prior probability

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) descended from a long-line of Genevan watchmakers, for his father Isaac Rousseau (1672–1747) and his grandfather David Rousseau (1641–1738) — as well as his great- and great-great grandfathers! — were master clockmakers in the city-state of Geneva. The beautiful 17th-century Geneva miniature clock pictured above, for example — which is now part of the Met’s fine art collection [see Clare Vincent & Jan Hendrik Leopold (with Elizabeth Sullivan), Highlights of the Collection of European Clocks and Watches in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 70-73, available here] — is believed to be the product of the master clockmaker (maître horloger) Jean Rousseau the Younger (1606–1684), the great-grandfather of none other than the famed man of letters.

More relevant than Rousseau’s clockmaker family pedigree to someone like Adam Smith — who visited Geneva in late 1765-early 1766 — is the fact that the celebrated Swiss philosopher’s forefathers most likely belonged to the old Watchmakers Guild of Geneva, which was established as early as 1601 in order to curtail competition under the guise of quality control. Among other things, mass production of clocks and watches was banned, the number of apprentices kept artificially low, and entry into the guild (and thus permission to make watches) strictly controlled. [See generally David S. Landes, “Watchmaking: A Case Study in Enterprise and Change”, Business History Review, Vol. 53, No. 1 (1979), pp. 1-39.]

So, why did Jean-Jacques Rousseau not follow in his forebears’ footsteps and become a watchmaker himself? Instead, according to his best-selling but posthumously-published autobiography The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (available here), he was an engraver’s apprentice before running away from Geneva at the age of 15 and becoming a man of letters. In any case, was Adam Smith aware of the protectionist apprenticeship policies of the Watchmakers Guild of Geneva? How could he not be, for the Scottish philosopher-economist has this to say about apprenticeships in the watchmaking industry in Book 1, Chapter 10, Part 2, paras. 16-17 of The Wealth of Nations (Glasgow edition, pp. 139-140):

Long apprenticeships are altogether unnecessary. The arts, which are much superior to common trades, such as those of making clocks and watches, contain no such mystery as to require a long course of instruction. The first invention of such beautiful machines, indeed, and even that of some of the instruments employed in making them, must, no doubt, have been the work of deep thought and long time, and may justly be considered as among the happiest efforts of human ingenuity. But when both have been fairly invented and are well understood, to explain to any young man, in the completest manner, how to apply the instruments and how to construct the machines, cannot well require more than the lessons of a few weeks: perhaps those of a few days might be sufficient. ***
It is to prevent this reduction of price, and consequently of wages and profit, by restraining that free competition which would most certainly occasion it, that all corporations, and the greater part of corporation laws, have been established.

So, was Adam Smith speaking from his own personal knowledge when he wrote this scathing critique of watchmaker apprenticeships — as an aside, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose; compare our oppressive and outdated rules of “occupational licensure” today — and was this personal experience based on his 1765/66 sojourn in Switzerland? For his part, it is worth noting that Rousseau himself confirms in passing in Book 1 of his autobiographical Confessions that “it required no very extraordinary abilities to attain perfection as a watchcase engraver” (my translation). [Cf. Texte du manuscrit de Genève (1782), pp. 30-31: “… le talent du graveur pour l’horlogerie est très-borné …”, available here.] Rousseau’s autobiography, however, did not see the light of day until 1782, while Smith’s magnum opus was published six years earlier in 1776, so it is safe to say that Smith was indeed writing from his own personal knowledge when he condemned watchmaker apprenticeships in The Wealth of Nations.

Thus far, Alain Alcouffe and I have explored Adam Smith’s possible motives for visiting the Swiss city-state of Geneva in the fall of 1765 (cf. the map of Geneva below, circa 1760). Among other things, we established a possible connection between Smith and the syndic Marc Turretin, one of the leading patricians of the Genevan Republic, as well as between Smith and Voltaire, who lived nearby in the village of Ferney and who was embroiled in two disputes at the time of Smith’s visit, one with a young English aristocrat, Charles Dillon; the other with Dillon’s tutor John Needham. But what else is there to say about Adam Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland? As it happens, a lot! Below are some additional topics that we have been busy researching this fall:

• The “Watchmakers’ Guild of Geneva”: a case study of Adam Smith’s scathing critique of watchmaker apprenticeships in The Wealth of Nations.
• Dr Théodore Tronchin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Geneva theatre controversy.
• Geneva as an English enclave: the case of Lord and Lady Stanhope.
• L’égérie des philosophes (“the philosophers’ muse”) — Smith, Turgot, and the duchesse d’Enville.
• Salon society and the “Republic of Letters”: the Charles Bonnet-John Needham-Duchesse d’Enville connection.
• Pinning down Adam Smith’s arrival and departure dates and retracing his travels to and from Geneva.

