prior probability

Although Walter Bagehot’s 1876 Adam Smith essay (see here) is succinct by scholarly standards (just 25 pages), it deserves to be included in the pantheon of Adam Smith biographies not just for its content but also for its literary style. I will thus conclude my review of “Adam Smith as a Person” by sharing my three favorite passages from the last few pages of Bagehot’s beautiful and erudite essay, where he refers to the English empiricist Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the Scottish abolitionist Zachary Macaulay (1768–1838), and the 8th century B.C. Greek poet Homer:

1. Bacon: “His mind was full of his great scheme of the origin and history of all cultivation; [but] as happens to so many men, though scarcely ever on so great a scale, aiming at one sort of reputation, he attained another. To use Lord Bacon’s perpetual illustration, like Saul, he ‘went in search of his father’s assess, and he found a kingdom’.” (Bagehot 1876, p. 40; para. 35)
2. Macaulay: “… he never voluntarily wrote of religious subjects, or, as far as we know, spoke of them. Nothing … can repel a man more from such things than what Macaulay called the ‘bray of Exeter Hall’.” (p. 41; para. 37)
3. Homer: “Free trade has become in the popular mind almost as much his [Adam Smith’s] subject as the war of Troy’s was Homer’s ….” (p. 42; para. 39)

Perhaps Bagehot’s greatest homage to Adam Smith appears toward the end of his essay, where he writes: “So much theory and so much practice have rarely, perhaps never, sprang from a single mind.” (p. 42; para. 40)

My previous post describes Adam Smith’s “lost years” as a customs officer, while my next post will wrap up my review of Walter Bagehot’s beautiful and erudite essay “Adam Smith as a Person”; in the meantime, below are links to several scholarly works that further explore Smith’s 12-year stint as a Commissioner of Scottish Customs:

1. A paper titled “Adam Smith in the Customhouse” by Gary M. Anderson, William F. Shugart II, and Robert D. Tollison.

2. A book chapter titled “Commissioner of Customs” by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner.

3. Another book chapter titled “Economic Theorist as Commissioner of Customs” by Ian Simpson Ross.

Bonus link: A blog post titled “Why Adam Smith Burned His Clothes” by Edwin West.

Alas, except for the blog post, all of these scholarly sources are gated. If I am able to find ungated copies of these materials, I will post them here next week.

(Walter Bagehot and Adam Smith, part 9)

Thus far, I have reviewed the first 20 pages (pp. 18-38 or paragraphs 1-31) of Walter Bagehot’s beautiful essay “Adam Smith as a Person” (available here, by the way). Today, I will review the next three pages (paragraphs 32-34).

The buzz generated by the publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776 would produce a third major plot twist in the last chapter of Adam Smith’s life, a permanent detour that would mark the formal end of Smith’s scholarly pursuits: his eventual appointment as a Commissioner of Customs in Edinburgh, a bureaucratic but well-remunerated post the Scottish philosopher would hold for the remaining 12 years of his life (February 1778 to July 1790). Doctor Smith was thus a customs officer for almost as many years as he was a professor (1751 to 1763)!

A further irony, as Bagehot himself notes, is that a “person less fitted to fill [this post] could not indeed have easily been found.” (Bagehot 1876, p. 38; para. 32.) Not only was the Scottish philosopher by all accounts an absent-minded scholar, bookworm, and literary light; he was now in charge of enforcing the very same protectionist laws that he had denounced in his magnum opus! But for me the worst part of Smith’s Customs House years in Edinburgh was that his day-to-day duties prevented him from completing his third great book on law and government. Although Smith made substantial revisions and additions to the last edition of Moral Sentiments toward the end of his life, as a full-time customs officer he would no longer enjoy sufficient time to conduct further researches, let alone write any new works.

