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THE RELEVANCE OF PROPRIETY AND SELF-COMMAND IN ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2021

Leonidas Montes
Leonidas Montes*
Affiliation:
Economics, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez and Centro de Estudios Públicos, Chile
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Abstract

Propriety and self-command are distinctive and complex Smithian concepts. This essay attempts to shed more light on the meaning and significance of propriety and the virtue of self-command. After a brief introduction on the recent reappraisal of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), a short analysis of Smith’s crucial idea of sympathy follows. Then the relevance of propriety is discussed and some connections between propriety and the virtue of self-command are explored. Finally, the importance of Smith’s self-command is reassessed, paying attention to its origins and philosophical implications. It is noteworthy that, through self-command and propriety, TMS stresses the role of intentions and motivations. By doing so, Adam Smith opens up new threads to rethink personal liberty and its ethical importance for political economy.

Keywords

Adam SmithThe Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS)sympathyproprietyself-command
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , Summer 2020 , pp. 118 - 137
Copyright
© Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation 2020

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Footnotes

This essay develops and further expands some ideas that stem from Leonidas Montes, Adam Smith in Context. A Critical Reassessment of Some Central Components of His Thought, (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004) and “Adam Smith: Self-Interest and the Virtues,” in Adam Smith: A Princeton Guide, ed. R. P. Hanley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). I am very much indebted for the unusually detailed, sharp, and helpful comments of an anonymous referee, and the challenging suggestions of the other participants in the intellectual adventure about the origins of PPE at Tucson. Last but not least, “surprise, wonder, and admiration” emerged from that discovery process organized by David Schmidtz, editor of this journal.

References

1 For references to Adam Smith, the standard citation based on the complete Glasgow edition of Wealth of Nations (WN), Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), Lectures on Rethoric and Belles Lettres, (LRBL) and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Corr.), originally published by Oxford University Press and then by Liberty Fund, will be used. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. A. Macfie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1984 [1759]); An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981 [1776]); Lectures on Rethoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985); Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987).

2 Smith, Corr., 34–35.

3 Smith’s beautiful account of his friend’s death in a letter to his editor, William Strahan (Corr., 217–21), was published, and it triggered a reaction from religious quarters. Smith reports that this “very harmless Sheet of paper … brought upon me ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain” (Corr., 251). Probably for that reason the pragmatic Smith, who avoided conflicts, did not publish posthumously Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion as Hume himself had asked in his will (cf. Corr., 211–12). As David Hume knew his cautious friend quite well, perhaps he performed the last joke to Adam Smith in his will. For a recent and fascinating treatment on Hume and Smith, see Rasmussen, D. C., The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Anderson, G. M., Shughart II, W. F., and Tollison, R. D., “Adam Smith in the Customhouse,” Journal of Political Economy 93, no. 41 (1985): 740–59 investigates the twelve years Smith spent at the customs service, concluding that he took this job seriously, and not simply as a sinecure.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For example, before the publication of the Glasgow edition of WN and TMS in 1976, only 52 editions of TMS versus 340 of WN were published (Tribe, Keith, A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith [London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002], 332–54).Google Scholar

6 For the renaissance in TMS, see review essays by Brown, Vivienne, “Mere Inventions of the Imagination,” Economics and Philosophy 13 (1997): 281–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Keith Tribe, “Adam Smith: Critical Theorist?” Journal of Economic Literature 37, no. 2 (1999): 609–632; and for recent scholarship on TMS, see Samuel Fleischacker and Vivienne Brown, “The Philosophy of Adam Smith: Essays Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” The Adam Smith Review 5 (2010): 1–11. And for a general and very recent reassessment of Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment scholarship, see Maria Pia Paganelli, “Recent Engagements with Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment,” History of Political Economy 47, no. 3 (2015): 363–94.

7 The importance of “imagination” for Smith’s sympathetic process has been widely treated. Already in the second paragraph of TMS, Smith says: “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation” (TMS I.i.1.2, p. 9).

8 As Weinstein, J. R., Adam Smith’s Pluralism: Rationality, Education, and the Moral Sentiments (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar has recently argued “ … sympathy is a rational process, cultivated by education" (p. 68) and Adam Smith “ … presents an account of human rationality that is representative of a holistic picture of human agency" (p. 264). For a recent philosophical reappraisal of Smith’s sympathy see E. Schliesser, Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 107–150 and Samuel Fleischacker, Being Me Being You: Adam Smith and Empathy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2019).