Although Christmas and New Year’s Day are around the corner, rest assured we will share our preliminary results regarding these sundry aspects of Smith’s Swiss travels in the days ahead …

Alain Alcouffe and I have been researching Adam Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland. More specifically, we have posed a number of questions about this chapter of Smith’s life. Did he, for example, take an interest in the whereabout of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or in the suppression of his works by the syndics of Geneva, and if so, whose side was Smith on, Geneva’s or Rousseau’s, the censoring syndics’ or his fellow philosopher’s?

The answer to our first question is clear enough, for if Smith’s 1756 letter-essay to the Edinburgh Review is any indication, the Scottish moral philosopher took notice of Rousseau long before his (Smith’s) subsequent sojourn in Switzerland in late 1765/early 1766. Simply put (as Alain Alcouffe and I have previously conjectured; see here and here), it is reasonable to assume that it was Rousseau’s celebrity, if not his notoriety (especially after a warrant for his arrest was issued in his native Geneva in 1762), that motivated the Scottish philosopher’s visit to Geneva in the first place!

Furthermore, we know for certain that Smith later took a keen interest in Rousseau’s quarrel with David Hume and that he (Smith) took Hume’s side in this matter. (See, for example, Adam Smith’s 6 July 1766 letter to David Hume; Corr. #93.) Even after this great literary affair had run its course, the future economist continued to inquire about Rousseau’s whereabouts. In a letter to David Hume dated 7 June 1767 (Corr. #103), Smith asks, “What has become of Rousseau? Has he gone abroad, because he cannot continue to get himself sufficiently persecuted in Great Britain?”

Likewise, in a letter addressed to Smith from one of his grand-tour contacts in Paris–the Comte de Sarsfield (1718–1789), a French military officer of Irish ancestry–his interlocutor volunteers information about Rousseau’s whereabouts: “They say Rousseau is in St Denis.” (Corr. #109) Why would Count Sarsfield bother revealing this detail to Smith unless he thought it would be of interest to him? And in another letter from Adam Smith to David Hume–this one dated 13 Sept. 1767 (Corr. #109)–Smith writes, “I should be glad to know the true history of Rousseau before and since he left England.”

It is therefore reasonable to assume that Rousseau’s whereabouts–as well the real or imagined persecutions against him–were important topics of conversation during Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland in late 1765/early 1766, but what did Smith think of his fellow philosopher? Did Smith side with the syndics of Geneva, who censored Rousseau’s works in 1762 and issued an arrest warrant against the offending author, or did the future economist and champion of “natural liberty” defend Rousseau’s right to express his ideas, however radical those ideas might be?

Alas, neither Alain Alcouffe nor I have found any direct or contemporaneous evidence of Adam Smith’s position on Rousseau’s troubles in his native Geneva, but what should we make of Smith’s silence? On the one hand, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially considering that most of Smith’s private papers and correspondence were destroyed at Smith’s own request on the eve of his death in July 1790, but at the same time, the Scottish philosopher’s few subsequent references to Rousseau provide us some clues. Specifically, whatever his views of Rousseau were in the fall of 1765 (when Smith was residing in Rousseau’s hometown of Geneva for several months), Rousseau–like Voltaire–must have lost whatever luster he had prior to Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland, for just a few months later (July 1766) Smith would update his priors, so to speak, and conclude that Rousseau was a “rascal” (cf. Corr. #93). We therefore think it is safe to say that Smith, like Hume (cf. Corr. #96), saw Rousseau either as a “villain” or a “madman” (ibid.). Either way, Smith must have concluded that Rousseau’s martyr complex was the result of his own pride, vanity, and lack of self-command.