In the alternative, what if the absence of scholarly productivity during the last phase of Adam Smith’s life were actually a good thing? As it happens, it is none other than Walter Bagehot who presents this surprising and counterfactual conjecture on page 39 (paragraph 33) of his 1876 Adam Smith essay. Although the Scottish philosopher had “made a vast accumulation of miscellaneous materials” since his early scholar days at Oxford (p. 39; para. 33), Bagehot is somehow skeptical of Smith’s ability to assemble and then synthesize so much information into a unified and useful whole. Perhaps Bagehot is right, but it is here where the English essayist and I (amicably) part ways. I prefer a single Adam Smith to a thousand Walter Bagehots!

I will conclude my review of Bagehot’s Adam Smith essay in my next post.

(Walter Bagehot and Adam Smith, part 8)

Picking up right where we left off, when Adam Smith finally returned home to his beloved mother in 1766, after three years overseas as a future duke’s chaperone and tutor, the Scottish philosopher spent most of the next ten years of his life in quiet seclusion in the small town of Kirkcaldy, where he wrote, revised, and proofread a book that was destined to become his magnum opus. But what kind of book is The Wealth of Nations? Alas, Walter Bagehot’s 1876 essay “Adam Smith as a Person” does not have much to say about this great work, except that its style was “plain and manly” (p. 36, para. 30); its substance, “curious” or idiosyncratic (p. 38; para. 31).

Why “curious” or idiosyncratic? For Bagehot, Smith’s Wealth of Nations consists of a miscellaneous collection of assorted facts and figures — a literary grab bag of random observations — and most of these intellectual sundries, so to speak, are archaic vignettes of a bygone pre-industrial age. Bagehot himself itemizes no less than 15 examples of such anachronisms directly from the pages of Wealth of Nations (pp. 37-38; para. 31), noting “[t]here are few books in which there may be gathered more curious particulars of the old world” (p. 37; para. 31). For my part, I would remind the Bagehots of the world of the complete title of Smith’s magnum opus: “An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations” (see screenshot below). An “inquiry” is an investigation, so Smith’s tome should be read like a murder-mystery, not a textbook, but instead of trying to solve a murder, our narrator is trying to figure out one of the most important and difficult mysteries of all time: the real reason why some countries are free and prosperous while others are stagnant and poor.

Also, as Bagehot himself reminds us, The Wealth of Nations “was but a fragment of an immensely larger whole.” (Bagehot 1876, p. 36; para. 29.) Recall that, before he had departed for France in 1764, Smith had disclosed at the very end of his first book, his treatise on Moral Sentiments, that he was writing “an account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions which they had undergone in the different ages and periods of society; not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else is the object of law.” In fact, as late as the 6th and last edition of Moral Sentiments, published in 1790 (the year of his untimely demise at age 67), the Scottish philosopher and legal scholar is still referring to his upcoming book on law and government. This observation, in turn, poses a new question. Why did Adam Smith never complete this promised work?

I shall address this very question in my next post (the penultimate one in this series) and begin wrapping up my multi-part review of Bagehot’s 1876 essay.

(Walter Bagehot and Adam Smith, part 7)

When did Adam Smith decide to write a treatise on political economy, and more importantly, what motivated him to write such a book? According to Walter Bagehot, Smith’s three-year residency overseas was the decisive moment. (See Bagehot 1876, pp. 29-35, paragraphs 17-28.) For the reasons I give below, I concur with Bagehot.

Among other things, Bagehot not only devotes the largest chunk of his Adam Smith essay — 11 out of 40 paragraphs — to Smith’s sojourn in France; he also describes in vivid detail — quoting key passages directly from The Wealth of Nations — the mishmash of outmoded trade barriers, oppressive taxes, and other “economic[] errors” that Smith found there. (See especially paragraph 18 of Bagehot’s 1876 essay, where Bagehot explains the logic of French mercantilism.) But what must have surprised or astonished Adam Smith’s imagination and intellect more than anything else during his time abroad were the counter-intuitive and radical doctrines of the French “Économistes” led by the great polymath François Quesnay (pictured below), one of the inventors a decade earlier of a new method of analysis called the Tableau économique, the first formal model of the economy. (As an aside, in his early essay on the history of astronomy Adam Smith himself had emphasized the pivotal role that the emotions of wonder, surprise, and admiration play in the development of science.)

