Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes are not usually mentioned in the same sentence together, much less positively. But this is a key line of argument in Joseph Crospey’s book, Polity and Economy, which subtly examines and points out the links between the two canonical thinkers.¹ Crospey, a student of Leo Strauss, and later co-editor with Strauss of their edition of the History of Political Philosophy, wrote the book early in his academic career, and although he added a mini-biography of Smith in a later edition, did not change the first four chapters that comprise this deep-reaching analysis of Smith.

At the very outset, Crospey notes that “Smith’s underlying views are essentially the propositions of Hobbean and Spinozistic philosophy.”² My unfamiliarity with the latter’s work removes any chance of comment on that, but Hobbes has been a peculiar object of study. He is so far from the milieu in which he worked, his language so puzzling and completely lacking in the grace of his fellow countrymen, the Bard or Milton, that his world is that of Paradise Lost, forcefully thrust onto man. Man is substituted for the fallen angels, and the Leviathan is born (hereinafter L; see note on standard editions.). Milton ironically describes Satan with the aid of the Leviathan in Paradise Lost: “Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge / As whom the fables name of monstrous size, / … that sea- beast / Leviathan, which God of all his works / Created hugest that swim’d th’ Océan stream”³. Clearly, Milton’s usage of the word ‘Leviathan’ is a remarkable pun: it takes after Isaiah 27:1, where, on the day of judgement, “the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan.”⁴ And this is perhaps the best summation of Hobbes one can give — his Leviathan is the cross between an ungodly monster who has fallen from grace and revels in sin. It is a satanic entity with no parallel among human creations.

The most prominent source of influence from Hobbes, Crospey argues, in Smith’s work is the ‘doctrine’ of humanity “or ‘the human’ [which] emerges as an inference from the desire for self-preservation, a desire which is gratified through the working of men’s passions. The desire for self-preservation becomes the irreducible, as well as the most compelling, and hence the most dependable, innate activator of the human spirit.”⁵ Even at this elementary stage, it is but obvious that Crospey’s conception of Smith will highlight the differences between a tacit understanding of the works of his friend, David Hume, and focus instead on a more elementary issue, namely Smith’s concurrence with Hobbes. Only later does Crospey insert the more controversial claim of “Smith’s descent from Hobbes,” tucked away neatly in a footnote.⁶ The issues that arise, however, from this creative reading of Smith are worth considering, because Smith is generally an ambiguous philosopher with several internal inconsistencies based on the number of propositions he manages to lose sight of in the process of advancing his argument. In any case, Crospey’s exposé of Smith’s similarities with Hobbes are remarkable, insightful, and although fanciful in terms of causation, certainly show a remarkable coincidence with Hobbes’ thought. In a way, Crospey articulates Smith’s work on moral philosophy as an idiosyncratic, sentimental, pseudo-romantic Hobbesianism. If such a thing was to exist, it found its station in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and his early published works, the Essays on Philosophical Subjects.

Smith’s dalliance with Hobbesianism begins much earlier, for he shares a remarkable similarity with another thinker whose name is the byword for notoriety: he who must not be named, Machiavelli. Crospey notes, Smith “proceeds to describe human nature by reference to how men are rather than what man is, i.e., by the ‘realistic’ conception advanced by Machiavelli when he counselled attention to the conduct of men as they are rather than to the idea of man’s formal excellence.”⁷ While Hume’s scepticism still leaves root for the rise of reason and the importance of universal norms and standards, particularly of justice, Smith’s conception of man is much more ambiguous. It is empiricist insofar as it claims descent from Smith’s understanding of man as he is around him, and does not presuppose an understanding either from common descent of morality — as Hume does in his Treatise — or descent from a non-material entity. Smith’s world is, in other words, a materialist one where moral philosophy is silently waylaid and replaced with a ‘pop’ moral psychology, which is wholly insufficient to pronounce questions of right and wrong, and instead lends itself to what Crospey terms “a generally hedonistic doctrine.”⁸ In comparison to Hume’s ‘science of man’, Smith’s is a radical overture. He is to Aristotle what Eminem is to Beethoven, bearing no relation whatsoever, forced to fit within the same collective term by various contortions and suspensions of disbelief. Like his forefathers, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Smith will go on to produce a playbook for moral psychology that does not acknowledge the power and might of right and wrong, of good and bad.

