prior probability

As Alain Alcouffe and I have mentioned in our previous two posts (see here and here), much of the scholarly attention to Adam Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland has been devoted to Geneva’s proximity to Ferney, where Smith’s hero Voltaire lived at the time, and to their (Smith and Voltaire’s) mutual interest in the l’affaire Calas or “Calas Affair”, an unjust criminal-religious prosecution that had taken place in Toulouse, France, in 1762. But what most Smith scholars have overlooked is that the little Republic of Geneva was itself the scene of an even more famous intellectual crime that same year, for it was in 1762 that the austere Calvinist authorities in Geneva banned what would become one of the most influential works of political philosophy and issued a warrant for its author’s arrest. (See, e.g., Mason 1993, p. 568.)

Who was this would-be criminal, and what was his great intellectual crime? He was none other than a citizen of Geneva, the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his crime was the publication of Du contrat social; ou, Principes du droit politique. (In addition to The Social Contract, Rousseau’s treatise on education, Émile, was also banned.) Rousseau, now an international fugitive (his works were banned in Paris too), reacted to the suppression of The Social Contract in Geneva by renouncing his Genevan citizenship in 1763 and then indicting the republican regime of that city-state in a letter-essay titled Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764), the last work of Rousseau’s to be published during his lifetime. For his part, given his review of one of Rousseau’s earlier works in his 1756 letter-essay to the Edinburgh Review, Smith must have taken an interest in these developments. (Also, for what it’s worth, a copy of Lettres écrites de la montagne made its way to Adam Smith’s private library. See Mizuta 1967, p. 53.)

Moreover, Rousseau was still living in the vicinity of Geneva at this time. After his works were declared illegal and a warrant issued for his arrest, he relocated to Môtiers (close to Geneva but outside her legal jurisdiction) in the summer of 1762 and remained there until mid-September 1765. (See here, for example; Durant & Durant 1967, p. 51.) It was during Rousseau’s 26-month residency in Môtiers that he wrote Letters from the Mountain, drafted a constitution for Corsica, and was visited by Adam Smith’s former student, James Boswell, but Rousseau was finally forced to flee after his house (pictured below), which today is a museum, was stoned by a mob on the night of 6 September 1765. (Ibid.) Rousseau then found refuge for a few weeks in a solitary house on the Île de St.-Pierre (St. Peter’s Island) in the independent city-state of Bern (also not far from Geneva), until the Senate of Bern ordered him to leave the island and the canton within fifteen days on 17 October 1765. (Ibid.) On 29 October 1765, Rousseau left Switzerland, never to return.

Whether or not Smith was aware of Rousseau’s dramatic departure from Switzerland, both of Rousseau’s Swiss sanctuaries — the house in Môtiers and the solitary caretaker’s house on St. Peter’s Island — were located near Geneva. Given this geographic proximity, perhaps Smith had every intention of meeting with Rousseau during his sojourn in Switzerland. Among other clues, Smith’s library would eventually contain no less than 15 volumes of Rousseau’s works. (See Mizuta 1967, p. 53.) By way of comparison, although Voltaire was an even more prolific author than Rousseau, only six of Voltaire’s volumes found their way into Smith’s library. (Ibid., p. 60.) Furthermore, if the amount of space Smith devoted to Rousseau in his 1756 letter-essay to the Edinburgh Review is any indication — no less than six out of the 17 paragraphs of this work are addressed to Rousseau, compared to just one paragraph to Voltaire — we can safely say that Smith admired Rousseau as much as, if not more than, Voltaire.

Alas, Adam Smith never did get to meet Rousseau, for by the time the Scottish philosopher had arrived in Geneva, Rousseau was about to take flight from Switzerland for good. So why did Smith stay in Geneva for as long as he did, possibly until end of January or beginning of February 1766? Maybe Smith expected Rousseau to find refuge in some other canton close by or maybe even resurface in his native Republic of Geneva to answer the charges against him. (In the meantime, Smith must have discussed Rousseau’s fate and fugitive status with Voltaire when the two intellectual giants finally met in Ferney.) Either way, as my colleague Alain Alcouffe and I will explain when we resume this series next week, Adam Smith would find many more good reasons to remain in Geneva …

Why did Adam Smith decide to visit Geneva in the fall of 1765? As it happens, the Scottish philosopher and travelling tutor would have had many good reasons for wanting to visit this pious and prosperous republic with his pupils during their grand tour years (1764-66), for Geneva was not only one of the leading centers of international scientific training at this time — Smith, for example, would befriend such leading “natural philosophers” as Charles Bonnet and Georges-Louis Le Sage during his sojourn in Switzerland — this little republic was also one of the last remaining self-governing city-states in all of Europe, a political anomaly that might have piqued the curiosity of any keen student of contemporary political economy and the classical Greek polei of lore.

According to most of his biographers, however, Smith’s first and foremost reason for visiting Geneva was the city’s proximity to the famed château de Ferney (pictured below), home of the celebrated Voltaire from 1761 to 1778. This claim is plausible, for the French freethinker was one of the most famous literary figures of the Enlightenment, and when Adam Smith was a professor at Glasgow, he devoted the last paragraph of one of his earliest writings to be published, a letter to the Edinburgh Review, to the great Voltaire, who he described as “the most universal genius” that France has ever produced. [This lengthy letter is reprinted in W. P. D. Wightman, et al., editors, Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Oxford University Press, 1980), and is available here.] So, how could the Scottish philosopher pass up the opportunity to meet one of his intellectual heroes? Alas, as great as Voltaire’s reputation was, the opportunity to exchange ideas with this intellectual giant cannot be the whole story. Why not? Because Smith’s remained in Geneva for several months: from October 1765 until the end of January or beginning of February 1766. If all Smith had wanted to do was to meet Voltaire, then why stay so long in this little republic?

