Jesse Norman’s book on Adam Smith, Adam Smith: What He Thought and Why It Matters,¹ is the coming of age of a new ‘tradition’ of interpreters of Adam Smith, a project that began first with the editors of Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith and has reached significant proportions today. Like Norman, thinkers in this tradition look to examine Adam Smith in all his richness, seeking to expose for posterity their theory of a unified Adam Smith. In some parts, they have been successful, especially when it comes to Smith’s own personal life, but in others, particularly relating to that of ‘das Adam Smith problem’, the project has left gaping holes and bridges built on substandard foundations. Norman’s book is emblematic of this approach: although Norman is a Conservative M.P., there is very little that is conservative in his mode of analysis and experience that he brings to the book, which he cleanly divides into three parts: Life, Thought, and Impact.

The first section is, on the whole, admirable. It is a mini-biography of Adam Smith, from his birth in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, on June 5, 1723, his time at Oxford, then as a Professor at the University of Glasgow, his resignation to become a young duke’s tutor, the time spent writing his works, to his famous friendship with David Hume. With impressive brevity and notable eloquence, Norman pulls together an impressive array of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, writing intelligently and comprehensively about the life of Adam Smith as mama’s boy, ducal tutor, and civil servant, woven with the more popular aspects of Smith’s life: his time travelling, his correspondence with Voltaire, and his work on the Wealth of Nations. Perhaps the most telling testament to a Smith now neglected, to some degree, is a letter from David Hume intended for Smith in April 1759, more than a decade before the Wealth of Nations was in print: “Charles Townshend, who passes for the cleverest fellow in England, is to taken with the performance [that is, The Theory of Moral Sentiments] that he said to Oswald he would put the Duke of Buccleuch under the author’s care, and would endeavour to make it worth his while to accept of that charge.”² The biography proves effective in the first step of the argument, namely, that Adam Smith was in fact one person, and that he intended to make a unified whole out of his nuova scienza.

It is hard to doubt that Smith intended to make a fully compatible system, where the moral fragments were detailed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments; arts, rhetoric, and other aesthetic concerns in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres; the workings of the economy in the Wealth of Nations; and the role of the state in his Lectures of Jurisprudence, which have come down to us in the form of lecture notes by his students. But the next step, the step that warrants examination, is not just Norman’s leap of faith — it is the leap of faith taken by the editors of the otherwise authoritative edition: that Adam Smith did, in fact, produce a wholly coherent system, and that the role of the scholarly project into Adam Smith ought to be a conflation of ideas, cherry picked from unevenly distributed sources across Smith’s work and lecture notes, whatever their fealty to Smith’s grand project may be, and turn them into a posthumous completion of this sterling design. From scholarly examination, a large leap was made into the realm of speculative fiction, and current scholarly consensus has accepted this jump as fact, rather unquestionably so.

Smith himself did as much to admit his failure in reconciliation in the preface of the sixth edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereinafter TMS). He writes:

“In the last paragraph of the first Edition of the present work, I said, that I should in another discourse endeavour to give an account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions which they had undergone in the different ages and periods of society; not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else is the object of law. In the Enquiry concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, I have partly executed this promise; at least so far as concerns police, revenue, and arms. What remains, the theory of jurisprudence, which I have long projected, I have hitherto been hindered from executing, by the same occupations which had till now prevented me from revising the present work. Though my very advanced age leaves me, I acknowledge, very little expectation of ever being able to execute this great work to my own satisfaction; yet, as I have not altogether abandoned the design, and as I wish still to continue under the obligation of doing what I can, I have allowed the paragraph to remain as it was published more than thirty years ago, when I entertained no doubt of being able to execute every thing which it announced.” (TMS, Advertisement, §2)

Smith himself is clear, if we are to put any measure of trust in his published words. The Wealth of Nations merely gives an account of “police, revenue, and arms,” but does not venture into the domain of that which is just, and “whatever else is the object of law.” It is like looking at a marvellous bridge made of a single arch. What can the individual bricks tell us if the keystone is present? The structure loses its integrity, and soon dissolves into the very gaping hole that it was intended to gulf. This, then, is ‘das Adam Smith problem’, with a tinge: to concede that is was Smith’s intention to work on a keystone is not the issue, but that with the information we have, it is impossible, even disingenuous, to stitch together a coherent account of Smith’s grand society.

Norman does not deign to mention that Smith requested most of his notes to be confined to the flame, or that his literary executors, Joseph Black and James Hutton, did, in fact, do so:

“At his [Smith’s] direct insistence on 11 July [1790] all barring ‘some detached papers’ were burned, including, it seems, the ‘eighteen thin paper folio books’ which Smith had previously mentioned to Hume. Several essays and Smith’s beloved History of Astronomy were excepted, but it appears his lectures on rhetoric and natural religion, his work on jurisprudence and the drafts of the ‘philosophical history’ which he mentioned to La Rochefoucauld were lost to the flames.”³

Less than a week after his papers were burnt, Smith was dead. But impiety is a moral transgression that affects the dead more than the living, or so it appears, and sacrosanct intention and ironclad will of no general significance in the study of one’s work. If, at this late stage, Smith could not bear to see his thoughts on jurisprudence or on other topics published, what sort of scholar would look back more than three decades, into early drafts and lectures, and reconstruct what is supposed to be an authoritative account of Smith’s entire work, as some sort of persona ficta distinct from Smith himself? This is precisely the issue with the work contained in the introductory matter of the otherwise authoritative editions of Smith’s work, the Glasgow editions.

Take, for example, the Lectures on Jurisprudence, which Smith mentioned in the advertisement above from 1790 itself, and then confined to the flames later that year. From lecture notes taken in 1762–63 — now known as LJ(A) — and then notes taken in 1763–64 — christened LJ(B) — the editors of the Glasgow Edition proudly claim that they have found a ‘work’ by Adam Smith.⁴ But they admit, in plain sight, too, that “about the actual content of these lectures of Smith’s on ‘natural jurisprudence and politics’ we know nothing.”⁵ Yet they persist to make a whole out of which the author himself could not make a whole out of, citing speculation in place of authority. If we can allow that Smith’s views changed in the time between the delivery of the lectures, in his earlier years, to the time of the publishing of The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ sixth edition, as is evidenced most certainly by the advertisement Smith himself wrote, what would make one think that it would be anything but baseless speculation to insist that these Lectures and generally the entire programme be taken as a cogent whole?

This issue is even more pronounced in the editorial introduction to The Theory of Moral Sentiments.⁶ It is true that Smith continued to add and expand to the The Theory of Moral Sentiments even after the publication of the Wealth of Nations, but the statement that the editors make, namely that “the so-called ‘Adam Smith problem’ was a pseudo-problem based on ignorance and misunderstanding,” is sketchy and sidesteps the moral substantial issue of compatibility whilst rightly critiquing the methodological misdemeanours of previous Adam Smith interpreters, particularly in the German tradition.⁷ The tradition set-up of ‘das Adam Smith problem’ is certainly an issue: the editors inform us that according to the traditional Umschwungstheorie, “the moral philosopher who made sympathy the basis of social behaviour in TMS did an about-turn from altruistic to egoistic theory in W[ealth of] N[ations] owing to the influence of the French ‘materialist’ thinkers whom he met in Paris in 1776.”⁸ The conventional form of the theory is odd, and most certainly untrue, but in choosing to digest the low-hanging fruit, the editors of the Glasgow edition have circumvented the more important issue, which is that even though readers and scholars may try to make a larger whole out of the parts, and the parts were never really fixed in place, always subject to constant revision, with oftentimes substantial changes between editions. To throw the Lectures on Jurisprudence into the mix through dated lecture notes would be radical and not prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the masterful interpretations that Norman and others in his vein conjure are based on anything but flimsy evidence.

This, too, is where Norman falters, in a more substantial way — in the middle section, where he seeks to dispel myths about Smith. The rhetoric and eloquence most certainly does not falter, but this is an assessment of Jesse Norman, the scholar and interpreter of Adam Smith, not Jesse Norman, the Member of Parliament preaching to the House of Commons. Eloquent overtones can only mask grim realities, not replace them en toto. The presence of an early draft of Smith’s works ensures that the claims of Umschwungstheorie cannot hold much substance: Smith clearly developed his ideas before he went to France. But that does not change the ideas, only their fount. Norman acknowledges that both of Smith’s published books have little in common, but does not recognise the consequence of such a recognition.⁹ Norman even admits that “moral norms may … become more attenuated and less pressing in impersonal trading contexts,” but does not see past the wool pulled over his eyes.¹⁰ For Smith’s theory of the impartial spectator that he introduces in his Theory of Moral Sentiments to come into play, sympathy ought to come from within. The question of the amorality of the commercial world was not one that Smith broached, but by all measures, it seems to preoccupy Norman, and it is a misunderstanding of this that ensures that Norman, too, fatally misinterprets Smith’s thought.

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argues that even “the greatest ruffian the most hardened violator of the laws of society” has access to “such principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.” (TMS 1.1.1.1). By nature, man empathises with others, joins him in their sorrows and grieves with him; by nature, man shares his happiness and bliss with others. But this is the realm of imagination, Smith says, and not from our senses: moral recognition and judgement are not objects of sense perception but creatures of our imagination (TMS 1.1.1.2). This creature is termed ‘sympathy’, which Smith writes, “denote[s] our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever” (TMS 1.1.1.5). But the root of moral judgement is in the self, and Smith’s own measure of the misleading maxim that man is the measure of all things is as follows: “Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges the like faculty in another. … I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them” (TMS 1.1.3.10). It is also true, as no doubt Norman points out, that Smith does not regard the nouveau riche with much admiration (TMS 1.2.5.1), or that Smith condemns an excessive desire for wealth as part of “the passions which we share in common with the brutes” (TMS 1.2.1.3).

But this leaves out the issue of Smith’s famous paragraph condemning admiration for the ‘rich and the powerful’ in a chapter the editors of the Glasgow edition wryly note was added in the sixth edition of 1790 — not the fourth edition printed in 1774, two years before the Wealth of Nations, or the fifth edition, printed in 1781, five years after the publication of the Wealth of Nations, but in the sixth edition, printed in 1790, as Smith lay inform and dying, as he himself admits in the advertisement to the edition. This is the famed third chapter of the third part of the first section of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, entitled fully ‘Of the corruption of our moral sentiments, which is occasioned by this disposition to admire the rich and the great, and to despise or neglect persons of poor and mean condition.’ In the chapter prior, Smith denounces ambition as “that great object which divides the wives of alderman, is the end of half the labours of human life; and is the cause of all the tumult and bustle, all the rapine and injustice, which avarice and ambition have introduction into this world” (TMS 1.3.2.8). Smith then continues in his condemnation of public vice:

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” (TMS 1.3.3.1)

But Smith does not stop here. If he did, it would be an unqualified condemnation of wealth as an illusion for happiness, and not worth aspiring to for its own sake. The following paragraph, too, admits the folly of admiring the rich and the powerful instead of the virtuous, juxtaposing this with “the great mob of mankind [who] are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness” (TMS 1.3.3.2). All this is well and fine, and there seems to be a layer of internal consistency, if not with the text as a whole, but within his additions, at the bare minimum.

Smith’s comments on the ‘path to fortune’, however, in the same chapter raise questions as to the genuineness of his sympathy toward the poor and his admonishment of the rich. “Men in the inferior and middling stations of life,” Smith notes, “can never be great enough to be above the law, which must generally overawe them into some sort of respect for, at least, the more important rules of justice” (TMS 1.3.3.5). For these men, “the good old proverb, therefore, that honesty is the best policy, holds, in such situations, almost always perfectly true” (TMS 1.3.3.5). There can only be one meaning of this: that for ‘men in the inferior and middling stations of life’, there ought to be one set of rules, and the rules themselves must be dictated by the maxim of utility in getting them to obey the law of truth-telling. The institution, lurking behind this facade of help for the poor and sympathy in their misfortune, is that the rich and the powerful are a class by themselves, and they bear no moral responsibility whatsoever for their deeds in contravention of the law. Nothing is fixed, for Smith, and everything is determined by relative position.