Despite Smith’s admiration of the Économistes, Quesnay’s new school of political economy possessed an irredeemable and fatal flaw. Bagehot himself identifies this fateful paradox on page 35 of his essay (paragraph 27), a logical contradiction that would doom the future fortune of the French peoples, literally and figuratively. On the one hand, the Économistes were the champions of economic freedom, or in the immortal 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; para. 22.)

But at the same time, the Économistes, starting with Quesnay himself, had “an eager zeal for … despotism”, for they wanted to accomplish their radical laissez faire reforms “by the fiat of the sovereign.” (Bagehot 1876, p. 35; para. 27.) In other words, a free market requires a strong central government (a political authority strong enough to, at a minimum, define, allocate, and enforce property rights as well as guarantee law and order), but a strong central government, in turn, poses a great risk to freedom. That is the logical contradiction of Quesnay and his disciples. Does this paradox have a solution? As I shall explain in my next Bagehot/Smith post, Adam Smith would devote the next ten years of his life (1766-1776) attempting to solve it.

My previous post describes Adam Smith’s unexpected decision to resign his prestigious professorship at the University of Glasgow in order to become a travelling tutor to the future 3rd Duke of Buccleuch, and my next post will describe what may have sparked the philosopher’s intellectual wonder while he was abroad. In the meantime, below are four links providing some background information regarding the 18th-century British custom of sending young aristocrats overseas with a tutor as part of their education:

1. 18th Century Grand Tour of Europe, via ThoughtCo.

2. History of the Grand Tour, via the Educated Traveller.

3. How the Grand Tour transformed eighteenth-century culture in Britain, via House & Garden.

4. What was the Grand Tour?, via the Royal Museums Greenwich website.

Bonus link: When Paris’s Streets Were Paved With Filth, via Undark.

(Walter Bagehot and Adam Smith, part 5)

Happy Monday! Thus far, we have reviewed the first few pages of Bagehot’s 1876 essay “Adam Smith as a Person” (pp. 18-26 or paragraphs 1-12, to be more precise); today, we will turn to the next three pages of his excellent essay (pp. 26-29 or paragraphs 13-15).

After joining the faculty of the University of Glasgow in the fall of 1751, Adam Smith began lecturing on a wide variety of topics, including rhetoric, ethics, and law, and it was during this time–his professor years (1751 to 1763) in Glasgow–that the now middle-aged Adam Smith would begin to play a small part on the intellectual stage of Enlightenment Europe. Smith’s lectures not only attracted students from all over the United Kingdom as well as the Continent; Smith also made his first major contribution to the world of letters: The Theory of Moral Sentiments. (The first edition of this great tome was first published in 1759, the year Smith celebrated his 36th birthday.)

Adam Smith’s philosophical treatise not only catapulted its author on the world stage in a literal sense, for as I shall further explain in my next post, it was the publication of “this celebrated book” that would lead to Adam Smith’s three-year “Grand Tour” of Paris, Geneva, and the South of France with the Duke of Buccleugh starting in January of 1764; Moral Sentiments was also the main source of Adam Smith’s scholarly and literary reputation while he was still alive. (As Bagehot correctly notes, except for a little essay on the origins of language, which Smith added to the third edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1767, Smith did not publish any other new work until the first edition of The Wealth of Nations was published in April of 1776.)

Although Smith’s Moral Sentiments was by all accounts “much praised and much read” (p. 26, paragraph 13) at the time of its initial publication in 1759, Bagehot, writing a century later, wastes no time in showing what a weak and flimsy a work of moral philosophy it really was. To the point, Bagehot launches a devastating two-pronged pincer movement, so to speak, against Smith’s work, simultaneously attacking both intellectual flanks of Smith’s ethical theory: the sentiment of sympathy and the device of the impartial spectator.