Note: Alain Alcouffe and I will resume our series on Adam Smith in Switzerland next week …

In this post (and our next one), Alain Alcouffe and I will address the following questions: Why did the leaders of the Republic of Geneva try to suppress The Social Contract, and what role, if any, did Marc Turretin — one of the magistrates or “syndics” of Geneva that Adam Smith met during his sojourn in the Swiss city-state — play in this sordid affair? Also, did Adam Smith take notice of this controversy during his visit to Geneva, and if so, whose side was he on, the Syndics’ or Rousseau’s?

By all accounts, the main reason the authorities in Geneva (including syndics like Marc Turretin) had for censoring The Social Contract and issuing an arrest warrant against Rousseau himself was his chapter on civic religion. (See Book 4, Ch. 8 of The Social Contract.) Among other things, Rousseau presents a scathing indictment of organized religion and concludes that Christianity and democracy are incompatible (emphasis in the original):

But I’m wrong to speak of a Christian republic—those two terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits by such a régime. Genuine Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and don’t much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes. (The Social Contract, Book 4, Ch. 8)

At the time, however, the Republic of Geneva presented herself as a bastion of religious and political liberty (a reasonable assessment given the prevalence of absolute monarchies in the rest of Europe), and many Genevans prided themselves on their Calvinist and republican traditions. [See generally Pamela A. Mason, “The Genevan political background to Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract'”, History of Political Thought, Vol. 14, no. 4 (1993), pp. 547-572.] Rousseau’s Social Contract, however, not only questioned this conventional wisdom; it threw a metaphorical grenade into an already volatile political situation. To put Rousseau’s dangerous diatribe against Geneva’s faux democracy into historical context, some background information about Geneva’s 18th-century constitutional system is in order.

In brief, the power to make and enforce laws in Geneva was divided among three corporate entities or political bodies, a constitutional arrangement going back to the days of John Calvin: (i) a general council consisting of all the male citizens of Geneva aged 25 or older, (ii) a legislature called the Grand Council or Council of the Two Hundred (as its name implies, this body contained 200 members), and (iii) a quasi executive-judicial body called the Small Council or Council of Twenty-Five. (See, e.g., Mason 1993, p. 551.) The small council, in turn, was led by four magistrates called “syndics”, whose appointments were rubber-stamped by the general council from pre-approved slates (ibid.).

But the one aspect of this constitutional arrangement that must have infuriated someone like Rousseau the most was the utter political impotency of Geneva’s general council. It could not deliberate on any matters not previously approved by the grand and small councils; it lacked the power to impeach or recall the syndics; and to make matters worse, it played no role in the election of the grand and small councils (Mason 1993, p. 555). Indeed, the most odd aspect of Geneva’s constitution was that the Grand Council and the Small Council formed a “closed loop”: the Small Council chose the membership of the Two Hundred and the Two Hundred chose the membership of the small council (ibid.).

During the 18th century, however, a group of reformers calling themselves the Représentants began to question these arrangements and rebel against the syndics. Their struggle would culminate in the so-called “Geneva Revolution of 1782” (see here, for example), a precursor to the great French Revolution that began in 1789. [See generally Richard Whatmore, Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain, and France in the Eighteenth Century, Yale University Press (2012).] But at the time of the publication of Rousseau’s “Social Contract” in 1762 and Adam Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland in late 1765, the Geneva Revolution of 1782 was still decades away. Nevertheless, although this decades-long constitutional struggle in Geneva had yet to be fully resolved in the 1760s, Rousseau’s radical critique of Geneva’s morally and politically corrupt constitution — corrupt because the general council did not represent the true will of the people given its limited power and the closed loop between the grand and small councils — no doubt struck a raw chord among the syndics and defenders of the status quo and must have been a topic of conversation in Adam Smith’s Geneva circle during his sojourn in Switzerland.

Assuming the Scottish philosopher did take notice of this constitutional controversy during his visit to Geneva, what did he make of it? Specifically, did he openly defend the marketplace of ideas in true classical liberal fashion (i.e. did he champion Rouseau’s freedom to criticize the system without fear of legal prosecution), or was he complicit in Rousseau’s predicament and in the censorship of the syndics through his esoteric silence? Alain Alcouffe and I will turn to these all-important questions in our next post …

As Alain Alcouffe and I mentioned in our previous post, the rather mysterious-sounding “Syndic Turretin” is mentioned in passing in John Rae’s biography of Adam Smith (Rae 1895, p. 191). According to Rae, this particular individual was one of the many leading lights whom Smith met and befriended during his extended sojourn in Switzerland, but who was this “Syndic Turretin”, and what might Smith have learned from him?

