The "Adam Smith, Esq." Monthly Book Review: "The Authentic Adam Smith," by James Buchan

James Buchan, The Authentic Adam Smith (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2006) has recently come out and it is an irresistible selection for this month's "Adam Smith, Esq." Monthly Book Review.  I hope you understand.

Buchan, a Brit, lives in Norfolk, England, and has been a foreign correspondent for The Financial Times as well as the author of Frozen Desire, an examination of money through history, as well as Crowded with Genius, a study of Edinburgh during the Enlightenment.  Better credentials for profiling Adam Smith are hard to imagine.

Which Buchan does succinctly:  In the small span of 145 not-large pages (not counting extensive endnotes).  And what story does he tell?  Essentially, a more complex and sophisticated view of Adam Smith than those ideologues of left and right today who would denounce or embrace him as a fairly one-dimensional proponent of laissez-faire, free markets, and limited government. 

Smith, in fact, viewed himself not as an economist (the term had barely been invented), but as a moral philosopher.  Buchan stresses the importance of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which predated The Wealth of Nations by 17 years, and implicitly critiques too-casual "followers" of Smith today who invoke his name in ignorance of what Smith actually wrote.

As for Smith's personal life, it's safe to say he was an eccentric preoccupied with the life of the mind.  He never married and lived much of his life as an adult with his mother.  Although he became wealthy through tutoring the Duke of Buccleuch through a multi-year tour of the European continent, followed by a lifelong retainer of £900/year (more than the most highly-compensated Scottish judges at the time), and considered himself "as affluent as I could wish to be," it was only after his death that we learned he gave away most of his wealth to charitable causes.

An unexplored—or unknown, hitherto, by me—aspect of Smith's thinking were his views on maintenance of the British Empire, and specifically on control of the American colonies (recall that Wealth of Nations was published in the almost preposterously apropos year of 1776).  Smith's view, in a word?  Set America free.

He came at this both through his economic analysis of matters, and from his experience of military affairs.  The second first:  As Buchan puts it (p. 112), "Smith, who like many Scotsmen of his social class had wide connexions with military officers, was able to see that an American militia, once it had served long enough to achieve military discipline, might be a match for the redcoats."

And as for the first? He believed that Britain's attempt:

"To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred right of mankind."

"Such has hitherto been the rapid progress of that country in wealth, population and improvement, that in the course of little more than a century, perhaps, the produce of American might exceed that of British taxation.  The seat of the empire would then naturally remove itself to that part of the empire which contributed most to the general defence and support of the whole."

As the expenses of the American war effort escalated, Smith became convinced of "the real futility of all distant dominions."

Smith died in Edinburgh on Saturday, July 17, 1790, aged 67, after a few years of declining health.  In February of that year he remarked:

"I meant to have done more; and there are materials in my papers, of which I could have made a great deal.  But that is now out of the question."

The night before he died, he took leave of his friends at dinner saying, as he left the room, "I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place."

Pick up Buchan's book; you'll learn much in short order, and may even, familiar as you believe you may be with Smith, learn something new.  I did.

Posted by Bruce at November 8, 2006 7:34 AM | TrackBack
Posted to Adam Smith Himself | Book Reviews | Globalization

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