Read On the Wealth of Nations Online
Authors: P.J. O'Rourke
On the Wealth of Nations (14 page)
Adam Smith's Lost Book
Adam Smith didn't write his book on politics. There were a number of reasons that the third part of Smith's betterment trilogy, his work on 'jurisprudence', was never finished. He was busy making revisions to
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
. He became a government official in Scotland. He died.
But I wonder if there wasn't another reason. Smith was a moral philosopher. It may be that at some point he realized politics isn't a good place for philosophy and is no place for morals. Could it have been while he was writing book 5 of
The Wealth of Nations
? Smith's old footnote on himself in
Moral Sentiments
about being concerned with 'a matter of fact' rather than 'a matter of right' could never be applied to a consideration of politics. Politics is all about right, which is to say wrong.
Political systems are founded upon paradoxes too deep for philosophy. Adam Smith was aware of this when he was writing
Moral Sentiments
in the 1750s. He alluded to it in the first chapter: 'A prison is certainly more useful to the public than a palace; and a person who founds the one is generally directed
by a much juster spirit of patriotism, than he who builds the other.'
1
Yet no father says to a newborn baby, 'Someday you may be warden of Leavenworth.'
The best intentions of political systems are refuted by dilemma. Political leadership is charged, Smith wrote, with 'promoting the prosperity of the commonwealth, by establishing good discipline, and by discouraging every sort of vice and impropriety'.
2
To neglect this 'exposes the commonwealth to many gross disorders and shocking enormities, and to push it too far is destructive of all liberty, security, and justice'.
3
Politics is unreceptive to the obvious and simple system of natural liberty. Imagine the politician who stood on the hustings and said, 'Oh, do what you want.'
As for the more successful kind of politicians, Smith addressed their character in a section of
Moral Sentiments
added in 1790:
They have little modesty; are often assuming, arrogant, and presumptuous; great admirers of themselves, and great contemners of other people ⦠Their excessive presumption, founded upon their own excessive self-admiration, dazzles the multitude ⦠The frequent, and often wonderful, success of the most ignorant quacks and imposters ⦠sufficiently demonstrate how easily the multitude are imposed upon by the most extravagant and groundless pretensions.
4
But â and in politics there is always a but â¦
⦠when those pretensions are supported by a very high degree of real and solid merit, when they are displayed with all the splendour which ostentation can bestow upon them, when they are supported by high rank and great power ⦠even the man of sober judgment often abandons himself to the general admiration.
5
What may have been most defeating to Smith about politics was the conundrum of justice and injustice in even the most justifiable political systems. In
The Wealth of Nations,
Smith stated the requirements for a political order that promotes well-being:
Commerce and manufactures can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice, in which the people do not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property, in which the faith of contracts is not supported by law, and in which the authority of the state is not supposed to be regularly employed in enforcing the payment of debts.
6
Justice is necessary for protecting property. But property is necessarily unjust â 'Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.'
7
Smith wrote that we can dispense with law. 'Where there is no property, ⦠civil government is not so necessary.'
8
But then we will get the opposite of law (and property) in the lawless proprietorship of feudalism or Mao. So political systems must be established to preserve the injustice of property by administering justice.
Adam Smith was not an absurdist. Political critiques are better left to a Jonathan Swift or a Bernard Mandeville. In the early 1700s, Mandeville wrote
The Fable of the Bees,
a poem and commentary in which, Mandeville stated, 'I flatter my self to have demonstrated that ⦠what we call Evil in the World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that makes us sociable Creatures.'
9
The worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the Common Good.
â¦
⦠whilst Luxury
Employ'd a Million of the Poor,
And odious Pride a Million more:
Envy it self, and Vanity,
Were Ministers of Industry;
Their darling Folly, Fickleness,
In Diet, Furniture and Dress,
That strange ridic'lous Vice, was made
The very Wheel that turn'd the Trade.
â¦
Thus Vice nurs'd Ingenuity,
Which join'd with Time and Industry,
Had carry'd Life's Conveniences,
It's real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,
To such Height, the very Poor
Liv'd better than the Rich before,
And nothing could be added more.
10
One of Mandeville's other works was
A Modest Defence of Public Stews; or, An Essay upon Whoring.
He was even more poker-faced than Swift in his efforts
pour épater les bourgeois.
This caused Smith to have a sense of humor failure in
Moral Sentiments:
'There is, however, another system which seems to take away altogether the distinction between vice and virtue, and of which the tendency is, upon that account, wholly pernicious: I mean the system of Dr. Mandeville.'
11
A 'system which seems to take away altogether the distinction between vice and virtue' â what is that but Poli Sci in thirteen words?