To understand this, one must turn to Michael Oakeshott’s somewhat sympathetic but illuminating introduction to Hobbes’ Leviathan. The consequences of the schema in the Leviathan are, for our purposes, twofold. If man is a Hobbesian “creature of sense,”⁹ and is merely matter in motion, there can be “nothing good or evil as such; for different men desire different things, each calling the object of his desire good, and the same man will, at different times, love and hate the same thing.”¹⁰ The basis of the judgement is pleasure, and discourse and will are not the product of reason but “the succession of emotions in the mind.”¹¹ There is “no summum bonum” because man does not have an end except the continual acquisition of that which fulfils his desires, producing what Hobbes calls Felicity. Oakeshott wryly notes that “there is, however, a summum malum, and it is death; its opposite, being alive, is only a ‘primary good’.”¹² For Hobbes, most strikingly, “man is a creature civilised by fear of death.”¹³ Without significant contortions of successions of emotions in our own minds, it is possible to reconstruct Smith’s vision of the world in this light, too, and expose its radical nature. It is wholly possible that by disavowing the brutish Mandeville of The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, Smith attempts to distance his work from another notorious figure, Thomas Hobbes, without explicit mention, association, and particular notice. Of particular interest, both to Crospey and us, is the paragraph relegated to the footnotes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereinafter TMS):

“Thus self-preservation, and the propagation of the species, are the great ends which Nature seems to have proposed in the formation of all animals. Mankind are endowed with a desire of those ends, and an aversion to the contrary; with a love of life, and a dread of dissolution; with a desire of the continuance and perpetuity of the species, and with an aversion to the thoughts of its intire extinction. But though we are in this manner endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has not been intrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason, to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them.” (TMS, 2.1.5.10).

If man could be said to have an end, it is ‘self-preservation’; in such a world, man and beast have no difference whatsoever. The analysis of man’s nature is deeply reminiscent of Oakeshott’s remark — that for Hobbes, there is no summum bonum, only a summum malum, namely death, or in Smith’s words, “a dread of dissolution.” Man is, as Smith tacitly avows, a creature of his own making: he seeks to exist and propagate himself, fulfil his desires, and act upon his passions, which instinctually draw one to pleasure, toward pain, a life of what seems to be sexual hedonism, and the bodily appetites. For Smith, then, life is the only thing that is desired for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else, nothing else, nothing more: there is no prospect of anything else being desired for its own sake.

Contrast this with Aristotle, for instance, who writes most famously in the Nicomachean Ethics (hereinafter NE) condemning such lines of thought. “All knowledge and every pursuit,” Aristotle remarks, “aim at some good” (NE I.4, 1095a14). But thence arises the question of the highest good — what is this good, and what does it comprise of? On the first count, Aristotle says, that most agree that “it is happiness (eudaimonia)” (NE I.3, 1095a19). But on the second count, there is an issue worth examining: “with regard to what happiness (eudaimonia) is, they differ, and the many do not give the same account as the wise” (NE I.3, 1095a20–21). With some subtle signs of exasperation and incredulity, Aristotle notes, “often even the same man identifies it with different things, with health when he is ill, with wealth when he is poor,” and so on (NE I.3, 1095a23–25). Aristotle seeks to refute the common view, the same as the one expressed in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, in that he does not think that the sole good to be desired for its own sake is self-preservation, but that there is a substantially different thing in its place. This is where Aristotle’s necessity for moral virtue, arete, comes into play: we always choose eudaimonia for its own sake and “never for the sake of something else,” (NE I.7, 1097a39), but also “honour, pleasure [contra hedonism], and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from them we should still choose each of them), but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that by means of them we shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor in general, for anything other than itself” (NE I.7, 1097b1–7). Those who seek to show Smith’s love of the ancients, particularly in the passages replete with Stoic inferences in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, conveniently forget that he owes little to the ancients in terms of actual doctrine. If self-preservation is the only thing that is good in itself, and everything else the product of casuistry masquerading as some variant of a nuova scienza, what is Smith’s conception of man? Smith’s love for the ancients is a weird brand of positivism: it asserts them to be good or true, without foregrounding his ancient influences in the moral psychology he seeks to create anew. Most striking is Hobbes’ criticism of Aristotle, which is famously as follows: “For words are wise men’s counters … but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas [Aquinas], or any other doctor whatsoever…” (L 1.4.15). Would Smith not abide by a similar criticism in the context of his work on rhetoric and ‘belles lettres’?

What, then, is Smith’s conception of man? Smith’s “reduction of life to motion implies the reduction of the living thing to the moving thing, to what is capable of motion, to matter.”¹⁴ From the above quoted paragraph buried in the footnotes of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, we get an approximation of man as existing, as matter, corpuscular bodies in motion, with their only end their existence and propagation. This is deeply reminiscent of the Leviathan. Hobbes, most famously in the introduction to the Leviathan, declares that “life is but a motion of limbs” (L, Introduction, 1). Hobbes takes wide aim at those who think that the non-material world has any effect upon the material world, and consequently that man ought to be thought of only in terms of Newtonian mechanics, namely that the laws of motion — which Hobbes uses in his own strange manner — ought to be the determinants of this new science of man. Smith’s position, especially in the development of his moral psychology, leaves much more to be desired precisely because it seeks to reduce Man to a single man; he seeks to resolve down to the parts the essence of the whole, but he does not get the whole. This is partly the same issue with Hobbes, though Smith’s brand of materialism is more benign and acknowledges tacitly, if not explicitly, the need for and the existence of some non-material world which is not artifice in its entirety. Crospey notes that for Smith, on the whole, “such an account of the mechanism of a material soul serves well enough to explain the responses of each man’s sentiments to those of another.”¹⁵

The second point of similarity, however, stems from this, and is substantial in different ways:

“Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean the felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense” (L 1.6.58).

Smith explicitly acknowledges in The Theory of Moral Sentiments an eerily similar line of thought (TMS 2.1.5.10, see above). He does not mention fear, but it is understood from his poor reconstruction of man’s social being that he ought to live in fear if he does not socialise into groups. In the context of the discussion, particularly of hunger, Smith ensures that hunger and death replace this Hobbesian fear, and Hobbes and Smith’s summum malum significantly converge into one entity. For Hume, society is artificial insofar as it is created by man, but natural insofar as it is caused by the paucity of ability in search for essential goods. It is between reason and passion, neither here nor here. For Smith, society is an exercise in passion, as Crospey astutely points out: “Society, and hence the most potent instrument for man’s preservation, does not flow from rational decisions to procure a useful end, but rather from the passions directly.”¹⁶ The same conceit is pulled forth for justice.¹⁷ Whatever may be et sequentia, the essence of his grand design is a society that is produced from passion, and reason does not have a part to play in many an important sphere.

Joseph Crospey’s analysis of Adam Smith returns to Thomas Hobbes with the regularity of a metronome. I have but explored one line of thought about the relationship that Hobbes and Smith enjoy that I did not notice much examination of in Crospey’s work. But, in conclusion, I ought to only offer these words from Crospey, which are revelatory:

“Morality and therefore moral science exist upon the tension between what the individual may do in his own interest and what he must concede to the interest, or rights, of others as such. In this, as in many fundamental respects, Smith is intelligible as the disciple of Hobbes, the translator of Hobbeanism into an order of society. It can be said that Adam Smith’s broad view of the present matter, expressed by him with elegant and laborious diffusion, is compressed by Hobbes into the single paragraph in Leviathan wherein complaisance is declared to be the fifth law of nature.”¹⁸