Note: I made significant revisions to this part of my “Adam Smith in Love” series of blog posts. (Check out my blog post of November 10, 2020.)
When Adam Smith first arrived in Paris in early 1764, little did he know that a tumultuous and world-changing Revolution would sweep over the City of Lights in just a few years. The Kingdom of France that Smith visited and lived in for two years–from February 1764 through October 1766–was the France of the Ancien Régime, an Old World domain in which Catholicism was the official state religion, a feudal and autocratic kingdom composed of three great estates–the clergy, the nobility, and the common people.
I have been researching and writing about Adam Smith’s enigmatic love life and have thus titled my latest work-in-progress “Adam Smith in Love.” But Adam Smith also wrote about love. In fact, Smith made several philosophical observations about love and romance in his first major published work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, an intellectual masterpiece that deserves a place of honor in our Western philosophical canon, along with the works of Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant. By way of background, Smith first presents his now-influential theory of virtue, a theory based on the notion of “mutual sympathy” or fellow feeling. (See summary, bottom left.) To see the spirit of Smith’s moral theory, there is no better place to begin than with the famous opening sentence of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereinafter “TMS“), which begins as follows:
“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 [the happiness of others] necessary to him, though he deserves nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
(Book 1, Section 1, Chapter 1 of TMS)
For Smith, then, our ability to feel “mutual sympathy” with others–i.e., feelings of anger, happiness, gratitude, pain, etc. depending on the circumstances–is the source of morality. For example, in the first paragraph of the TMS chapter titled “Of the Passions which take their origin from the body,” Smith illustrates his theory of mutual sympathy with the following graphic illustration of physical pain:
“There is, however, a good deal of sympathy even with bodily pain. If … I see a [whip] aimed, and just ready to fall upon the leg, or arm, of another person, I naturally shrink and draw back my own leg, or my own arm: and when it does fall, I feel it in some measure, and am hurt by it as well as the sufferer.”
(Book I, Section II, Chapter 1 of TMS)
But then, in the very next paragraph, Smith proceeds to compare and contrast “passions which take their origin from the body” (such as physical pain) with “those passions which take their origin from the imagination” (such as love). More to the point, in what could be described as a tender and auto-biographical reference to his first failed love affair–i.e. the early romantic liaison described by Smith’s first biographer Dugald Stewart in Note K; see here for more details–, Smith observes that “[a] disappointment in love, or ambition, will, upon this account, call forth more sympathy than the greatest bodily evil.” Below is the complete quote for the reader’s reference. After describing the sympathy elicited by physical pain, Smith specifically states:
“It is quite otherwise with those passions which take their origin from the imagination. The frame of my body can be but little affected by the alterations which are brought about upon that of my companion: but my imagination is more ductile, and more readily assumes, if I may say so, the shape and configuration of the imaginations of those with whom I am familiar. A disappointment in love, or ambition, will, upon this account, call forth more sympathy than the greatest bodily evil.”
(Book I, Section II, Chapter 1 of TMS)
Smith even goes onto say:
“The loss of a leg may generally be regarded as a more real calamity than the loss of a mistress. It would be a ridiculous tragedy, however, of which the catastrophe was to turn upon a loss of that kind. A misfortune of the other kind, how frivolous soever it may appear to be, has given occasion to many a fine one.”
(Ibid.)
What is Adam Smith trying to tell us with these passages about disappointed love and lost mistresses? Specifically, when Smith is writing about a “disappointment in love” or the “loss of a mistress,” is he referring to his own lost love–i.e. to the “Fife lady whom he had loved very much,” to the “young lady of great beauty and accomplishment” to whom Adam Smith was “for several years attached.” (Stewart, Note K.) Yet, Smith himself will conclude that romantic love is a “ridiculous” passion. We will see why soon …
I will resume my series on “Adam Smith in Love” soon; in the meantime, here is Bailey Sok’s stupefying choreography of one my favorite English-language songs of 2020. Added bonus: here is Miss Sok’s Instagram.
Where is the consumer harm, y’all? I finally got around to reading the Government’s official Complaint against Google. (You can read it for yourself here.) In summary, the Feds are alleging that Google’s agreements and exclusive deals with Apple are somehow anti-competitive and that Google has shut down search-engine competition on the open-source Android platform. For my part, based on my initial reading of the Government’s Complaint, I am totally unpersuaded that any of Google’s agreements or policies are illegal. To win an anti-trust case, it is simply not enough to show that a business firm has monopoly power in a given market; the government must also show that the firm has used its dominant position in such a way as to harm consumers. Here, the Government specifically alleges that “Google’s conduct has harmed consumers by reducing the quality of general search services (including dimensions such as privacy, data protection, and use of consumer data), lessening choice in general search services, and impeding innovation.” But this key allegation is buried in Paragraph 167 of the Government’s Complaint, and it remains to be seen whether there is any merit to this allegation. For now, my money is on Google, not the Feds. Bonus material: Here is a helpful thread containing Sam Bowman’s economic analysis of the Google case.