One answer to the political quandary is a populist extension of Smith's obvious and simple liberties. Modern political cynics can at least cite Winston Churchill's dictum from his speech to the House of Commons in November 1947: 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried.' But in Smith's time democracy hadn't been tried. Adam Smith had no such touching faith to fall back upon.
There is nothing theoretically wonderful about rule of the people, by the people. For example, in one of Smith's lectures on moral philosophy, he theorized that slavery could never be abolished in a republic because, 'The persons who make all the laws in that country are persons who have slaves themselves.'
12
Most of the eighteenth century's information about democracy was more than two thousand years old. Like any
educated man, Smith knew the history of the Peloponnesian Wars. It's a long story that can be briefly told. Democratic Athens screwed up. Smith didn't consider the more recent experiments in democracy to be encouraging. He looked at Calvinist Protestants in Switzerland and concluded that their 'right of electing their own pastor ⦠seems to have been productive of nothing but disorder and confusion, and to have tended equally to corrupt the morals both of the clergy and of the people'.
13
(John Calvin had the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus burned at the stake in 1553.) Nor was Smith impressed by what he'd seen so far of democracy in the American colonies. He noted the 'rancorous and virulent factions which are inseparable from small democracies',
14
and predicted that if the Americans won their independence, 'those factions would be ten times more virulent than ever.'
15
He thought America's internal disputes 'would probably soon break out into open violence and bloodshed'.
16
Smith was wrong â about 'soon'. It would be eighty-five years before the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
However, if one can't place one's faith in a majority of people, then one has to place one's faith in a minority of them. And Smith did: 'Upon the power which the greater part of the leading men, the natural aristocracy of every country, have of preserving or defending their respective importance, depends the stability and duration of every system of free government.'
17
This trust in a 'natural aristocracy' led Smith into a dangerous, even Latin American, line of reasoning:
Where the military force is placed under the command of those who have the greatest interest in the support of the civil authority, because they have themselves the greatest share of that authority, a standing army can never be dangerous to liberty ⦠The security which it gives to the sovereign renders unnecessary that troublesome jealousy, which, in some modern republics, seems to watch over the minutest actions, and to be at all times ready to disturb the peace of every citizen.
18
It's impossible to imagine Adam Smith writing such nonsense about morality or economics. He's got the invisible hand carrying a swagger stick. He's put the Impartial Spectator in a stately home on broad acres. Smith understood how natural liberty works in our ethics and our wallets, but he didn't have a clue how it could operate in the voting booth. When he concocted a recipe for politics he replaced organic natural liberty with processed and genetically modified 'natural aristocracy'.
It's no use criticizing Smith. After 230-odd years of experience we still don't know much about democracy. We have discovered that it works. If you compare the countries that have the greatest degree of democracy with the countries that have the greatest degree of other things we prize, they are the same countries. But an examination of any democratically elected government leads to deep puzzlement about
why
democracy works. And every democratic election produces
a dismal display of
how
democracy works. Maybe we the people, with all our idiocies, cancel each other out. Maybe politically empowered people are different from other pests and predators â the only thing worse than a lot of them is a few.
Small doses of politics can make life better, in the way that taking small doses of poison every day was said to make King Mithridates of Pontus immune to poisoning. But politics, as an enterprise, does not lend itself to being part of a project for the betterment of human life. Politics is a different project altogether. Smith knew this. He argued for the distinction between morality and politics in
The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
What institution of government could tend so much to promote the happiness of mankind as the general prevalence of wisdom and virtue? All government is but an imperfect remedy for the deficiency of these.
19
He argued for the distinction between â and the disentanglement of â economics and politics in
The Wealth of Nations:
The mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot perhaps be corrected, may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquillity of any body but themselves.
20
And of politics itself, he declared:
The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy.
21
An Inquiry into Adam Smith
Adam Smith did admit of one remedy to the violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind â for mankind to rule itself. He didn't propose democratically selecting our own leaders. They turn out to be violent and unjust anyway. And foolish. They have a dilly of an ego. They have a dally with their staff. They dillydally on issues of national urgency. They listen to their harebrained spouses, obey their raving political advisors, and they get their pictures taken with Gerry Adams and Jack Abramoff. What Smith wanted us to do was use our mental and physical capabilities to render the rulers of mankind as unnecessary and as inconsequential as possible, to leave them in their drafty castles throwing chicken bones on the floor.
