Although Adam Smith’s 1756 “Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review” consists of only 17 paragraphs, this survey essay makes for remarkable reading for two reasons. First off, it is one of Smith’s first publications — appearing in print in March of 1756, the year the Scottish professor would attain the age of 33. (Adam Smith’s first published piece, a review of Samuel Johnson’s celebrated Dictionary of the English Language, appeared in the first issue of the Edinburgh Review in August of 1755. See page 660 of Jeffrey Lomonaco’s excellent essay in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Oct., 2002), pp. 659-676, available here.) Secondly is its scope. Simply put: “the thirty-two-year-old writer presumes to pass judgment on the writing and learning of Europe as a whole …” (See page 659 of Lomonaco’s essay.) But this observation begs the question: who was this thirty-something moral philosophy professor trying to impress?

To be frank, the young Smith does come across as a pedantic know-it-all, especially in the first few paragraphs of his beautiful letter-essay. After dismissing the intellectual state of southern Europe — “In Italy, the country in which [the pursuit of knowledge] was first revived, it has been almost totally extinguished. In Spain … it has been extinguished altogether.” (Para. 3) — and damning with faint praise “the Academies … both in Germany and Italy, and even Russia (Ibid.), Smith finally gets around to the famed symbol of the great Enlightenment movement that was sweeping Europe at the time, or what Smith, quoting no less an authority than Voltaire, refers to as this “immense and immortal work, which seems to accuse the shortness of human life” (Para. 6): the new “French Encyclopedia” of Diderot and d’Alembert. Smith’s praise of this ambitious project is so great that his letter-essay should be titled “A Paean to the Pursuit of Knowledge”.

But the Enlightenment thinker who Smith appears to have the highest praise for is none other than his future nemesis Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “I observe some traces of [originality], not only in the Encyclopedia, but in the Theory of agreeable sentiments by Mr. De Pouilly … and above all, in the late Discourse upon the origin and foundation of the inequality amongst mankind by Mr. Rousseau of Geneva” (Para. 10, emphasis added). For my part, I would add that Rousseau’s “Discourse on inequality”, though published in 1754, is still one of the most compelling works of any genre of literature that I have ever read! Smith himself devotes no less than six of the 17 paragraphs of his letter-essay to Rousseau’s work, so I will therefore turn to the Swiss author starting on Thursday of this week …