Has Geology Anything to Teach Economists?

An interesting item crossed my screen this evening while in pursuit of Googling Professor Larry Neal of the University of Illinois, Urbana:
The Journal of Economic History (2000), 60:2:317-334 Cambridge University Press:

“A Shocking View of Economic History”, with a tantalizing abstract:

“Economics, like geology, is an historical science. Geology has made incredible advances by accepting it is an historical, rather than a laboratory science. Economic historians can help economics make similar advances by adopting the research strategies of modern geology. Intensely empirical and global in their range, today’s geologists focus on the historical remains of shocking, usually catastrophic, events in the earth’s past. Already empirical and global, economic historians have ample shocks to study whether their specialty is population, technology, or institutions. A few examples of the possibilities should stimulate us to reinvigorate our parent disciplines of economics and history.”

Comment
One of Adam Smith’s close friends was James Hutton, a fellow member of the Scottish Enlightenment, with a special interest in the then early days of geology. Hutton’s fairly quiet challenge to the reigning orthodoxy of the origins and age of the Earth - believed by preachers to be around 6,000 year old, as deduced from the Bible – was quite radical and based on a search for evidence beyond the mythical certainties of the Flood.

Smith took a close interest in all sciences and often walked with Hutton down from Edinburgh to its adjacent Holyrood Park, which played host to an extinct volcano.

Smith listened as Hutton explained its geology. It is not known if he took Smith to Siccar Point about 20 miles down the coast to show him the now famous ‘nonconformity’ of layers of rock, red sandstone and greywacke, which led Hutton to make his famous remark about the Earth’s origins: ‘we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’.

Hence, I found the abstract for Larry Neal’s paper so interesting, prescient and thought provoking.

My search on Google for details of Larry Neal came from finding a typewritten paper authored by him Adam Smith on “Defence and Opulence”, undated, and at the back of a cupboard, unopened since 1998, though possibly kept by me from my time as a defence economist from the 1970s, which I had put in the cupboard on moving into the house I am presently clearing.

A Moment In History

I took time out this afternoon for a long-standing commitment: to attend a meeting and reception at the University of Edinburgh for the unveiling of a new plaque naming the Department of Chemistry the “Joseph Black Building” in honour of Joseph Black (1728-99), discoverer of what he called “fixed air” and we now know as Carbon Dioxide. He was also a major influence during the Scottish Enlightenment in promoting chemistry as an academic discipline and gave his advice without seeking paid employment to individuals active in the burgeoning Scottish chemistry industry.

A speech by Dr. Robert Anderson, Department of History at Cambridge, was a masterly tour de force in a rounded view of Joseph Black’s life. Black was a close friend of Adam Smith, both at the University of Glasgow and, later, at Edinburgh University (he held the chair in chemistry at the latter for 33 years).

Black was also a close friend of James Hutton, geologist, and the man who deduced that the age of the Earth was far older than was believed with passionate certainty at the time. Both men were friends of Adam Smith, the moral philosopher, who made them his literary executors.

It was a productive few hours, well worth my time this busy afternoon.

Attending a Conference - Without Internet Connections

I am leaving for Oxford University tomorrow to attend as a listening participant the following conference:

“The Philosophy of Adam Smith”

A conference to commemorate the 250th anniversary of The Theory of Moral Sentiments
January 6-8, 2009 - Balliol College, Oxford University.

Organised by the International Adam Smith Society and The Adam Smith Review.

“Although Adam Smith is better known now for his economics, in his own time it was his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which established his reputation. Just as scholarly work on Smith has challenged the free market appropriation of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, so it has also come to appreciate the importance of Smith’s moral philosophy for his overall intellectual project. This conference, to be held at the college Smith himself attended from 1740-46, and at the beginning of the year marking the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, will provide an opportunity to re-evaluate the significance of Smith’s moral philosophy and moral psychology, the relationship between them and his other writings on economics, politics, jurisprudence, history, and rhetoric and belles lettres, and the relevance of his thought to current research in these areas."

***
From the delegates’ list it is a gathering of some of the leading Smithian scholars from around the World and the papers to be presented are a mouthwatering sample of the very best of current scholarship.

