prior probability

Is the prosecution’s case against Mr Trump plausible or preposterous? See also here and here. Or put another way, is the Manhattan District Attorney upholding or destabilizing the rule of law by going after the former president at this time? And more abstractly, what is “rule of law”? These are just some of the questions the students in my honors section and I will discuss this week.

“He is not here; he has risen!” —Luke 24:6-7

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.