In this and other ways Smith's philosophy was solidly based upon and securely fastened to reality. His thoughts could be used.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
and
The Wealth of Nations
leave the reader with workable rather than ontological (whatever that may mean) ideas. It is as if my Introduction to Philosophy class had dropped Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason
and taken up a critique of my little sister's attachment to that long-haired creep with a motorcycle.
But Smith was a philosopher.
Moral Sentiments
and
Wealth
may offer a program for practical thinking, but they do not offer a practical program. They certainly do not offer a practical political program, as Smith's advice on politics showed.
Philosophy is, I crib from
Webster's Third New International,
definition 4a, 'the sum of an individual's ideas and convictions'. (And, incidentally, you have to read down to 4a before you arrive at a useful definition of philosophy.) There is no need for us to examine the sum of the ideas and convictions of the man who repairs our car, unless he's been convicted of grand theft auto or has an idea that molasses should go in the carburetor. The mechanic's â or even the president's â private life shouldn't much concern us. But a philosopher is different. We have a legitimate interest in knowing what sort of existence the sum of Adam Smith's ideas and convictions resulted in. A man's life doesn't confirm the truth of his thoughts. Men's thoughts about Charlize Theron demonstrate that. But a life is an exhibit of evidence â Exhibit 4a, if you will â in the trial of those thoughts.
This evidence is of special importance in the case of a philosopher who espouses freedom and has the freedom to exercise his own espousal. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, so admired by eight or nine generations now of romantics and radicals, should be indicted. The author of
The Social Contract
kept an illiterate laundress as his mistress and treated her like hell for thirty-three years. Their five children were put in orphanages at birth. Rousseau didn't bother to name them. Smith himself once admired Rousseau, telling a visitor that 'Rousseau
conducts the reader to reason and truth by the attractions of sentiment and the force of conviction.'
1
But Smith also wrote a letter from Paris to David Hume about 'this hypocritical Pedant', telling Hume, 'I am thoroughly convinced that Rousseau is as great a Rascal ⦠as every man here believes him to be.'
2
It is doubtful that Smith allowed himself to be conducted by Rousseau to reason or to truth or to anywhere else without keeping a close eye on the path down which he was being led. It was Rousseau, and definitely not Smith, who wrote, 'Everything is at root dependent on politics.'
3
We have good reason to learn about the life of Adam Smith, but there are two problems. The first problem is Smith. He didn't keep a diary. He was a fitful correspondent without much interest in collecting the letters he received. He burned his scholarly notes. He had no toady to write down his every aperçu. He didn't blog.
The second problem is us and what we're used to learning about great men and women or the people who pass for them. What we're used to learning is everything. There is an ongoing biography of Lyndon Johnson, the writing of which is taking a span of time equal to that of LBJ's active political career. And it will take me more than that long to read it. A man's soul is understandable only to God, so the best that mortals can get
out of such a purgatorial enterprise is an understanding of the Great Biography Subject's personality.
'Personality' hadn't been invented in the eighteenth century. The Copernican view of the cosmos was accepted. The earth was no longer considered the center of the universe. But Romanticism's neo-Ptolemaic view of the cosmos hadn't come into fashion: the self had not yet taken the earth's place. The bundle of tics and traits and squirrelly notions that make one person different from another was not considered supremely important. Personality, in the 1700s, meant the fact of being a person rather than a thing. The solipsistic motormouth Ralph Waldo Emerson seems to have initiated the use of the word the way we use it.
What an eighteenth-century man had was character. If he possessed any distinctive personal qualities at all, character was the one worth mentioning. As with much that's best in life, character is dull. 'Vice is always capricious: virtue only is regular and orderly,' Smith wrote in
Moral Sentiments
.
4
In Smith's opinion, the 'difference between a man of principle and honour and a worthless fellow' is that 'the one adheres, on all occasions, steadily and resolutely to his maxims, and preserves through the whole of his life one even tenour of conduct. The other, acts variously and accidentally, as humour, inclination, or interest chance to be uppermost.'
5
Every modern person is a worthless fellow. It's no wonder that many of the most admirable â and unmodern â people of the eighteenth century do not 'come alive on the page' for us
moderns. Meanwhile some of the less admirable, like Rousseau, come alive so well that they still need killing off today. Richard Brookhiser coped with this problem of good character in his biography of George Washington,
Founding Father
:
We worry about our authenticity â about whether our presentation reflects who we 'really' are. Eighteenth-century Americans attended more to the outside story and were less avid to drive putty knives between the outer and inner man. 'Character' ⦠was a role one played until one became it; 'character' also meant how one's role was judged by others. It was both the performance and the reviews. Every man had a character to maintain; every man was a character actor.