9 On the renaissance of the influence of Aristotelian and virtue ethics on Smith, see especially McCloskey, Deirdre, The Bourgeois Virtues (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deirdre McCloskey, “Adam Smith, the Last of the Former Virtue Ethicists,” History of Political Economy 40, no. 1 (2008): 43–71; R. P. Hanley, “Adam Smith, Aristotle and Virtue Ethics,” in New Voices on Adam Smith, ed. Leonidas Montes and E. Schliesser (London: Routledge, 2006); Hanley “Adam Smith and Virtue,” in The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, ed. Christopher Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli, and Craig Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Maria A. Carrasco, “Adam Smith: Self-Command, Practical Reason and Deontological Insights,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20, no. 2 (2012): 391–414; Carrasco, “Adam Smith’s Reconstruction of Practical Reason,” The Review of Metaphysics 58, no. 1 (2004): 81–116. Also, the relationship of sympathy and Smith’s intellectual virtues is worth exploring (see Hanley, “Adam Smith and Virtue,” 230–36).

10 Furthermore, the three sections of Part I are entitled “Of the Sense of Propriety,” “Of the Degrees of the different Passions which are consistent with Propriety,” and “Of the Effects of Prosperity and Adversity upon the Judgment of Mankind with regard to the Propriety of Action; and why it is more easy to obtain their Approbation in the one state than in the other” (emphasis added).

11 McKenna, S. J., Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 5.Google Scholar

12 Elsewhere he also refers to “perfect,” “superior,” “complete,” “exact,” “most exact,” and “utmost propriety.” Also to “mere propriety,” “natural propriety,” “noblest propriety,” “virtue and propriety,” and “beauty and propriety.”

13 Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Steinberg, E. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993 [1748]), 3.Google Scholar

14 Actually, in De Officiis, Cicero uses decorum as the Greek prépon (De Officiis I.xxvii). Moreover, in Cicero, On the Republic, xx.70 it is stated that: “The Greeks call it prepón; let us call it decorum.” Vivenza, G., Adam Smith and the Classics: The Classical Heritage in Adam Smith´s Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 192–94;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Montes, Leonidas, Adam Smith in Context. A Critical Reassessment of Some Central Components of His Thought (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004), 122–28;Google Scholar and S. J. McKenna, Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety, 25–51, all explore some possible classical sources of propriety.

15 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1651]).Google Scholar

16 For example, Hobbes would declare “[a]nd therefore where there is no Own, that is, no Propriety, there is no Injustice; and where there is no coercive Power erected, that is, where there is no common-wealth, there is no Propriety” (Hobbes, Leviathan, 106, original emphasis). Elsewhere he refers to “power as propriety,” or “Rules of Propriety” (125), “Propriety of Subjects” (225), and “Propriety in his land” (228).

17 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1689]), 350, original emphasis.

18 It is noteworthy that Locke considers “life and liberty” as things that belong to oneself, adding to this broader and expanded meaning of property. Elsewhere Locke refers to “ … every Man has a Property in his own Person” (Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 287, original emphasis). Locke also refers to “[t]he measure of Property, Nature has well set, by the Extent of Mens Labour” (292, original emphasis), and soon after he refers to the “Rule of Propriety” (293). Propriety is also connected to the central concept of oikeíosis that relates to sympathy, but also to the self (see Vivienne Brown, “Mere Inventions of the Imagination,” Economics and Philosophy 13 [1997]: 281–312; G. Vivenza, Adam Smith and the Classics; Montes, Adam Smith in Context; and Barzilai, Forman-F., Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010]).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 The narrative of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s “The Spectator” is a good source and example that gives voice to this practical moral idea and its classical sources.

20 I am indebted to the anonymous referee for calling my attention to this point.

21 For example, in Hume’s Treatise, propriety appears only four times: two times connected to “exactness” (“propriety and exactness” and “propriety or exactness”), and then related to “language” and “speech” (“propriety of speech” and “propriety of language”). And it appears only two times in his two Enquiries.

22 Note that in WN, propriety appears only eight times, and always in the common vernacular sense of simply doing something “with propriety.”

