There is more than one “Das Adam Smith Problem.” Case-in-point: Paul Sagar’s 2022 book Adam Smith Reconsidered, especially chapter 3, which poses a new “Adam Smith problem”, one that I had not given much thought before reading Professor Sagar’s work. Specifically: what did Adam Smith think of Rousseau, and what influence did this reclusive Swiss author have on Smith’s intellectual development?

In summary, the consensus among academics is that Smith considered Rousseau “a major intellectual interlocutor and challenger.” (Sagar 2022, p. 116.) Some Smithian scholars have even gone as far as to say that Smith wrote his first great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in direct response to Rousseau’s famed Second Discourse on the origins of inequality. (See generally the collection of essays in Maria Pia Paganelli and Dennis C. Rasmussen, editors, Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), available here, via Amazon. See also the YouTube video below of Professor Istvan Hont’s October 2010 Benedict Lecture at Boston University on “Rousseau and Smith: Political Theorists of Commercial Society.”)

Professor Sagar, however, has a different take; according to Sagar’s reading of Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments was more influenced by David Hume, Bernard Mandeville, and others than by Rousseau, for Smith would have considered Rousseau’s ideas either obsolete or unpersuasive! I won’t rehash the particulars of Prof Sagar’s meticulous, if not tedious, line of reasoning. Instead, for now it suffices to restate Sagar’s surprising conclusion that “the influence of Rousseau upon Smith is at best minimal and secondary.” (Sagar 2022, p. 141.) Alas, if Sagar’s conclusion about Rousseau’s limited influence on Smith is correct, then why did the Scottish professor choose to review Rousseau’s Second Discourse in his [Smith’s] March 1756 letter to the Edinburgh Review? Sagar himself is perplexed by this fact: “… we simply do not know why Smith reviewed [Rousseau’s Second Discourse] for his Scottish audience ….” (See Sagar 2022, p. 126.)

In addition to Sagar’s macro question — i.e., what influence did Rousseau have on Smith, if any? –, I would add one further micro question regarding Smith and Rousseau: did the two great Enlightenment thinkers ever meet each other in person? By all accounts, Rousseau left Strasbourg for Paris 9 December 1765, arriving a week later, and lodged in the palace of his friend, the Prince of Conti, where he met David Hume, among many other numerous friends and well-wishers. (See, e.g., Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), pp. 404-405, available here via Amazon.) As it happens, most of Smith’s biographers think that Smith arrived in Paris sometime in December of 1765, so was Adam Smith among Rousseau’s many visitors during this time?

Note: Professor Sagar identifies at least four more Adam Smith mysteries in his book. I will survey these additional problems in the next day or two.