First off, Adam Smith tried to build a comprehensive and sophisticated theory of ethics on the foundation of human sympathy. In brief, according to Smith the moral philosopher, man is not just a selfish creature but an other-regarding one too, or in Smith’s own “pompous” words: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it“. (This famous passage appears in the very first sentence of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.)

Bagehot, however, spots an “obvious objection” to Smith’s pro-sympathy premise: “We often sympathize where we cannot approve, and approve where we cannot sympathize.” (p. 27, para. 14). In other words, unlike the Pope, Smith’s lofty sentiment of sympathy is not infallible! Moreover, even if Smith’s theory is really based on what we now call “empathy” (I always get the two confused!), Bagehot’s “obvious objection” still stands. Either way, people often sympathize (i.e. feel pity for) or empathize (i.e. understand how others feel) with the wrong people, an observation that is especially true in a real-world domain like politics, where “[e]ven the wisest party men more or less sympathize with the errors of their own side ….” (ibid.).

To his credit, Bagehot acknowledges that Adam Smith anticipated this “obvious objection” to his theory and that Smith tried to remedy it by introducing the imaginary device of the impartial spectator, perhaps the most original aspect of all of Smith’s moral philosophy. Alas, Bagehot’s take-down of the impartial spectator is so deadly and devastating that it is worth quoting in full:

Adam Smith could not help being aware of this obvious objection …. But the way in which he tries to meet the objection only shows that the objection is invincible. He [Smith] sets up a supplementary theory–a little epicycle–that the sympathy which is to test good morals [i.e. properly distinguish right from wrong] must be the sympathy of an “impartial spectator.” But, then, who is to watch the watchman? Who is to say when the spectator is impartial, and when it is not?

As it happens, Bagehot is not the only public intellectual to “diss” Smith’s great work of moral philosophy. My colleague and friend Daniel Klein, for example, has identified no less than 26 different authors who have found one fault or another in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. (See here: Dan Klien, “Dissing The Theory of Moral Sentiments: Twenty-Six Critics, from 1765 to 1949,” in Volume 15 of Econ Journal Watch.) But Bagehot’s critique, to my mind, is the most fatal one. (If Bagehot were a modern-day hip hop artist, his two-track Adam Smith diss songs might be called “Too Much Sympathy, Yo'” and “Who’s Watchin’ My Watcher?”)

Aside from the question of its intellectual merit, The Theory of Moral Sentiments led to Adam Smith’s tour of Europe, a voyage of discovery that most likely shaped Adam Smith’s intellectual destiny more than other episode in Smith’s life. I shall turn to Smith’s appointment as a travelling tutor to the Duke of Buccleugh and their short-lived “Grand Tour” in my next post.

Below is a recap of my first five posts in this series:

1. Adam Smith as a Person (March 25, 2023), where I introduce an essay with the same title by English essayist Walter Bagehot.
2. Walter Bagehot and Adam Smith, part 1 (March 27), where I identify several themes in Bagehot’s Adam Smith essay.
3. Adam Smith’s dream (March 28), where I describe the ambitious nature of Smith’s massive scholarly project: to identify the universal and law-like rules of behavior that men, merchants, and law-makers should live by.
4. Balliol College and the road to Adam Smith’s Damascus (morning of March 30), where I survey the last stage Smith’s formal education–his seven years of study at Oxford–and take notice of his momentous decision in 1746 to abandon his religious vocation.
5. Adam Smith’s patrons and possible father figures (afternoon of March 30), where I identify two prominent men who took Smith under their protective wings: the jurist Lord Kames and the mechant/slave trader Provost Cochrane.

Stay tuned; I will pick up where I left off (with the publication of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759) and resume my Bagehot/Smith series on Monday, April 3 …