith may have at some point later changed his mind about the Swiss scholar — and for the various reasons set forth in Chapters 3 and 4 of Sagar’s book.

Pause. Why does any of this matter? Because according to Professor Sagar’s revisionist reading of Smith and Rousseau in Chapters 3 and 4 of his book, these great Enlightenment thinkers have radically different views about the moral implications of markets. For Rousseau, it is the pursuit of luxury goods — and the concomitant growth of commercial society more generally — that is the main source of man’s moral corruption, while Sagar’s version of Adam Smith is less troubled by commerce, luxury goods, etc. and more worried about inequality, or in the words of Sagar himself, “it is inequality, and not mere riches …, that makes the real difference for Smith” (Sagar, p. 161). Wait … say what?!

To make his revisionist interpretation of Adam Smith’s “egalitarian impulses” (p. 65) make sense, Sagar devotes most of Chapter 4 (“Whose corruption, which polity?”) to a close reading — and tedious reinterpretation — of the poor son’s paragraph in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Alas, although I am willing to concede that Sagar’s interpretation of the poor son’s paragraph is persuasive (see especially pp. 173-176), his larger point about Smith’s diagnosis of the source of moral corruption is way off the mark. Yes, Smith was a champion of equality before the law, i.e. the classical liberal idea that everyone, including the lawmakers themselves, are bound by the law, but Smith was also a champion of markets, and markets by definition generate economic inequality.

As it happens, Sagar himself grudgingly concedes this point in a footnote: “We can agree with [Smith scholar István Hont] that Smith [sided] with Locke, and against a thinker like Rousseau, in judging that economic inequality is on balance justified if the result is an absolute and massive improvement in the condition of the poor” (Sagar p. 171, n.39). But back to the topic at hand: Smith versus Rousseau. The real difference between these two intellectual giants is that one was a critic of markets and private property; the other, their greatest defender. Sagar’s revisionist reinterpretation of Smith is a textbook example of a scholar from the present forcing a figure from the past to conform to the scholar’s normative priors.

Note: I will resume my review of Adam Smith Reconsidered sometime next week. (We still have Chapter 5, plus the Conclusion, to discuss.) In the meantime, weather permitting, I will be in Washington, D.C. during the remainder of this week to attend the 25th Annual Federalist Society Faculty Conference (see here) and present my prequel to Gödel’s Loophole (here) at the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS).