Adam Smith's America by Glory M. Liu

Author:Glory M. Liu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

Caldwell was charitable to the “loving and discriminating care” with which Cannan treated the Lectures, but his review drew out implications of the discovery far beyond Cannan’s narrow purview.79 Whereas Cannan underplayed the position of the Lectures in Smith’s body of work, Caldwell elevated it. The Lectures did more than confirm the structure of Smith’s course in moral philosophy, Caldwell thought; they gave readers a better sense of the way in which Smith thought about the nature of politics. They showed that Smith was not content with providing a narrowly economistic view of the world nor did he see economic science at the foundation of a theory of mankind. Instead, the Lectures showed how Smith, “both a philosopher and a scientific investigator and teacher,” saw how the principles of economic life were inseparable from and conditioned by “a still broader law—the evolution of the principle of Justice in human affairs.” Understanding Smith’s philosophy of justice thus provided a means for systemizing the whole of Smith’s corpus. This broader understanding of Smith’s lifework, with much of it devoted to the study of law and government, exposed the “absurdity and inaccuracy” of labeling Smith as a narrow-minded economist.80

The bolder claim that Caldwell made was that the Lectures placed Adam Smith among the greatest theorists of jurisprudence. Like The Wealth of Nations, Smith’s Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms were astounding in their “breadth of conception.” Smith’s jurisprudence was not just free-standing positive discourse on public and private law, but also an ambitious attempt to relate the intellectual history of jurisprudence—as traced through its great writers such as Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf—to the history of human development. Caldwell argued that one had to place Smith among the many English writers seeking an alternative to social contract theorizing in the shadow of Hobbes.81 Smith’s twin concepts of authority and utility provided an alternative explanation for why men were induced to enter into civil society and submit to authority; political obligation stemmed not from a hypothetical social contract, but from opinion. Authority stemmed from four “natural” sources: superior abilities, age, wealth, or birth. In the early stages of human society, for example, superior ability and age were the primary sources of political authority. Chieftains in a “warlike society” were men of “superior strength,” while in more civilized societies leaders were chosen for “superior mental capacity.” As human society developed and property was introduced, wealth and birth became new—and increasingly important—sources of authority. Utility, as Smith saw it, was some sense of the common good: “It may sometimes be for my interest to disobey [the government] and to wish government overturned,” Smith wrote. “But I am sensible that other men are of a different opinion from me and would not assist me in the enterprize. I therefore submit to it’s [sic] decision for the good of the whole.”82 Authority and utility were thus functions of a society’s particular historical, social, and material circumstances.

According to Caldwell, this “genetico-historical account of the different systems of political and social authority” was Smith’s distinctive contribution to the science of jurisprudence.

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