Adam Smith (1723-90) is a frustrating subject for biography. He passed most of his life in such masculine institutions as the University of Glasgow and the Scottish Customs Board, valued solitude, travelled abroad only once, and then only to France and Geneva, never married, lived with his mother.
Smith destroyed many of his unpublished manuscripts, leaving posterity a few ravishing fragments, a couple of hundred letters and two highly finished essays in philosophy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776).
Dugald Stewart's eulogy, delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the winter of 1793, supplied most of what little there was to know of Smith's life, and was supplemented by anecdotes in John Rae's Victorian biography in 1895. That year, a set of lecture notes from Smith's jurisprudence course at Glasgow turned up in Edinburgh and began to transform our notion of the man. The "Scottish Enlightenment" was invented. Scott (1937), Ross (1995) and now Phillipson present Smith as the model intellect of the 18th century, in which thought itself changes direction and modernity begins to take form.
Far from being the unworldly fellow of Stewart or an economist avant la lettre, this new Smith passed a long life wrestling with a stupendous theory of everything. Phillipson calls this project nothing less than a "Science of Man", in which introspection in the manner pioneered by David Hume and a profound study of ancient and modern history would lay bare the principles of social organisation, the well-springs of the arts and sciences, and the ideal government and code of laws. Such an enterprise, wildly ambitious even in antiquity, was in the much broader circumstances of the 18th century utterly doomed, and Smith died in 1790 in a dejection bordering on despondency. According to one of his last visitors, "I meant (said he) to have done more."
Phillipson, who is the great expert on the Scottish Enlightenment, has little new by way of what Dr Johnson (in his essay on biography in the Rambler of 13 October 1750) called the "domestic privacies". What he brings is a great knowledge of the industrial and commercial processes transforming Scotland after the 1730s, and a sensitivity to the currents of religion in Scotland and philosophy in Britain and France.
His chronology is distinctive. For Phillipson, Smith was reading Epictetus's Enchiridion in the one-room schoolhouse in Kirkcaldy at 13 and had the rudiments of the division of labour and commercial liberty by the late 1740s. Phillipson devotes a "conjectural" chapter to reconstructing lectures on jurisprudence that Smith may or may not have delivered in Edinburgh in the winter of 1750-51. One effect of this chronology is that Phillipson's Smith, like Hume, had done all his important thinking in his 20s, leaving the rest of his life free not, as I thought, for hypochondria and depression, but for university business, the Scottish Customs and the management of the estates of his young pupil, the Duke of Buccleuch.
A second effect of Phillipson's chronology is to reduce to the juvenile the influence of both Presbyterianism and the classical authors. For Phillipson, The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a response to the cult of savagery in Rousseau (who is not mentioned in it) rather than the stoicism of Cicero and Epictetus (who are, often).
In Phillipson's reading, the theory is not so much an ethics as a theory of polite sociability, contra Rousseau and also Hobbes, and per Hume, in which imagination plays the starring ethical role. Through the exercise of imaginative sympathy, we form notions of justice, morality, beauty, taste, good manners and order and also, this being the 18th century, subordination. This "natural" sociability also – and this is the hinge of Phillipson's argument – justifies the new world of luxury and commerce opening to Scottish 18th-century view.
Phillipson demolishes the old notion, popular in Germany, that there was some change of heart between The Theory and The Wealth of Nations, one hopes for all time. Also, the new notion of "left" Smithians that lying in some linen-press or croquet-box in one of the Buccleuch houses is a philosophy of justice which will permit them to wrest their hero from the horrid economists and Thatcherites. For Phillipson, we have Smith's jurisprudence and it is The Wealth of Nations.
There follows a master stroke. Phillipson argues that, having established sociability in The Theory, Smith had no need to take commercial society back to its root in The Wealth of Nations, but could content himself with a sort of shorthand (the non-benevolent butcher, brewer and baker; truck, barter and exchange one thing for another; invisible hand). Alas, the economists took these rather vulgar aphorisms as the foundation of their science and ignored those parts of Smith's system that concerned humanity's sociable, moral, intellectual and aesthetic nature.
Here is the problem. The transformation in Smith's biography since the discovery of the first jurisprudence lectures in 1895 has had no influence at all on the theory and practice of economics. Economists reject biography, as they reject history. Yet having failed so royally to predict or ameliorate our present distress, some economists may come to examine their assumptions and be drawn to this fine book and its mighty subject.
James Buchan's Capital of the Mind is published by Birlinn.