6
Adam Smith's role as the Fred Mertz in
I Love Political Economy
was as regular and orderly and dull as any proponent of his ideas and defender of his character could hope. Smith lived most of his adult life with his widowed mother, Margaret Douglas Smith, and his spinster cousin, Janet Douglas. They doted on him and he on them. 'And nothing could be added more.'
Smith's comments on his mother, in a letter telling his friend and publisher William Strahan about her death at ninety, are not the stuff of twenty-first-century memoirs: 'a person who certainly loved me more than any other person ever did or ever will love me; and whom I certainly loved and respected more than I ever shall either love or respect any other person'.
7
Only one domestic anecdote comes down to us, circa 1788, from Sir Walter Scott, who was then an Edinburgh University student. At tea time, said Scott, Smith gave Janet Douglas 'sore confusion, by neglecting utterly her invitation to be seated, and walked round and round ⦠stopping ever and anon to steal a lump from the sugar basin, which the venerable spinster was at length constrained to place on her own knee, as the only method of securing it from his most uneconomical depredations'.
8
But Sir Walter Scott could make a story out of anything, and often did.
David Douglas, the nine-year-old son of another Smith cousin, was taken into this household when Smith was a bachelor of fifty-five. Skateboards, television, and Xboxes not having been invented, Smith enjoyed this and spent his leisure giving David his lessons. (One hopes 'Variations in the Value of Silver during the Course of the Four last Centuries' was lightly taught.) David Douglas became Smith's heir. Contrary to the heirs-of-the-prominent story line with which we are familiar (what's Scots dialect for
rehab
?), Douglas would ascend to the Scottish bench as Lord Reston.
There is no record of an accusation against Adam Smith for prevarication, deceit, shifty dealing, or even for having a little too much of that good head for business that his esteemed middle class invented. Smith resigned his professorship at Glasgow to tutor the young Duke of Buccleuch. Because Smith left at midterm he tried to return his students' fees. The students liked him so well that none would accept the refund. Smith declared, 'You must not refuse me this satisfaction; nay, by
heavens, gentlemen, you shall not.' Then he seized the nearest young man by his coat and stuck the refund in his pocket.
9
Smith received a life pension for having tutored the Duke of Buccleuch, who called him 'a friend whom I loved and respected, not only for his great talents, but for every private virtue'.
10
Years later the duke helped get a political appointment for Smith, and Smith responded by offering to give up his pension. The only way the duke could talk Smith out of this point of honor was by invoking a more personal point of same. As Smith explained in a letter to a friend, 'His Grace sent me word ⦠that though I had considered what was fit for my own honour, I had not consider'd what was fit for his; and that he never would suffer it to be suspected that he had procured an office for his friend, in order to relieve himself from the burden of such an annuity.'
11
Adam Smith made a good living as a member of what he described as 'that unprosperous race of men commonly called men of letters'.
12
And he gave most of it away. One instance came to light in a business letter of Smith's sold at an auction in 1963.
13
Smith explained that two hundred pounds (nine months' worth of his pension) needed to be sent to a 'Welch Nephew' so that the young man wouldn't have to sell his commission in the army. Smith didn't keep a carriage or spend extravagantly on his house or clothes. He entertained with potluck suppers on Sundays. 'The state of his funds at the time of his death, compared with his very moderate establishment, confirmed, beyond a doubt,' wrote an intimate acquaintance, 'what his intimate acquaintances had
often suspected, that a large proportion of his annual savings was allotted to offices of secret charity.'
14
Adam Smith was a big person, with big hands, big teeth, and the big nose everyone in the eighteenth century seems to have had. In his portraits he looks a bit like that other fellow intent upon staying in character, George Washington, but plumper and less denture and democracy afflicted. 'His countenance was manly and agreeable,' said one friend,
15
with, said another, 'a smile of inexpressible benignity'.
16
There is a disturbing aspect, to a modern reader, about romantic scandals involving Adam Smith: there weren't any. And we have very little information of that type that's unscandalous either. The only biographer of Smith who knew him was Dugald Stewart, occupant of Smith's old chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow University and the son of a Glasgow schoolmate of Smith's. Stewart may be suspected of reticence. He did tell one story:
In the early part of Mr. Smith's life, it is well known to his friends that he was for several years attached to a young lady of great beauty and accomplishment ⦠What the circumstances were which prevented their union, I have not been able to learn; but I believe it is pretty certain that, after this disappointment, he laid aside all thoughts of marriage. The lady to whom I allude died also unmarried ⦠I had the pleasure of seeing her when she was turned of eighty, and when she still retained evident traces of her former beauty.
17
Stewart may also be suspected of sitting up late and reading love poetry.