What if Smith had another reason for visiting Geneva, one even more powerful than the intellectual prestige or academic allure of meeting the famed Voltaire? And more to the point, what if this additional motive had to do with Voltaire’s lifelong nemesis and polar opposite, Jean-Jacques Rousseau? Alain Alcouffe and I will explore this intriguing possibility in our next blog post; for now, however, it suffices to say that Geneva was not only Rousseau’s hometown, the city of his birth; Rousseau himself had dedicated his famed Second Discourse to the “Republic of Geneva”. These are important clues for us because, as much as Smith admired Voltaire, the one philosopher who Smith devotes even more space to than Voltaire in his second letter to the Edinburgh Review is none other than Rousseau.

Why did Adam Smith go out of his way to travel to the little Swiss city-state of Geneva in the fall of 1765? At the time, Geneva was an independent and self-governing republic, but she was much smaller than now, covering an area of 124 square kilometers. [See, e.g., Phillip Judd, “On this day 200 years ago Geneva nearly doubled in size“, Le News (3 March 2016). As an aside, Geneva did not officially join the Swiss Confederation until 19 May 1815 (ibid.).] As it happens, my colleague, friend, and co-author Alain Alcouffe and I have been researching this very question for many months now.

In summary, our point of departure is Chapter 13 of John Rae’s Life of Adam Smith, which recounts many of the most salient events and encounters during the middle phase of Smith’s Grand Tour years–specifically, the time Smith spent in the Republic of Geneva beginning in October 1765. (As an aside, Rae incorrectly has Smith departing Geneva as early as December 1765, but as my colleague Alain Alcouffe and I have discovered, this is wrong, for Smith’s sojourn in Geneva most likely lasted until the end of January or beginning of February 1766.) In brief, Rae and subsequent biographers rightly emphasize Smith’s encounters with his intellectual hero, the famed Voltaire, especially given the stature of this famed Enlightenment figure as well as their mutual interest in l’affaire Calas, a major legal and religious controversy that played out in Toulouse, where Smith had spent most of 1764 and 1765.

But at the same time, it is also worth pointing out that Smith met, befriended, and exchanged ideas with many other notable historical figures and intellectuals during his stay in Switzerland, including, in alphabetical order, (1) the botanist Charles Bonnet, who by all accounts abhored Smith’s intellectual mentor David Hume; (2) the wealthy and beautiful widow Louise Elisabeth de La Rochefoucauld (duchesse d’Enville), described as Turgot’s “muse” by some of our primary sources; (3) the physicist Georges-Louis Le Sage, who invented the electric telegraph; (4) the hospitable Lord and Lady Stanhope, who hosted many dinner parties for British visitors during their residency in Geneva; and (5) one of the most famous medical doctors of the Enlightenment era, Theodore Tronchin (pictured below), whose son had recently attended Smith’s foundational philosophy lectures at the University of Glasgow.

Prior to his sojourn in Switzerland, however, Smith did not know any of these Lumières; accordingly, Alain Alcouffe and I will explain in our next post why the “City of Calvin” or “Protestant Rome” was such a popular destination for 18th century British aristocrats on their grand tours of Europe.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Louise_Nicole_de_La_Rochefoucauld (in French)

For me, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are the original “blog kings” — I have been a huge fan of their “Marginal Revolution” blog since 2006 — so why not share the love every Tuesday by featuring my favorite Cowen/Tabarrok posts from the previous week?

Cowen, 21 Nov — Bike lanes are not about bikes: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/11/bike-lanes-are-not-about-bikes.html

Tabarrok, 22 Nov — Sunstein on DOGE: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/11/sunstein-on-doge.html

What if southern Spain were still an Islamic emirate? On this day (25 November) in 1491, the Treaty of Granada was signed and ratified by Boabdil, the last sultan of the Emirate of Granada, and Ferdinand and Isabella, the King and Queen of Castile, León, Aragon, and Sicily, who completed the “Reconquist of Spain”. (Here is an English-language translation of the treaty.) Among other things, this treaty decreed a truce between the warring parties, followed by the relinquishment in January 1492 of the sovereignty of the Muslim Emirate of Granada (founded in the 13th century) to the Catholic monarchs of Spain.

Or will Biden? See here: https://manifold.markets/BusinessLawProf/will-president-biden-release-by-dec

In the meantime, it is worth noting that we were lied to about this the last time around (see here), but fwiw check out this report, via Forbes.

Oh, the irony! The self-described “progressive constitutionalist” Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet published his latest paper on court reform (without, alas, any sense of irony) the day after the re-election of Donald J. Trump!

Gino is the Harvard Business School professor accused of using fake data in her papers, including at least one purporting to show how to elicit honest behavior (see here, for example)! Earlier this week, Daniel Engber, a senior editor at The Atlantic, published this damning report explaining why the research fraud problem in the trendy field of behavioral psychology is much bigger than Gino. Below is an excerpt:

More than a year since all of this began [i.e. the original allegations of research fraud committed by Gino], the evidence of fraud has only multiplied. The rot in business schools runs much deeper than almost anyone had guessed, and the blame is unnervingly widespread. In the end, even Schroeder [one of Gino’s co-authors] would become a suspect.

Bonus link: my 2017 refereed paper “Legal Liability for Research Fraud“.