23 It is worth noting that Cicero would define sympatheia as “consensus” and “concord.”

24 Smith also complains that Hutcheson, by making virtue consist in benevolence, focuses just on the beneficial effects, omitting the important question of the causes of other virtues. In Smith’s own words: “The view and aim of our affections, the beneficent and hurtful effects which they tend to produce, are the only qualities at all attended to in this system. Their propriety and impropriety, their suitableness and unsuitableness, to the cause which excites them, are disregarded altogether” (TMS VII.ii.3.15, p. 304). In his account of sympathy, J. Rust (“Indulgent Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,” in Hardwick, D. F. and Marsch, L., Propriety and Prosperity. New Studies on the Philosophy of Adam Smith [London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014], 98–101) echoes the importance of motives.Google Scholar

25 Haakonssen, K., The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 In the same line, Emma Rothschild argues that Smith rejects Hume’s proto utilitarianism, as in his sympathetic process “the convergence of sentiments depends on judgements about motives, as well as about consequences” (Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment, [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001], 231). Nowadays there is a general consensus that Adam Smith is not a proto-utilitarian, and there are also good grounds to defend Smith as a precursor of a deontological position (see Samuel Fleischacker, “Philosophy in Moral Practice: Kant and Adam Smith,” Kant-Studien 82, no. 3 [1991]: 249–69; Fleischacker, A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999]; and Montes, Adam Smith in Context, 118–22).

27 On the general evolution of the different editions of TMS, Dickey, L., “Historicizing the ‘Adam Smith Problem’: Conceptual, Historiographical, and Textual Issues,” Journal of Modern History 58, no. 3 (1986), 579–609 underlines some differences between the first and the sixth editionsCrossRefGoogle Scholar. And W. Eckstein, “Introduction to The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” reprinted in Adam Smith: Critical Responses, edited by H. Mizuta, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2000 [1926]), 12–49, in his introduction to the 1926 German translation of TMS, already compares Smith’s six editions. See also Montes, Leonidas, “Adam Smith as an Eclectic Stoic,” Adam Smith Review 4 (2008): 30–56, for this evolution in relation to the Stoics’ influence.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Self-command appears in thirty-six paragraphs of TMS. Of them, twenty-five paragraphs correspond to those added to the final sixth edition of 1790.

29 See Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding E 7.19 and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals M 6.14 and M App 4.2. It also appears a couple of times in his History of England, but no appearance has relevance beyond its vernacular neo-Stoic sense.

30 This reflects the classic relationship between virtus and manly courage. Cicero would state that “it is from the word man that the word virtus is derived” (Cic.Tusc II.xviii).

31 From these last two quotes, both added to the final edition of TMS, it can be inferred that self-command combines the Greco-Roman virtue of courage with the Christian cardinal virtue of fortitudo. Self-command has the physical and visible connotation that courage had for the classics, and the endogenous or subjective sense that fortitude had for the Christians (for the Greeks or Romans a handicapped individual could not have had the virtue of courage; for the Christians, yes). Therefore when Martha Nussbaum (“‘Mutilated and Deformed’: Adam Smith on the Material Basis of Human Dignity,” in Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble But Flawed Ideal [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019]) refers to Smith’s “macho stoicism,” interpreting his manly virtues from today’s perspective, she disregards this important political and historical context (I am indebted to Nussbaum for sharing in private correspondence an early version of her chapter).

32 Many authors have pinpointed this difference. For example, Carrasco, Maria A., “Adam Smith: Self-Command, Practical Reason and Deontological Insights,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20, no. 2 (2012): 391–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Forman-Barzilai, F., Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; I. S. Ross, The Life of Adam Smith, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); E. Schliesser, “Review of D. D. Raphael, The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy and Leonidas Montes, Adam Smith in Context: A Critical Reassessment of Some Central Components of His Thought,” Ethics 118, no. 3 (2008): 569–75; Maria A. Carrasco, “Adam Smith’s Reconstruction of Practical Reason,” The Review of Metaphysics 58, no. 1 (2004): 81–116; Montes, Adam Smith in Context; Leonidas Montes, “Adam Smith as an Eclectic Stoic,” Adam Smith Review 4 (2008): 30–56; Vivenza, Adam Smith and the Classics; Fleischacker, A Third Concept of Liberty; C. L. Griswold, Jr., Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment; and recently Michele Bee and Maria Pia Paganelli, “Adam Smith, Anti-Stoic” (January 16, 2019). Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University Working Paper Series, 2019–02. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3316874 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3316874.

33 For Smith, “the stoical apathy is, in such cases, never agreeable, and all the metaphysical sophisms by which it is supported can seldom serve any other purpose than to blow up the hard insensibility of a coxcomb to ten times its native impertinence” (TMS III.3.14, p. 143). See also (TMS VI.iii.18, p. 245), and (TMS VII.ii.1.43, p. 292).