The author of a more recent (1995) and more thoroughgoing biography of Smith, Ian Simpson Ross, wrote, 'It is to be feared that the biographer can do little more with the topic of Smith's sex life than contribute a footnote to the history of sublimation.'
18
But I wouldn't be a truly modern reader if I didn't try. Smith left a couple of hints that he was a man like other men.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
contains an offhand comment of the kind that men who are like other men always make when fashion's dictates are thwarting nature's inclinations: 'ladies ⦠endeavouring, for near a century past, to squeeze the beautiful roundness of their natural shape into a square form'.
19
And there is that mention in
The Wealth of Nations
of the potato-fed 'unfortunate women who live by prostitution' whom Smith called 'the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions'.
20
Let modern readers supply a 'hmmm'.
While with the Duke of Buccleuch on grand tour in France, Smith was set upon by a French marquise, said by Smith's nineteenth-century biographer, John Rae, to be 'bent upon making so famous a conquest'.
21
It was all Smith could do to fend her off, which embarrassed Smith and amused the members of his traveling party. But this may not have been a matter of chastity alone. A friend told a friend that the real reason Smith fought shy of the marquise was his love for an English lady staying in the same town. This seems to have resulted
in a disappointment additional to the one described by Dugald Stewart. Perhaps Smith renounced marriage forever more than once. Men have been known to.
Anyway Smith did make a conquest, of the heart if not the rest of Mme Riccoboni in Paris. She was a famous actress who quit the stage to become a more famous author of romantic novels. She wrote a letter to her friend the playwright and actor David Garrick, a letter which John Rae and other Smith biographers as late as the 1960s discreetly left in French:
Oh these Scotts! These Scottish dogs! They come to please me and afflict me! I am like those silly young girls who listen to a lover without thinking of regret, always the neighbor of pleasure. Scold me, beat me, kill me! But I love Mr. Smith, I love him very much. I would like the devil to carry away all our literary minds, our philosophers, and bring back Mr. Smith.
22
Not to be outdone in effusiveness (though an effusiveness of a very Scots kind) Smith included Mme Riccoboni in his revision of
The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
The poets and romance writers, who best paint the refinements and delicacies of love and friendship, and of all other private and domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux, and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus.
23
An update of Smith's list being something like 'Stoppard, Pinter, Updike, Bellow, and Danielle Steele'.
However it was that, in the Enlightenment, character outweighed personality, Smith had plenty of the latter. We'd be inclined to set aside his character and just call him one. He talked to himself. His head swayed continually from side to side. When he walked he looked as though he was headed off in all directions. He told friends that once, as he passed along the High Street in Edinburgh, he heard a market woman tsk-tsk about an obviously prosperous lunatic being allowed to wander alone.
Smith was splendidly absentminded. While he was working on
The Wealth of Nations
at his mother's house in Kirkcaldy, he is supposed to have gone out into the garden in his dressing gown and, lost in thought, wandered into the road. He walked to Dumferline, fifteen miles away, before steeple bells broke his reverie and he realized he was wearing his robe and slippers in the midst of a crowd going to church.
Someone who breakfasted with Smith in London said that Smith, deeply involved in a conversation, put bread and butter and boiling water into a teapot, served himself, and pronounced it the worst cup of tea he'd ever had. Smith was avoided as a whist partner by his fellow professors at Glasgow University because if he got an idea during a game he would claim he had no more cards in the suit being played. Dining at Dalkeith House, the country seat of the Duke of Buccleuch, Smith began a scathing commentary on some important politician with the politician's closest relative sitting across the table. Smith
stopped when he realized this. But then he began talking to himself, saying that the devil may care but it was all true.
Most of these anecdotes fall into the journalist's category of 'too good to check'. But there is evidence of their general truth in the student notes taken during Smith's Glasgow lectures on rhetoric. Smith mentioned an absentminded character in a French play, and scribbled into the notebook margin is a Latin tag to the effect of 'Look who's talking.'
When Smith was a government official in Edinburgh he had a ceremonial guard consisting of a porter dressed in an elaborate military-style tunic and wielding a seven-foot staff. Each day when Smith arrived the porter would perform a sort of drill team exercise. One day Smith became fascinated by this and, using his bamboo cane in place of the staff, matched the porter's every motion, present arms for present arms, about face for about face, parade rest for parade rest. Afterward no one could convince Smith that he'd done anything odd. Dugald Stewart says Smith had an aesthetic theory that much of the pleasure we get from the imitative arts has to do with the difficulty of the imitation. Maybe that's what Smith was thinking about. Or maybe he was just having a goof.