The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith (ereader that reads to you TXT) 📗

the very order in which the subjects happen to occur in Hutcheson’s System is almost identical with the order in which the same subjects occur in Smith’s Lectures.81 We are strongly tempted to surmise that when Smith had hurriedly to prepare his lectures for Craigie’s class, he looked through his notes of his old master’s lectures (as hundreds of men in his position have done before and after him) and grouped the economic subjects together as an introduction and sequel to the lectures which he had brought with him from Edinburgh. Hutcheson was an inspiring teacher. His colleague, Leechman, says:⁠—

“As he had occasion every year in the course of his lectures to explain the origin of government and compare the different forms of it, he took peculiar care, while on that subject, to inculcate the importance of civil and religious liberty to the happiness of mankind: as a warm love of liberty and manly zeal for promoting it were ruling principles in his own breast, he always insisted upon it at great length and with the greatest strength of argument and earnestness of persuasion: and he had such success on this important point, that few, if any, of his pupils, whatever contrary prejudices they might bring along with them, ever left him without favourable notions of that side of the question which he espoused and defended.”82

Half a century later Adam Smith spoke of the Glasgow Chair of Moral Philosophy as an “office to which the abilities and virtues of the never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson had given a superior degree of illustration.”83

But while we may well believe that Adam Smith was influenced in the general direction of liberalism by Hutcheson, there seems no reason for attributing to Hutcheson’s influence the belief in the economic beneficence of self-interest which permeates the Wealth of Nations and has afforded a starting ground for economic speculation ever since. Hutcheson, as some of the passages just quoted show, was a mercantilist, and all the economic teaching in his System is very dry bones compared to Smith’s vigourous lectures on Cheapness or Plenty, with their often repeated denunciation of the “absurdity” of current opinions and the “pernicious regulations” to which they gave rise. Twenty years after attending his lectures, Adam Smith criticised Hutcheson expressly on the ground that he thought too little of self-love. In the chapter of the Theory of Moral Sentiments on the systems of philosophy which make virtue consist in benevolence, he says that Hutcheson believed that it was benevolence only which could stamp upon any action the character of virtue: the most benevolent action was that which aimed at the good of the largest number of people, and self-love was a principle which could never be virtuous, though it was innocent when it had no other effect than to make the individual take care of his own happiness. This “amiable system, a system which has a peculiar tendency to nourish and support in the human heart the noblest and the most agreeable of all affections,” Smith considered to have the “defect of not sufficiently explaining from whence arises our approbation of the inferior virtues of prudence, vigilance, circumspection, temperance, constancy, firmness.”

“Regard,” he continues, “to our own private happiness and interest too, appear upon many occasions very laudable principles of action. The habits of œconomy, industry, discretion, attention and application of thought, are generally supposed to be cultivated from self-interested motives, and at the same time are apprehended to be very praiseworthy qualities which deserve the esteem and approbation of everybody.⁠ ⁠… Carelessness and want of œconomy are universally disapproved of, not, however, as proceeding from a want of benevolence, but from a want of the proper attention to the objects of self-interest.”84

Adam Smith clearly believed that Hutcheson’s system did not give a sufficiently high place to self-interest. It was not Hutcheson that inspired his remark, “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”85 He may have obtained a general love of liberty from Hutcheson, but whence did he obtain the belief that self-interest works for the benefit of the whole economic community? He might possibly of course have evolved it entirely in his own mind without even hearing another lecture or reading another book after he left Hutcheson’s class. But it seems probable⁠—we cannot safely say more⁠—that he was assisted by his study of Mandeville, a writer who has had little justice done him in histories of economics, though McCulloch gives a useful hint on the subject in his Literature of Political Economy. In the chapter of the Moral Sentiments which follows the one which contains the criticism of Hutcheson just quoted, Smith deals with “Licentious Systems.” The appearances in human nature, he says, which seem at first sight to favour such systems were “slightly sketched out with the elegance and delicate precision of the duke of Rochefaucault, and afterwards more fully represented with the lively and humorous, though coarse and rustic eloquence of Dr. Mandeville.”86

Mandeville, he says, attributes all commendable acts to “a love of praise and commendation,” or “vanity,” and not content with that, endeavours to point out the imperfection of human virtue in many other respects.

“Wherever our reserve with regard to pleasure falls short of the most ascetic abstinence, he treats it as gross luxury and sensuality. Everything according to him, is luxury which exceeds what is absolutely necessary for the support of human nature, so that there is vice even in the use of a clean shirt or of a convenient habitation.”87

But, Smith thinks, he has fallen into the great fallacy of representing every passion as wholly vicious if it is so in any degree and direction:⁠—

“It is thus that he treats everything as vanity which has any reference either to what are or to what