In summary, he was most likely Marc Turretin (1712–1793), a career politician who was appointed to Geneva’s Conseil des Deux-Cents (Council of the Two Hundred) in 1746 and who would eventually rise to the highest ranks of power in the Swiss city-state, elected one of four “syndics” or chief magistrates of the Republic of Geneva, a powerful legal-political post going back to the days of John Calvin. Turretin was also a husband and a father — he wed Françoise Boissier (1716–1797) in 1733 and had one son, Jean Alphonse Turretin [Jr.] (1735–1779), who predeceased him in 1779 — and was descended from a distinguished Swiss-Italian brood, the Turrettini family (see generally Tripet 2012). The syndic was the son of Jean Alphonse Turretin [Sr.] (1671–1737), one of the leading “enlightened orthodox” public intellectuals in Geneva during his day (Klauber 1990, p. 328).

Among other things, his father Jean Alphonse was a professor of theology at the Academy of Geneva (appointed in 1705 to replace his mentor, Louis Tronchin), had led the movement to abrogate the formulaic and outdated Formula consensus ecclesiarum Helveticarum (see here, for example) in 1706, and “was also instrumental in building a more secular curriculum at the Academy through the addition of a Chair of Mathematics in 1704 and a special two-year humanities course in 1722” in order to make the Academy more competitive with other more secular universities to draw more foreign students (Klauber 1990, p. 327). Jean Alphonse [Sr.] was also a prolific scholar; among his most important works are his Cogitationes et dissertationes theologicae on the principles of natural and revealed religion (2 vols., Geneva, 1737; in French, Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne). (See Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), Vol. 27, p. 483, available here; see also Gargett 1991.) In short, given his father’s theological background and scholarly credentials, it is safe to assume that Marc Turretin was brought up in a pious and highly-educated household.

But what did Adam Smith and Marc Turretin, the Scottish moral philosopher and the Swiss statesman, discuss during their encounters in Geneva in late 1765/early 1766? (Alain Alcouffe and I assume they met more than once given the length of Smith’s sojourn in Geneva and the small size of the Swiss city-state.) Several possible topics of conversation come to mind. Perhaps they talked about the Dillon Affair of December 1765, for Turretin himself, in his capacity as syndic, might be called on to decide the legal dispute between Voltaire and Charles Dillon. Possibly, they compared notes on a much-discussed essay that must have hit close to home for Turretin, d’Alembert’s controversial entry for “Genève” in the 7th volume of the Encyclopédie (available here, by the way), an article that according Friedrich Melchior Grimm had “caused much uproar” (Grimm 1758). Or maybe Turretin filled Smith in on the latest developments in the ongoing political tug-of-war over taxation among Geneva’s main factions (see, e.g., Whatmore 2012).

But the one topic that could not have escaped their attention was the whereabouts of Geneva’s most famous native son, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was, after all, the syndics who just three years earlier (1762) had condemned one of Rousseau’s most recent works, The Social Contract, and issued a warrant for his arrest! What was Turretin’s role in this affair, and whose side was Adam Smith on, Turretin or Rousseau’s? Rest assured, Alain Alcouffe and I will address these questions and revisit the troubled Rousseau and his relationship to the Republic of Geneva in our next post.

In addition to the great Voltaire and his mistress Madame Denis, Adam Smith met and befriended many other noteworthy men and women during his extended sojourn in the picturesque Swiss city-state of Geneva (pictured below, circa 1780). Among these illustrious individuals are (in alphabetical order) Charles Bonnet (1720–1793); Marie Louise Elisabeth de La Rochefoucauld, the duchesse d’Enville (1716–1797) and her son Louis Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, 6th Duke of La Rochefoucauld (1743–1792); Georges-Louis Le Sage (1724-1803); Philip Stanhope, 2nd Earl Stanhope (1714–1786), his wife Grizel Hamilton (Lady Stanhope), and their son Charles, who would become the 3rd Earl Stanhope; and last but not least, Theodore Tronchin (1709–1781). Another person, however, who should be added to this list of international luminaries in Adam Smith’s exclusive Geneva circle is “the Syndic Turretin“. [On this note, see John Rae, Life of Adam Smith (1895), p. 191.]

