The Enlightenment: An Interpretation - Volume 2 - The Science of Freedom by Peter Gay

Author:Peter Gay [Gay, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Political, History, Europe, Great Britain, General, World
ISBN: 9780307831453
Google: KVsxAAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00E733UXK
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2013-06-25T22:00:00+00:00

III

Between 1764 and 1766, when physiocracy was at its height, Adam Smith visited France and met its leading proponents. He was ready for them; he already shared many of their ideas, and, as his Wealth of Nations was to show in 1776, he was willing to acquire more. But he was not their disciple. He did not need to be: he had developed the leading conceptions of The Wealth of Nations—the existence of a natural order and the beneficent effects of economic freedom—a quarter of a century before. “Projectors disturb nature in the course of her operations in human affairs,” he had said in lectures as early as 1749, “and it requires no more than to let her alone, and give her fair play in the pursuit of her ends that she may establish her own designs.” He had even drawn the political consequences of this position: “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.”88 When Adam Smith expressed these views, Quesnay had not yet written a line on economics.

But others had, both in England and Scotland, and notions of an economic science, and of economic freedom, were becoming familiar. “Trade,” David Hume observed in 1742, “was never esteemed an affair of state till the last century,”89 but when he wrote, it had become an important affair for statesmen, and for theorists who wrote less for statesmen than for one another. In 1740, Joseph Massie, who assembled an impressive library of books on economic affairs—itself testimony to the development of the discipline—noted that while there were a few writers who “considered Commerce as a science,” and others who “treated it as a branch of history,” both groups had “made only light essays” on “elementary” matters. And the third class of writers, the most numerous, had indiscriminately mixed history and policy, to the benefit of neither. The time for a serious treatise was at hand.90 Adam Smith would respond to Massie’s invitation in 1776.

He had had long, sound preparation through the conversation and the writings of his friends, most notably David Hume. Hume addressed economic questions as he addressed all questions in the social sciences—as an intelligent amateur. The informality of his presentation and the lucidity of his reasoning suggested what cultivated men in his century liked to suggest—that a man of letters, any man of letters, could apply himself profitably to all subjects whatever. It was a false impression: to write Hume’s essays on economics required Hume’s intelligence, and that was rare.

When Hume published his seven essays on economics in 1752, he lacked even a proper name for them;

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