Puzzles of the “Wealth of Nations”

Extract

Every well-bred economist knows that a man named Adam Smith was born at Kirkcaldy in 1723, published a somewhat notable book in 1759 entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and in 1776, when he was fifty-three years old, produced an extraordinary pair of volumes called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Most young economists nowadays, I fear, do not read either work of the great Scotsman as we all once did—in the days when one could still take time to enjoy also the leisurely pace of Thackeray and Dickens, even Scott. Students who just skim the Wealth of Nations, or parts of it, would surely miss what has attracted my attention; and even scholars interested in Smith's economic principles would hardly perceive what I have in mind, namely, that he was noteworthy for his “unbounded benevolence,” as one near-contemporary described him, and that he was “slow to think evil” as a recent biographer alleges.

Apparently it was out of this abounding good nature that Smith alluded to “the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects”; that he took opportunity to mention “the conveyances of a verbose attorney”; and that, with a more sweeping serenity, he recorded an observation of “the over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities.”

Biographers of Smith have been led to state that perhaps he was not as obviously religious as some of his contemporaries. He was perhaps a deist, even if he was a philosopher and a friend of Hume. John Rae reported that Smiths “opening prayers” at Glasgow were thought to “savour strongly of natural religion,” and occasioned no little shaking of heads. Perhaps, then, one might expect Smith to have been somewhat less charitable toward wearers of the cloth than he was toward other groups.