34 It is certainly not easy to define stoicism and the real meaning of some of the Stoics’ key concepts. For example even a philosopher like Martha Nussbaum refers to the concept of apátheia as “what the Stoics said it was. It is extirpation” (Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism,” Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994], 401) or “the Stoic does not hesitate to describe the wise person as totally free from passion” (ibid., 390). I believe there are certainly more nuances to these judgments.

35 It is worth noting that Smith, who had certainly read Memorabilia, elsewhere praises Xenophon’s style as “easy and agreeable” (LRBL Lecture 19, ii.53, p. 107).

36 Although knowledge of Latin was common during the eighteenth century, Smith was an Edinburgh literati, unusually well versed in Greek. Evidence of Smith’s command of Greek is found in the impressive collection of works by classical writers in Smith’s library (Mizuta, H., Adam Smith’s Library: A Supplement to Bonar’s Catalogue with a Checklist of the Whole Library [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008]Google Scholar), his command of Greek in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, and his repeated emphasis on the study of the Greek language in his letters to Lord Shelburne concerning the education of his son (cf. Corr., pp. 28, 29, and 31). Henry Mackenzie, labeled then as the Addison of Scotland by Walter Scott, is reported to have referred to Smith as “ . . . an exception. He had twice Dr. Johnson’s learning—who only knew one language well, the Latin—though he had none of his affection” (Clayden, P. W., The Early Life of Samuel Rogers [London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1997 (1887)], 166–67).Google Scholar

37 Nussbaum, “Adam Smith on the Material Basis of Human Dignity.”

38 Aristotle, EN, VII 1150.a.32.

39 For the history and importance of the Greek classical cardinal virtue of sophrosúne, related to the cardinal virtue of temperantia, and its close relationship with enkráteia, see H. North, Sophrosyne: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

40 Carrasco, “Adam Smith: Self-Command, Practical Reason and Deontological Insights,” 399.

41 This important connection is not original. Otteson, Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life, already emphasized the idea that self-command “presupposes the notion that one can freely choose to act in one way or in another way” (238–39), and argues that free human choice is “embodied in Smith’s notion of the virtue of self-command” (291). And Edward Harpham suggested that “[o]ne could argue that the ideal of self-command itself demands a certain amount of negative liberty if it is [to] be realized” (E. J. Harpham,“The Problem of Liberty in the Thought of Adam Smith,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 22, no. 2 [2000]:215–37, at 236).

42 In this line of thought, Hanley, R. P., “Freedom and Enlightenment,” in the Oxford Handbook of Freedom, ed. Schmidtz, David (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar questions the nature and consequences of Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative liberty, and convincingly argues that they are intertwined in Smith, Rousseau, and Kant. Keith Hankins, (“Adam Smith’s Intriguing Solution to the Problem of Moral Luck,” Ethics 126, no. 3 [2016]: 711–46), working on Smith’s moral luck, has uncovered interesting connections between motives and outcomes.

43 One referee has sharply suggested that justice, as a negative virtue for Smith, would not fit within this framework. It is a good point, but the debate about whether for Smith justice is only negative—Smith famously said that “We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing” (TMS II.ii.1.9, p. 82)—is open. He certainly supports and strongly endorses commutative justice, but there are some inklings toward distributive justice (for example, see Fleischacker, Samuel, On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).Google Scholar

44 Carrasco, Maria A., (“Adam Smith’s Reconstruction of Practical Reason,” The Review of Metaphysics 58, no. 1 [2004]: 81–116) has argued that “Smith’s system can also be plausibly seen as a theory of practical reasoning” (ibid., 81) and that self-command would be “an expression of practical reason” (Carrasco, “Self-Command, Practical Reason and Deontological Insights,” 399).Google Scholar

45 See Vivenza, Adam Smith and the Classics; Hanley, R. P., “Adam Smith, Aristotle and Virtue Ethics,” in New Voices on Adam Smith, ed. Montes, Leonidas and Schliesser, E., (London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; Hanley, “Adam Smith and Virtue,” in The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, ed. Christopher Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli, and Craig Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); McCloskey, Deirdre, The Bourgeois Virtues (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCloskey, “Adam Smith, the Last of the Former Virtue Ethicists,” History of Political Economy 40, no. 1 (2008): 43–71; Carrasco, “Self-Command, Practical Reason and Deontological Insights,” 391–414; Carrasco, “Adam Smith’s Reconstruction of Practical Reason,” 81–116; and Broadie, Alexander, “Aristotle, Adam Smith and the Virtue of Propriety,” The Journal of Scottish Philosophy 8, no. 1 (2010): 79–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar