Whose Adam Smith?

Though Thomas Carlyle contemptuously dismissed economics as the “dismal science,” he always had a soft spot in his cranky heart for Adam Smith. “I consider Smith’s Wealth of Nations to be still the best, as well as the pleasantest of all the books,” he said in his one known favorable reference to an economist. And, in truth, Adam Smith, an eager, absentminded and eternally inquisitive man, did have great charm, as Dr. C. R. Fay’s Adam Smith and the Scotland of His Day (Cambridge University Press, $4.75) attests. This book, which projects the founder of modern political economy against the backdrop of eighteenth-century Glasgow and Edinburgh (to say nothing of London and Paris), reminds us of many things, chief of which is that most people who quote Smith today (whether to praise him or to deride him) do not really have very much idea of what he actually had to say.

The big thing which comes through in Dr. Fay’s genial pages is that Smith regarded political economy as something which existed as part of a moral order. Quite early in life, when he was a student at the University of Glasgow, he came under the spell of Francis Hutcheson, the popular professor of Moral Philosophy. Hutcheson taught something about economics, but it was in the setting of a philosophy which embraced esthetics and the mission of “making ‘moral sense’ indigenous to Scotland.” Smith himself, when he first came to deal with economics as a branch of “jurisprudence” in his own lecture courses on Moral Philosophy, bracketed it with a number of “police” functions. It was the duty of the police, he explained, to give the citizens of a town or nation the advantages of “cleanliness, safety and cheapness or plenty.”

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

Featured Tags

Though Thomas Carlyle contemptuously dismissed economics as the “dismal science,” he always had a soft spot in his cranky heart for Adam Smith. “I consider Smith’s Wealth of Nations to be still the best, as well as the pleasantest of all the books,” he said in his one known favorable reference to an economist. And, in truth, Adam Smith, an eager, absentminded and eternally inquisitive man, did have great charm, as Dr. C. R. Fay’s Adam Smith and the Scotland of His Day (Cambridge University Press, $4.75) attests. This book, which projects the founder of modern political economy against the backdrop of eighteenth-century Glasgow and Edinburgh (to say nothing of London and Paris), reminds us of many things, chief of which is that most people who quote Smith today (whether to praise him or to deride him) do not really have very much idea of what he actually had to say.

The big thing which comes through in Dr. Fay’s genial pages is that Smith regarded political economy as something which existed as part of a moral order. Quite early in life, when he was a student at the University of Glasgow, he came under the spell of Francis Hutcheson, the popular professor of Moral Philosophy. Hutcheson taught something about economics, but it was in the setting of a philosophy which embraced esthetics and the mission of “making ‘moral sense’ indigenous to Scotland.” Smith himself, when he first came to deal with economics as a branch of “jurisprudence” in his own lecture courses on Moral Philosophy, bracketed it with a number of “police” functions. It was the duty of the police, he explained, to give the citizens of a town or nation the advantages of “cleanliness, safety and cheapness or plenty.”