That it is to be held in Balliol College, Oxford, where Adam Smith spent six years (1740-46) earning his MA degree, is a special treat in itself. He went to Oxford to study to qualify for ordination into the Church of England and for a career as a minister in the Episcopalian Church of Scotland (the C of E affiliate church, north of the Border). He left Oxford before completing his course and resigned his Snell Exhibition (worth £40 a year) in 1749, and never returned to Oxford University.

It was while Adam Smith was at Oxford that, it is believed, he began to write sometime around 1744 what became is essay, ‘The Principles which lead and direct Philosophical Enquiries as illustrated by the History of Astronomy’, first published posthumously in 1795 by his Literary Executors, Joseph Black and James Hutton.

In my ‘Adam Smith: a moral philosopher and his political economy’, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, I regard this first essay as a most important statement of Smith’s approach to his work, coinciding, while he was writing it, with his decision to resign from his preparation for a career in the Church and to become a moral philosopher.

I also suggest – which I am currently researching in detail – that this essay marks his first statement of his abandonment of the Church version of Christianity, followed up in Moral Sentiments with what amounts to a non-religious stance that was well short of Deism.

Unfortunately, my current laptop no longer connects to the Internet, so, unless I can make alternative arrangements in Oxford, I shall be unable to post on Lost Legacy (you may believe I shall every effort to find an Internet Café or such like). I shall be able to read messages and emails on my Apple i-phone.

I shall compile reports of the Conference for Lost Legacy, but I may be unable to post them until my return to Edinburgh on Friday.

Thank you for your patience at any absence enforced by failure on the technical side.

James Hutton's Right to Precedence

The introduction to a remarkable, and welcome, booklet celebrating the opening of the recently beautifully restored (from Lottery funds) 19th-century Rotunda in Scarborough, England, contains these paragraphs which I noticed:

“The 1770s to the 1820s was a period of major change and modernisation in Britain, with the Industrial and Agricultural revolutions in full swing. There as a renaissance in scientific thought too, which led to the birth of a new science, geology. Edinburgh lay at the centre of its development, primarily becaude ot was there that James Hutton (1726-1797), who had studied at both Edinburgh and Leiden universities, began challenging the established idea that the Earth was created in 4004 B. C. Hutton owned land in Berwickshire, where he observed the way that rivers eroded their surroundings to transport sediment to the sea. He realised that those sediments would ultimately form solid rock which could be uplifted to form mountains and eroded again. This process implied the passing of immense intervals of time. In 1795 Hutton published his revolutionary ideas in a book called Theory of the Earth.

A few years earlier, in 1797, a young man in south-west England was appointed as a surveyor’s assistant. He was called William Smith (1769-1839), and is now immortalised as the ‘Father of English Geology’,”

Comment
My interest in James Hutton primarily is in his friendship and collaboration with Adam Smith. While acknowledging the major contributions of William Smith (no relation) to geology (‘father of English geology’), I was taken aback by the implication (‘a few years earlier') that William Smith he had a claim to precedence over James Hutton (widely credited as the ‘father of modern geology’).

James Hutton made the essence of his theory of the Earth in a paper (Concerning the system of the Earth, its duration, and stability), read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh at two meetings in 1785 (the first part was read by his friend, Joseph Black, the physician and chemist, in March and the second part by Hutton in April). His book, The Theory of the Earth, was published later but that does not affect Hutton’s rightful 'claim' to precedence.

Papers read at either of the Royal Societies in Edinburgh or London, or other prestigious bodies like the Linnaean Society, London, are clear statements of proven precedence, as applies from the reading of the papers on natural selection read at the Linnean Society on behalf of both Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin in July 1858.

My interest in James Hutton and his theories of the Earth is partly because of my current research project on the claims of many Smithian scholars that Adam Smith was motivated by his alleged beliefs in Christianity or some form of Deism, of which I intend to report in due course.

Meantime, search the Lost Legacy archives for my earlier article on James Hutton on 29 May 29 May, 2006: “James Hutton, geologist and Friend of Adam Smith'.