But who exactly was this Turretin, and what did Adam Smith learn from him? Alain Alcouffe and I will turn to those questions in our next post; in the meantime, we will say a few words about Turretin’s title or honorific, “Syndic”. One historical source identifies “Le Syndic Turretin” as the “Mayor” of Geneva [see Warwick Lister, Amico: The Life of Giovanni Battista Viotti (2009), p. 43], while for his part Smith’s biographer John Rae calls him “the President of the Republic” [Rae 1895, p. 191]. But as we shall see in our next post, Turretin was neither a president nor a mayor, properly speaking. Instead, it would be more accurate to describe him as one of four chief magistrates of the Geneva Republic, for at the time, Geneva was led by four syndics. (For reference, see this entry in d’Alembert and Diderot’s famed Encyclopédie.) This observation, in turn, is noteworthy for us because, in his capacity as syndic or magistrate, Turrentin may have been called on to resolve the legal dispute between Voltaire and Charles Dillon (the Dillon Affair), and he may have also been instrumental in his city-state’s decision to issue an arrest warrant against the great Rousseau and ban his works in 1762 … (to be continued)

Thus far, Alain Alcouffe and I have explored two important incidents that coincided with Adam Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland in late 1765/early 1766: (1) the Voltaire-Needham clash over the question of miracles, and (2) the “Dillon Affair” or “Fracas at Ferney”, which led to legal proceedings against a young English hunter. But we have left one key question open: what did Smith really think of Voltaire? To the point, if Smith truly admired this great Enlightenment literary figure as much as Smith’s biographers have led us to believe, then why does Voltaire appear but once in The Wealth of Nations? In fact, Smith refers to Voltaire only in passing toward the end of a lengthy section titled “Of the Expense of the Institutions for the Instruction of People of all Ages” buried deep in the dense pages of Book V of The Wealth of Nations (see WN, Book V, Chapter 1, Part Third, Art. 3, para. 39), where Smith writes:

It is observed by Mr. de Voltaire, that Father Porrée, a Jesuit of no great eminence in the republic of letters, was the only professor they had ever had in France whose works were worth the reading. In a country which has produced so many eminent men of letters, it must appear somewhat singular that scarce one of them should have been a professor in a university. *** The observation of Mr. de Voltaire may be applied, I believe, not only to France, but to all other Roman Catholic countries. We very rarely find, in any of them, an eminent man of letters who is a professor in a university, except, perhaps, in the professions of law and physic; professions from which the church is not so likely to draw them.

To make matters worse, the great Voltaire appears absolutely nowhere (i.e. zero times!) in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), despite the fact that Smith made substantial revisions to this great work in 1790! For my part (I won’t speak for my colleague, co-author, and friend Alain Alcouffe here), the logical inference I draw from the utter paucity of references to Voltaire in Smith’s two great magnum opera is this: whatever Smith may have first thought of Voltaire (see, for example, the last paragraph of Smith’s 1756 letter to the short-lived Edinburgh Review, which Alain Alcouffe and I discuss here), Voltaire most likely lost most of his luster after Smith had met him in person during his sojourn in Switzerland. Why? Because Voltaire’s pride, vanity, and total lack of “self-command” in the pursuit of his vendetta against John Needham, i.e. Voltaire’s resorting to name-calling and the distorted picture he paints of Needham’s groundbreaking work on spontaneous generation — coupled with his poor handling of the “Dillon Affair”, i.e. Voltaire’s decision to take legal action against the hunter whose dog his own gamekeeper had killed — both of which incidents Smith himself no doubt observed first-hand during his Swiss sojourn — may have simply been too much for the prudent Scottish philosopher to bear.

Alain Alcouffe and I will resume our series on Adam Smith in Switzerland soon; in the meantime, pictured below is a Genevan coin for six sols minted in 1765, the year of Smith’s first and only visit to the small but prosperous Swiss city-state during his grand tour years with the 3d Duke of Buccleuch. (More details about the Republic of Geneva’s coinage in the 18th century are available here, via Wikipedia.)