Perhaps the most neglected aspect of Adam Smith’s biography is the pervasive role religion played in Scottish life. More to the point, the most regulated aspect of Scottish life by far in Adam Smith’s time was not the economy; it was people’s sex lives. Every parish in Scotland had its own ecclesiastic or church court. These parish courts or “kirk sessions” (as they were called) had jurisdiction over every parish member’s private and public conduct, including over all matters of sexual morality.
According to extensive historical research by Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman, the great majority of these church cases consisted of sexual matters. (Mitchison & Leneman, 2001, surveys over 8,000 church court records spread across 78 Scottish parishes from the mid-17th to mid-18th Century.) Leneman and Mitchison (1988, p. 483, emphasis added) have also painted a detailed picture of the repressive nature of Adam Smith’s world and of the roving jurisdiction of Church courts over sex: “In the early modern period every parish in Scotland had its own church court (the kirk session) dealing with matters of conduct and morality. Drunkenness, sabbath breaking, slander, riotous behavior–all these came under the aegis of the session. However, partly through a sharper defining line between the roles of lay and of ecclesiastical jurisdictions, by the mid-eighteenth century the great majority of cases were of a sexual nature ….” In addition, Leneman and Mitchison emphasize “[t]he thoroughness with which these cases were pursued.” Specifically:
“The usual train of events was for an unmarried girl to be reported as ‘with child’ at a meeting of the kirk session and to be cited to appear at the next meeting. At that time she would be asked to name the man who had been guilty with her, and that man would in turn be cited to appear at a forthcoming meeting. Unless a case were in some way unusual, for instance if the man denied fornication with the woman, further enquiry would not normally be made into the circumstances surrounding the act. However, for some unknown reason, certain parishes in the Western Highlands and certain parishes in Fife often went on to ask where, when and how often intercourse had taken place.”
(Leneman & Mitchison, 1988, p. 483)
Even pre-marital sex or “ante-nuptial fornication” was a sin. According to Leneman and Mitchison (1988, p. 484), for example, most of these cases would came to light when a woman gave birth to a child less than nine months after being married. (According to scholars, there was a disconnect between official Church doctrine and informal social norms on the matter of pre-marital sex. For ordinary people, betrothal was a part of marriage, and as such made sexual intercourse permissible. Church elders, however, generally did not approve of such “irregular” marriage. For the Church, a marriage required the public exchange of promises in the presence of the parish minister. See generally Hardy, 1978; see also Gillis, 1985, pp. 52-54.)
We can thus make two Smithian conjectures given this repressive state of affairs in early modern Scotland. One conjecture is that the Adam Smith must have been very careful in his private life. Although the penalties for fornication, adultery, and other such moral offenses consisted of shaming penalties, or “penance on the pillar” to quote Leneman and Mitchison (1988, p. 495), a cautious and careful scholar of Adam Smith’s stature would not have wanted to incur such penalties as they would have derailed his prestigious academic career and lucrative private tutoring opportunities. The other conjecture I wish to make here is far more provocative and tentative. Given that there is evidence that Adam Smith did fall in love multiple times during his life, did Adam Smith not resent these religious restrictions? Were these religious restrictions on his love life perhaps the genesis of Adam Smith’s life-long love and defense of liberty?
“The Ordination of Elders in a Scottish Kirk” by John Henry Lorimer (1891)
I will be resuming my ongoing series of blog posts on “Adam Smith in Love” in the next day or two. In the meantime, here is the latest draft of my paper on Adam Smith’s lost loves and below is a complete catalogue of my previous blog posts on this enigmatic topic: (1) Abstract, (2) Introduction, (3) Exhibit A, (4) Exhibit B, and (5) Exhibit C.
I am fascinated by how widespread cheating is at the highest levels of our society, especially in the world of sports. Name me a champion or record breaker in any high-stakes sport, and I will name you a cheater, whether it be Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, or Sammy Sosa (baseball); Tom Brady and Bill Belichick (North American football); Lance Armstrong (cycling); Ben Johnson (Olympics), etc., etc. It now turns out that the world of chess is not immune from this sordid pattern. Check out, for example, this revealing report by Archie Bland for The Guardian. (Hat tip: The Amazing Tyler Cowen.) Here is an excerpt: “Chess.com, the world’s biggest site for online play, said it had seen 12 million new users this year, against 6.5 million last year. The cheating rate has jumped from between 5,000 and 6,000 players banned each month last year to a high of almost 17,000 in August.” But be that as it may, we still have to ask, What is the “optimal level” of cheating in any particular sport?
This song is about a lost love, but for me, I always think of Cuba, the magical island of my ancestors, whenever I listen to this beautiful song because my long lost love is Cuba …
prior probability 