Rhetoric and literature are essential to Smithian ethics.
Before he was known for economics, Adam Smith taught rhetoric and literature.
Adam Smith was born in 1723. This year he turns 300.
To celebrate, National Review Capital Matters offers the Adam Smith 300 series. An essay on Smith will appear monthly throughout 2023, written by various students of Smith’s thought. Smith’s birthday is June 16, so the essays will appear on the 16th day of each month. Daniel Klein and Erik Matson of George Mason University are helping curate the series for Capital Matters along with Dominic Pino. To read previous months’ essays, click here.
A dam Smith and Jane Austen share many things, from ethics to common sense, but perhaps the most significant is a kind of celebrity across political and disciplinary boundaries. If Austen is “everybody’s Jane,” Smith is becoming everybody’s Adam, celebrated by people as diverse as Ludwig von Mises and Robert Reich.
As an English professor, I claim Adam Smith for my own discipline, not least because he began his career as a teacher of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (a term roughly meaning “polite literature”). He delivered lectures on the subject for the benefit of the public in Edinburgh between 1748 and 1751, more than two decades before he published Wealth of Nations, and later chose the subject for his first private class when he became a professor at the University of Glasgow. Student notes from the course in 1762-63 provide insight into his subjects and method. Although previous professors had referenced English literature, Smith was the first to make it a formal part of the course, teaching Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope alongside Cicero and Longinus.
Smith’s attention to rhetoric and literature might seem tangential to his system of human flourishing. But, for Smith, studying rhetoric helps us learn how to speak in our own voices yet adjust our language and behavior to what others will go along with. And such skills enable us to engage in trade with dignity as well as profit.
As for literature, stories connect us, making us better and more prosperous people. Rhetoric and literature are essential to Smithian ethics.
Great Literature Engages our Sympathy and Teaches Moral Sentiments
Smith’s library contained a number of literary works, from Joseph Addison’s essays to Racine’s plays to Henry Mackenzie’s novels. He frequently cites literature in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), first published in 1759, evoking drama in the first chapter to illustrate how and why we sympathize with others. In watching the heroes of tragedy or romance, we share their resentment of traitors and joy at deliverance: “In every passion of which the mind of man is susceptible, the emotions of the by-stander always correspond to what, by bringing the case home to himself, he imagines should be the sentiments of the sufferer.”
Understanding the situation of others is an essential step in forming moral judgments. Only by imagining ourselves in the actor’s situation can we gain understanding: How is this character behaving? Do we sympathize? What is the correct moral choice?
Great literature invites the audience’s engagement with such questions. Smith suggested that great literature illuminates both the models and the foils of virtue more effectively than philosophy: “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, [Marivaux], and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno, Chryssipus, or Epictetus.” Zeno might have good advice on listening, but Richardson shows the pleasures of true friendship, even amidst the betrayals of families and supposed protectors. Note, by the way, that Riccoboni was a woman — Smith could point to a woman as sage.
Morality and Criticism Are Grounded in Common Sense
How do great writers achieve such effects? The student notes from Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres offer some answers. First, language has beauty “when the sentiment of the speaker is expressed in a neat, clear, plain, and clever manner, and the passion or affection he is possessed of and intends, by sympathy, to communicate to his hearer, is plainly and cleverly hit off.” As in TMS, sympathy is central.
Sympathy is “fellow feeling,” or, one might say, a sense of things that is common to actor and spectator — a form of common sense. Smith observes, “All the Rules of Criticism and morality when traced to their foundation, turn out to be some Principles of Common Sense which every one assents to.” We must attend to our audience and restrain our excesses. The wise man does not pretend to be someone else. He regulates his temper and brings it “to that pitch which will be [agreeable] to those about him.”
Smith illustrated with the example of Jonathan Swift, with his “plain” style. Swift’s writing is easy to follow and wastes no words. As a result, Smith suggests, we read his works with “more life and emphasis” than those of other writers. Likewise, we should speak and write in our own style, using common sense to regulate our excesses and appeal to our audience — advice applicable whether exchanging goods or ideas.
Smith Tells Stories to Explain Complex Points
Nothing illustrates this point better than Smith’s own parable of the poor man’s son, in Part IV of Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith introduces the story as demonstrating that we often value the “adjustment of means for attaining any conveniency” more than the convenience itself, and that pursuit of such adjustment — or imagined fittingness, or imagined propriety — “is often the secret motive of the most serious and important pursuits of both private and public life.”
Smith gives the parable a sense of immediacy by using the present tense: “The poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, when he begins to look around him, admires the condition of the rich. He finds the cottage of his father too small for his accommodation, and fancies he should be lodged more at his ease in a palace.” The opening invites us to understand this man’s situation, to sympathize with what Smith elsewhere identifies as the natural admiration of the rich, and to evaluate his excessive ambition.
The poor man’s son works hard to make himself valuable, so as to obtain wealth. Smith then leaps decades into the future and describes this man’s disappointment in the results. Having worked nonstop to achieve the means of acquiring luxury, he is then disappointed to find that “wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility.”
Yet Smith does not end there. He says that it is a good thing that nature imposes such desires upon us, for “it is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.” Fields are cultivated to feed more people, and while the landlord may be a glutton, he cannot devour it all but must divide it with the poor. The rich are “led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants.”
Smith could have explained his point briefly but without impact. Instead, he tells a story to engage the reader’s imagination in tracing the steps to his conclusion about an invisible hand. We constantly adjust our language and tone to appeal to our audience, whether persuading them to accept a theory or buy a beverage.
Smith’s Theories Help Us Interpret Literature
While Smith’s writings have long been popular among economists and philosophers, they are gaining increasing admiration among literary scholars. For Smith, morality is a realm of aesthetic — the beauty of human conduct and character. His concepts of sympathy, luxury, spectatorship, the character of virtue, and the temptations of commercial society have all inspired analyses of novels and films.
For instance, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is frequently paired with Adam Smith’s TMS. Mr. Collins’s vanity is a running joke, while Lydia Bennet is the poster child for imprudence. If Mr. Darcy struts around ballrooms cloaked in pride, the protagonist, Elizabeth, surely counters with her own measure of this trait. It is their mutual growth in moral judgment — as Elizabeth says, “Till this moment I never knew myself” — that enables the couple to unite.
But more modern novels and films also benefit from insights brought by Smith’s theories. Smith examines how literature enables us to imagine the situations of characters, how we would feel, and how those feelings compare with the responses of the characters. Do we sympathize with John Wick’s resentment over being beaten, having his car stolen, and getting his dog killed by the spoiled son of a mafioso? If so, what might justice entail? In a world of assassins, how does one react to injustice?
Smith teaches the essence of being human. It’s no wonder everyone wants to claim Adam Smith.