Nicholas Phillipson by Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

Author:Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Social Scientists & Psychologists, Modern, Theory, Economists, Economics, General, 18th Century, Biography & Autobiography, Enlightenment, Business & Economics, History
ISBN: 9780300177671
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2010-08-05T05:00:00+00:00

What is known about Smith’s jurisprudence in this period is to be found in two remarkably full sets of student notes, one taken in 1762–3, the other in the following year. The contrast between them is very striking. The earlier set of notes is as much a monument to Smith’s erudition as to his philosophy, every one of his principles fleshed out by a lavish use of carefully formulated historical illustrations; the later set of notes suggest that this illustrative material was drastically pruned and used schematically to allow the basic principles of Smith’s complex system to appear with greater clarity. What is more, these later notes show that in the final year of his academic career Smith reorganized his course in order to emphasize the importance of government in maintaining the rules of justice and fostering the sociable dispositions of its subjects. The earlier course he had begun with a natural history of property ownership, because he wished to show that the means of subsistence and the distribution of property determined the patterns of subordination and power on which the authority of governments and their peoples’ sense of justice was based; he had then gone on to discuss the principles of government and police. In the later course, however, Smith reversed the order of the first two sections, beginning with a discussion of the principles of government and only then going on to discuss the changing state of property in different forms of society, finishing with a discussion of police. What may have happened is this.

When Smith gave the original version of his course in Edinburgh in 1750, he cannot have done much more than propose the principles on which his theory of jurisprudence was based, that our sense of justice is derived from our sympathetic response to the resentment a person feels when the impartial spectator assures us that their person or their property has been unjustly violated. He would have then gone on to show how that sense of justice is shaped by the system of property that operates in a particular form of society, by the social system that is built upon it and, eventually, by the way in which it is governed. It was an approach to the subject that stressed the essentially historical, or as we might say, sociological roots of our understanding of justice. The Smith who had lectured in Edinburgh in 1750 could not possibly have acquired the erudition he was able to call on twelve years later to illustrate his principles. But the weight of this erudition and the lavish use of illustrations could be criticized on the grounds that they strengthened the ‘sociological’ dimension of the analysis at the expense of the political, a matter of some practical as well as theoretical importance to an enlightened professor concerned with preparing boys for public life. Smith saw the problem very well. As he commented at the beginning of the new version of his course,

Property and civil government very much depend on one another.

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