His harsh words against the rich and the powerful do not change the internal inconsistency in this late, and dare I say, hasty addition to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book that takes the high horse of the ‘impartial observer’ but does not provide a pressing explanation for virtue or the requirement for it in society. Moral judgements can reside in the individual, but rarely do, and there seems to be no impetus for Smith to go beyond the base passions and sympathies unless one is already predisposed to do so, either by the grace of good education, or features of one’s personality. The Theory of Moral Sentiments does not provide a wholly satisfactory analysis of man in commercial society, and for most, it restricts, as was noted above, most moral experiences to the realm of imaginative processing of self-perception. Smith’s conception of virtue is, in itself, not very innovative: it closely follows the Stoic account. But wedded to that is a proto-Humean conception of man and perception that all but relegates the possibility of virtue to the realm of fantasy.

Even if we are to indulge Norman’s position,¹¹ which is that Smith’s moral schema worked on an evolutionary principle, there is a marked degree of positivism at play. Smith’s evolutionary cycles, which Norman derived from his Lectures on Jurisprudence, are anachronistic misreadings that Smith never entirely intended, but for the whole part suggest something along the lines of moral positivism: that associations form moral norms and codes of conduct based on what is observed, not with relation to the larger world of moral obligations and conduct. If a stated business community chose to operate with minimal qualms about certain types of conduct which would otherwise be considered grossly improper, how would these norms be explained and examined in light of a standard of moral conduct expected of everyone? What if the ‘rich and the powerful’ were playing some part in this? For Smith, they would rise above the law. That is the institution of the passage contained in TMS 1.3.3.5.

One need not look beyond The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ late additions to see how Smith’s thought changed — and how drastically it did — to note why reading his early Lectures of Jurisprudence (reconstituted from lecture notes) into the corpus of his other works is an awfully bad idea. The problems raised above, certainly that of moral conduct and internal inconsistency in the late editions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, can apply to the famous quote about the butcher, the brewer, and the baker operating on the basis of their self interest. Smith goes as far as saying that “in the middling and inferior stations of life, the road to virtue and that to fortune, to such fortune, at least, as men in such stations can reasonably expect to acquire, are, happily, in most cases, very nearly the same” (TMS 1.3.3.5). The end to this line of argument can only be that this statement, read in conjunction with its famous counterpart in the Wealth of Nations, namely that self-interest guides the market, is that Smith’s moral theory and conception of virtue is inconsistent and tacitly condemns the poor as lacking virtue — for if the poor had virtue, would they not be on the road to fortune? Whether Smith’s explicit disavowals of Mandeville and Hobbes and the other doctors of self-interest can be taken seriously is to be questioned, seriously.

There is ‘das Adam Smith problem’, then, of this formulation: Smith’s earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments (eds. 1–5, at any rate), have a different internal logic that is skewed by the addition of the Wealth of Nations. The chapter under study, at any rate (TMS 1.3.3), is a late addition that puts Smith’s moral psychology off kilter when read closely. It is inconsistent with the earlier work, and the intent behind the change can be clearly construed within the advertisement. Smith’s ‘great society’, then, is after all based on self-love and the pursuit of self-interest: he gives expression to the self-maximising man, Homo Economicus, but not to the physiocrats. How can the early Theory of Moral Sentiments be effectively reconciled with The Wealth of Nations? Can they be?

Before I put this essay to a close, I ought to, on a somewhat different ending, not that Norman’s third section, ‘Impact’, is remarkable. He traces the birth of Homo Economicus whilst missing Smith’s contribution to it, but provides a helpful, well-cited history of the damnation of man to economics, and not the other way around. Most touching is his proclamation:

“Over time, the subject of political economy would become further detached from politics. Indeed, in the nineteenth century a thoroughgoing attempt was begun to recast political economy as the new subject of economics, and to separate out not merely economics and politics, but economics and ethics, in the name of science. As economics became more scientific, so it became more mathematical; and as it became more mathematical so it became more removed from everyday life, from human institutions and human values, and indeed from the idea of value itself.”¹²

Little did he realise who rolled the dice first.