The Mystery of Adam Smith's '1755 Paper'

Remy Briand and Madhusudan Subramanian post an article on investment prospects in ‘Emerging Markets: a 20 year perspective’ in IndexUniverse.com (Sept/Oct) (HERE):

‘Emerging Markets: a 20 year perspective’, which you have to read to get its professional investor flavour (vicariously, of course).

It opens, however, with a well known quotation from Adam Smith:

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." — ."

Comment
No references to Adam Smith occupy any of the 5 pages of the article, and in that sense the quotation is disengaged from the article. I assume it was picked by the authors because it reads well and supposedly sends a powerful message to their readers.

However, the emerging markets that they are interested in do not qualify as having taken Smith’s advice – they tend to be state dominated in partnership with “family-controlled conglomerates that benefit from political connections”, which does not stop them being a ‘buy’ prospect, provided you have strong connections with a winning family (political or commercial).

The ‘1755 paper’ as it is known is most interesting, not least because it was only seen by Dugald Stewart (Smith’s first biographer) and not by others who could verify its contents and, perhaps more importantly, explain its context.

The occasion was Stewart’s eulogy following the death of Adam Smith (in 1790) and his reading of an appreciation of Smith’s work and life to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1793 (he read his eulogy in two parts, one in January and the other in March: the February meeting was postponed without explanation).

A partial explanation for the postponement was the rising concerns of the British Establishment for their safety in light of the events in revolutionary France with the trial of the French King in December 1792 and his execution in January 1793.

There were also a series of events in Edinburgh early 1793 in which various radicals were placed under observation and then on trial for sedition. In short, the atmosphere was not conducive to the proper business of an eulogy for a academic moral philosopher - even meetings were viewed with distrust.

Stewart quotes from Smith’s paper which was actually delivered in 1755 to his club in Glasgow and appears to be ‘expressed with a great deal of that honest and indignant warmth, which is perhaps unavoidable by a man who is conscious of the purity of his own intentions, when he suspects that advantages have been taken of the frankness of his temper’.

Stewart used the occasion to place on record in front of his peers (Smith was a founder member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783 – he had been elected to the Royal Society of London in 1773) a strong rebuttal of the mysterious circumstances that led him to write with ‘indignant warmth’ about unexplained matters that had ruffled his normal kindly disposition. Fellows of the RSE are assumed to have known what the dispute was about even though it had occurred 38 years earlier. It must have been some row!

But the paper was not published by Stewart – he thought it would be considered ‘improper’ to ‘revive the memory of private differences’, yet clearly everybody knew about them.

The paper, with a few quotations from it (including the one quoted above), was placed among Stewart’s papers and never saw the light of day. Unfortunately, Stewart’s son appears to have burned it among other papers when he was suffering from mental illness.

So, not knowing what the paper contained remains a major problem for Smithian scholars. I have discussed its possible contents and context in the appendix to my book, Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy, 2005, Palgrave Macmillan, pp 241-48.

I don't suppose Remy Briand and Madhusudan Subramanian are aware of this background, nor am I convinced that they quoted the sentence above because it had anything to do with the cotnents of their article. States and powerful family conglomerates don't do 'peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice'.

Adam Smith on Happiness?

There are border line quotations from Adam Smith's writings that may or may not express the themes than an author wishes to convey, and this may be one of them.

Gretchen Rubin, a former lawyer from Yale, turned ‘writer’, for which she is working on The Happiness Project (HERE), writes:

“Happiness quotation from Adam Smith

“The consciousness, or even the suspicion, of having done wrong, is a load upon every mind, and is accompanied with anxiety and terror in all those who are not hardened by long habits of iniquity.” --Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

That's why I've found that when I behave myself better, and manage to keep my resolutions, I feel happier. Knowing that I've lost my temper, failed to use good manners, behaved thoughtlessly, etc., makes me anxious, even as I'm making excuses for myself.”

Comment
An unusual theme and I applaud any advice to readers that they might read Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Incidentally, the sentence that Gretchen quotes is part of a discussion in which, uncharacteristically, Smith attacks the ‘Roman Catholic superstition’ as part of a veiled attack on religious superstition in general. He was ‘safe’ from the attention of the Protestant zealots in mid-18th-century Scotland in describing the Catholic religion as ‘superstition’ in the context of the confession of sins to a priest; woe betide him if he said anything similar about the Calvinist confession.

However, judge for yourself for here is the quotation is its context:

“The doctrine of the casuists, however, is by no means confined to the consideration of what a conscientious regard to the general rules of justice would demand of us. It embraces many other parts of Christian and moral duty. What seems principally to have given occasion to the cultivation of this species of science was the custom of auricular confession, introduced by the Roman Catholic superstition, in times of barbarism and ignorance. By that institution, the most secret actions, and even the thoughts of every person, which could be suspected of receding in the smallest degree from the rules of Christian purity, were to be revealed to the confessor. The confessor informed his penitents whether, and in what respect they had violated their duty, and what penance it behoved them to undergo, before he could absolve them in the name of the offended Deity.

The consciousness, or even the suspicion of having done wrong, is a load upon every mind, and is accompanied with anxiety and terror in all those who are not hardened by long habits of iniquity. Men, in this, as in all other distresses, are naturally eager to disburthen themselves of the oppression which they feel upon their thoughts, by unbosoming the agony of their mind to some person whose secrecy and discretion they can confide in. The shame, which they suffer from this acknowledgment, is fully compensated by that deviation of their uneasiness which the sympathy of their confident seldom fails to occasion. It relieves them to find that they are not altogether unworthy of regard, and that however their past conduct may be censured, their present disposition is at least approved of, and is perhaps sufficient to compensate the other, at least to maintain them in some degree of esteem with their friend. A numerous and artful clergy had, in those times of superstition, insinuated themselves into the confidence of almost every private family. They possessed all the little learning which the times could afford, and their manners, though in many respects rude and disorderly, were polished and regular compared with those of the age they lived in. They were regarded, therefore, not only as the great directors of all religious, but of all moral duties. Their familiarity gave reputation to whoever was so happy as to possess it, and every mark of their disapprobation stamped the deepest ignominy upon all who had the misfortune to fall under it. Being considered as the great judges of right and wrong, they were naturally consulted about all scruples that occurred, and it was reputable for any person to have it known that he made those holy men the confidents of all such secrets, and took no important or delicate step in his conduct without their advice and approbation. It was not difficult for the clergy, therefore, to get it established as a general rule, that they should be entrusted with what it had already become fashionable to entrust them, and with what they generally would have been entrusted, though no such rule had been established. To qualify themselves for confessors became thus a necessary part of the study of churchmen and divines, and they were thence led to collect what are called cases of conscience, nice and delicate situations in which it is hard to determine whereabouts the propriety of conduct may lie. Such works, they imagined, might be of use both to the directors of consciences and to those who were to be directed; and hence the origin of books of casuistry.

The moral duties which fell under the consideration of the casuists were chiefly those which can, in some measure at least, be circumscribed within general rules, and of which the violation is naturally attended with some degree of remorse and some dread of suffering punishment. The design of that institution which gave occasion to their works, was to appease those terrors of conscience which attend upon the infringement of such duties. But it is not every virtue of which the defect is accompanied with any very severe compunctions of this kind, and no man applies to his confessor for absolution, because he did not perform the most generous, the most friendly, or the most magnanimous action which, in his circumstances, it was possible to perform. In failures of this kind, the rule that is violated is commonly not very determinate, and is generally of such a nature too, that though the observance of it might entitle to honour and reward, the violation seems to expose to no positive blame, censure, or punishment. The exercise of such virtues the casuists seem to have regarded as a sort of works of supererogation, which could not be very strictly exacted, and which it was therefore unnecessary for them to treat of.” (TMS IV.iv.16-7 pp 333-4)

I am not sure that all this is about happiness. But Gretchen is on the right track. There is much in Moral Sentiments that addresses the issues that she is interested in, and perhaps she should look elsewhere in the book for a better quotation.