Adam Smith and Robert Burns

Ian Hunter (professor emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario, and author of Robert Burns: A Tribute) reviews The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography by Robert Crawford (Jonathan Cape), in The Afterword (’posting from the literary world’) in the National Post (Canada) HERE:

“It was on July 31, 1786, that Burns’s Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was published; 612 copies printed by his friend John Wilson of Kilmarnock, today one of the most valuable first editions in the world. The book has never since been out of print. By the time the second Edinburgh edition was being prepared the following year, the subscriber list exceeded 3,000 names, including Adam Smith, who signed up for four copies. Burns was now the people’s poet, the poet of the common man “wher’er he be”; as Crawford puts it “the poet who will speak to anyone prepared to listen, regardless of class, culture or situation.”

This is why Burns’s poems have been translated into every language. It is why there are more statues of Burns in North America than there are for any other human being. It is why, on July 25, 1796, uniformed soldiers lined the streets of Dumfries for Burns’s funeral procession and why, for as far as the eye could see, locals walked in silence behind the casket as a band played the Dead March from Handel’s Saul. One young boy, watching the casket go by, was heard to ask his mother: “Now that Burns is dead, who will be our poet?” His mother thought and then said: “He will.”
She was right in 1796; she is right today.”

Comment
‘Twill surprise nobody who knows anything about Scottish history – and the Scottish nation – that there is controversy (sometimes bitter) about Robert Burns and his literary works.

Thankfully Robert Crawford has written a splendid biography that has restored some of the balance since the unfortunate Canongate Burns: the complete poems and songs of Robert Burns, edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg, (2001) (Canongate Books, Edinburgh).

The snippet, quoted above (follow the link to read the whole review) reveals the link between the young Burns and Adam Smith. Smith’s subscription for four copies of Burns’ Kilmarnock (2nd) edition is typical; Smith had a great affection for poetry (his first ever appearance in print was to write a preface for a book of poems written by William Hamilton of Bangour in 1748; a copy of Smith’s preface is reproduced in Adam Smith’s Essays on Philosophical Subjects, 1982. p 261, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis).

The Canongate Burns, cited above, contains a complete misreading of both the poem by Burns and of Smith’s Moral Sentiments. The editors write:

‘As a writer he was a smuggler not an Excise man. It should also remind us not to read ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gies us/ to see ourselves as ithers see us!’ as a piece of sententious sentimentality but Burn’s two line demolition of Adam Smith’s concept of the creation of an internalized spectator in his Theory of Moral Sentiments as a form of secular conscience adequate to controlling our materialism and social pretentiousness’. (p 133).

This a travesty of the truth. Smith’s Moral Sentiments, which Burns admired, and Burns’ poem ‘To a Louse’, shared a union of sentiments, of which these famous lines summed their agreement, not their ‘demolition’:

‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion’

‘To see oursels as ithers see us’ expresses their different perspectives: Burns, pessimistically, reminding us of human frailty and its consequences; and Smith, optimistically, mapping how most humans develop and maintain their moral senses.

Smith says we do have the power ‘to see oursels as ithers see us’ and he explains how we exercise it. We have this power,shared common ground), from what we may crudely describe as our conscience, or the effect of consulting our impartial spectator within, which helps us resist self-deceit. Smith is explicit:

‘… self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable. We could not otherwise endure the sight.’ (TMS158–9)

We are not indifferent guardians of our reputations. In practice, other people are our ‘looking-glass’ through which we see ourselves in their eyes, not ours.

Once satisfied with what we believe they see (beware hubris!), we are less flattered by the applause of some and less bothered by the censures of others if, in the main, what we believe they see indicates natural and proper approval of our behaviour.

In this manner, our ‘first moral criticisms are exercised upon the character and conduct of other people’ in so far as they might affect us and we are ‘very forward’ in expressing our views.

But the traffic is not all one-way. We soon learn that others are equally forward in their criticisms of us! This causes us to review our conduct by imagining how we appear in the eyes of others.

If we wish to become less worthy of censure and more worthy of praise, we must discover how we might improve our behaviour. In effect we become ‘the spectators of our own behaviour’ and we imagine how other people ‘scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct’ (TMS 112) through their eyes, not ours.

If we believe what we see in the looking-glass of the spectator, we are ‘tolerably satisfied’ and can discount the applause and downplay any censure. On the other hand, we may be doubtful about the merits of their disapprobation, and provided we know we have not already ‘shaken hands with infamy’, we are doubly struck with the severity of their disapproval.

But if we are secure in our beliefs that we are ‘the natural and proper objects of approbation’, because our imagined spectator’s view of us is ‘tolerably satisfied’, we may reject misrepresentations of our conduct by others (TMS112).

Smith’s argument takes us right back to Burns’ scepticism: do people really see themselves as others see them? Smith’s response is ingenious. Society is our mirror, our looking-glass, and we create our moral compass from living in it, at least in so far as we avoid causing offence to others. But is this sufficient for us to act positively in a moral manner?

We are compelled, and almost in spite of ourselves, to ‘see ourselves as others see us’ (TMS 23) The result for society is a greater degree of tranquillity than would be thought likely in a society composed of individual egos who ignore (or defy) their impartial spectators.

The impartial spectator restrains individuals from unbridled expressions of their passions in pursuit of their interests, preferring ‘silent and majestic sorrow’ in place of ‘detestable … fury without check or restraint’, and thereby confines individuals to pursue their interests only to the extent that is equitable and proportionate to what the impartial spectator and ‘every indifferent person would rejoice to see executed’ (TMS 24).

From this binding relationship it follows ‘that to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind the harmony of the sentiments and passions which consists their whole grace and propriety’ (TMS25).

Ironically, the Canongate Burns’ editors include in their controversial collection of poems they attributed to Burns an epigram ‘On the Late Death of Dr Adam Smith’, which appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1790, page 843 (Smith died on 17 July, 1790):

‘Death and Hermes of late Elysium made boast,
That each would bring thither what earth valued most;
Smith’s Wealth of Nations Hermes stole from his shelf;
DEATH just won his cause – he took of Smith himself.’

The lady in the Church, unaware of the louse on her hat and careless of the opinions of others, was a member of that portion of humanity that did not consult their internal impartial spectators, and was the appropriate candidate for Burns to mock; but of those who did fraternise with their impartial spectators, it was evident that Burns and Smith agreed on the benefits individually of so doing.

Wha's Like Us?

David Lindsay (‘Pro-Life, Pro-Family, Pro-Worker, Anti-War') HERE(25 January):

‘A Hardy Son of Rustic Toil’

One is that he and Scotland do not quite fit. Or, rather, did not. His sheer genius turned a culture bipolar between Calvinism and Enlightenment rationalism into one conducted within a triangle with the Westminster Confession and its staunchest upholders in one corner, the likes of Adam Smith and David Hume in another, Robert Burns (and also, later, Sir Walter Scott) in the third, and most people somewhere in the middle.

And another is that his writing in Scots identified him in his time as falling within a category mostly comprised of Episcopalians and such Catholics as there were in the eighteenth-century Lowlands. He maintained good relations with both, even if it is true that he had little or nothing in common with either beyond a hostility both to rationalism and to Calvinism (or at least, in the Episcopalian case, to the Westminster variety of it). And those hostilities not only formed his own rural proto-Romanticism, but then went on to inform, not least through him, the Mediaeval and Jacobite nostalgia of the Episcopalian Scott.

Indeed, Burns entered Continental intellectual life via the Scots Catholic seminaries in exile. Such seminaries serving these islands have a great deal to answer for. Among very much else, they also introduced football to the Iberian Peninsula.”

Comment
David Lindsay writes of Robert Burns, of course, which readers unacquainted with Scottish history may not realise until his name is mentioned, and if even they realise of whom David speaks, many would be perplexed by the depth of his historical associations into which he places Burns’ life in mid-18th century Scotland.

What a tangled web of bloody strains and passions Scotland was in those days!

It echoes still of these in the present, the most violently destructive, or at least most threatening, of them now subdued; the population is larger, the certainties of the old loyalties are more ephemeral; the old battles are almost forgotten or, at best, dimly remembered; and the venerable firebrand warriors of the creeds, passions, and hatreds, are no more.

Scotland has moved beyond them, nostalgia for its past and people, at its most potent on one or perhaps two days a year, but even then it never rise beyond a few limp gestures of empty defiance, despite, or because of, the drink and the almost pathetic nursing of national sentimentality posing as solidarity.

Of Adam Smith and David Hume, they were of a mind that saw reason as the slave of the passions, and Smith, we know, signed the Calvinist Confession of Faith in 1751 to conclude his election as a professorial member of Glasgow University (the Cathedral located conveniently next door).

We also know he chose not to be ordained at Oxford into the Church of England and serve his times as an Episcopalian Church Minister in Scotland. We also know he was not a Jacobite, though he was a friend of several, and that he had stiff things to say about the Roman Catholic Church and 'papist' priests and their ‘superstitions’.

Smith also “entered Continental intellectual life” but not through any roots of it in Scotland, except from its books of which he read aplenty in French, Italian, and the ancient Greek and Latin; however, he met, mixed with, and was stimulated intellectually by, those intellectuals who frequented the Salons of Paris, in particular the Physiocrats and their daring économistes, not forgetting Voltaire in Geneva.

David Lindsay writes an evocative piece, probably of most marked relevance to those who know their Scottish history, and Lost Legacy congratulates him for it. Link and read it today on Burns' Birthday.

Robert Burns and Adam Smith

“Robert Crawford interview: A Burns to believe in”, The Scotsman, 17 January, (Edinburgh, Scotland) HERE:

“Robert Crawford on Robert Burns”:

"People often pat Burns on the head as a 'heaven-taught ploughman', assuming he was an unlearned character," says Crawford, professorially leaning back against a wall of books in his St Andrews study. "But if I was to say to my students, 'Hands up which of you have read a major work of philosophy published in the year of your birth' I wonder how many would be able to do so. Yet Burns read Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, and he knows it well because he refers to it several times. "O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us" ... that's just a straight versification of something in Adam Smith.

Comment
At last, an authoritative guide to the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns!

Shoals of books have been written about him and we celebrate each 25 January with “Burns Suppers” about and beyond the land of his birth, from fairly formal suppers, with their strict rituals and order of events - piping in the Haggis, the ceremonial toast to the ‘chieftain of the puddin race’, delivered with appropriate deference in the ‘Guid Scot’s tongue’, the traditional ‘toasts to the lassies’, and the ‘immortal memory’. This followed by the obligatory meal of ‘haggis, neaps and tatties’, washed down with whisky (or other drink – in my case orange juice) and, as the evening progresses, it becomes more of a blur to most of those present, with Burns’ songs, sang with feeling by a lovely singer, with listeners thinking romantic thoughts (I’m trying not to be sexist) and the occasional inter-family feud breaking out.

For many years, if we are not going to a public ‘Burns Supper’, we have our private family one (plus any guests who happen to drop in). The traditional meal is followed by our version of the Supper’s verbal accompaniments in that everybody –guests included – must recite or read a Burns’ poem (copies provided from our old copy of 'The Poetical Works of Robert Burns, edited by The Rev. Robert Artis Wilmot, George Routeledge and Sons, London and New York, 1856). This year’s is planned for Sunday, 25 January, at our daughter's house nearby (we take turns).

However, let me refer to Robert Crawford’s reference to Burns junior reading Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments. He received his copy from his father, and Robert Crawford is absolutely right to refer to Burns’ poem as about a subject discussed by Smith:

“"O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us" ... that's just a straight versification of something in Adam Smith.”

In my 2005 book, Adam Smith’s Lost legacy (Palgrave Macmillan), chapter 10:

‘A Poem About a Louse’:

“One way to pass through your mind’s window into Smith’s theory of the impartial spectator is to start with a poem by Robert Burns:
‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion;’ (Burns, 2001: 130-2: To a Louse: On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church, 1786)

Translating Scots into English drains its poetic power: ‘We would save ourselves from many a blunder and foolish notion if only we could see ourselves as others see us.’

Robert Burns (or Burness) was born in 1759, the same year Smith published Moral Sentiments. He was a young contemporary of Adam Smith and, during the winter of 1786-7, Burns tried to meet him in Edinburgh but Smith was too ill to socialise, though they were at the same meeting of a Masonic lodge on at least one occasion. (Rae: 402) It is said that Moral Sentiments influenced Burns composition of the above lines. (Macfie, 1967: 66; Raphael, 1975: 89, n18)

Unlike Smith, who theorised about the consequences of imagining how other people in the persona of ‘impartial spectators’ might judge our behaviour, Burns wrote of our blindness to the perceptions of others and how our vanity masks our imperfections. In truth, others who weigh us in the balance find us wanting (as we do them). Powerful poetry indeed! On hearing Burns’ lines we often assume that his poem applies to others, not ourselves. How vulnerable we are to foolish and petty vanities!

Burns’ poem is a way into Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’. Both men would have agreed that ‘to see oursels as ithers see us’ expresses their different perspectives; Burns, pessimistically, reminding us of human frailty and its consequences, and Smith, optimistically, mapping how humans develop and maintain their moral senses. Smith, contrary to the poet’s assertion, says we do have the power ‘to see oursels as ithers see us’ and he explains how. We have this power, if we wish to use it, from what we may crudely describe as akin to a conscience (though it was much more) in a weak resistance to self-deceit.

Smith is explicit and his stance inspired Burns’ verse:

… self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable. We could not otherwise endure the sight. (TMS III.4.6)

Burns’ editors (Messrs. Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg) comment that his poem:

‘should also remind us not to read “O was some Pow’r the giftie gie us/to see oursels as ithers see us!” as a piece of sententious sentimentality but Burns’ two line demolition of Adam Smith’s concept of the creation of [an] internalised spectator in his Theory of Moral Sentiments as a form of secular conscience adequate to controlling our materialism and social pretentiousness.’ (The Canongate Burns: the complete poems and songs of Robert Burns), edited by Noble, A. and Hogg, P. S., 2001. Canongate Books, High Street, Edinburgh).

These editors, Noble and Hogg, unlike Burns, forgot Smith on ‘self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind’.” (Adam Smith’s Lost legacy, pp 48-49, Palgrave Macmillan) Assuming they had ever read Moral Sentiments.

Meanwhile, I recommend that you read the interview with Robert Crawford HERE:

Note too: “The Bard” by Robert Crawford, is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £20. At this price it is accessible (try Amazon) and it promises to be the most authoritative biography of Robert Burns in print.

Note also the publication of “The Best Laid Schemes, Selected Poetry and Prose of Robert Burns”, edited by Robert Crawford and Christopher McLachlan, is published by Polygon, priced £12.99.

A Text for the Season

Nick Nejad, in Rational Angle, selects a short extract (HERE) from Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments”

“...As nature teaches the spectators to assume the circumstances of the person principally concerned, so she teaches this last in some measure to assume those of the spectators. As they are continually placing themselves in his situation, and thence conceiving emotions similar to what he feels; so he is as constantly placing himself in theirs, and thence conceiving some degree of that coolness about his own fortune, with which he is sensible that they will view it. As they are constantly considering what they themselves would feel, if they actually were the sufferers, so he is constantly led to imagine in what manner he would be affected if he was only one of the spectators of his own situation. As their sympathy makes them look at it in some measure with his eyes, so his sympathy makes him look at it, in some measure, with theirs, especially when in their presence, and acting under their observation: and, as the reflected passion which he thus conceives is much weaker than the original one, it necessarily abates the violence of what he felt before he came into their presence, before he began to recollect in what manner they would be affected by it, and to view his situation in this candid and impartial light.

The mind, therefore, is rarely so disturbed, but that the company of a friend will restore it to some degree of tranquillity and sedateness. The breast is, in some measure, calmed and composed the moment we come into his presence. We are immediately put in mind of the light in which he will view our situation, and we begin to view it ourselves in the same light; for the effect of sympathy is instantaneous. We expect less sympathy from a common acquaintance than from a friend; we cannot open to the former all those little circumstances which we can unfold to the latter; we assume, therefore, more tranquillity before him, and endeavour to fix our thoughts upon those general outlines of our situation which he is willing to consider. We expect still less sympathy from an assembly of strangers, and we assume, therefore, still more tranquillity before them, and always endeavour to bring down our passion to that pitch, which the particular company we are in may be expected to go along with. Nor is this only an assumed appearance; for if we are at all masters of ourselves, the presence of a mere acquaintance will really compose us, still more than that of a friend; and that of an assembly of strangers, still more than that of an acquaintance.

Society and conversation, therefore, are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity, if, at any time, it has unfortunately lost it; as well as the best preservatives of that equal and happy temper, which is so necessary to self-satisfaction and enjoyment. Men of retirement and speculation, who are apt to sit brooding at home over either grief or resentment, though they may often have more humanity, more generosity, and a nicer sense of honour, yet seldom possess that equality of temper which is so common among men of the world.”

[TMS I.i.4.8-10: pp 22-23; 1872, Kessinger Rare Reprints, pp 22-23]

Comment
This is an important extract from Moral Sentiments, particularly the last paragraph about ‘society and conversation’. The society of other people and the normal relations of conversation with them is a harmonising influence of great consequence – yes, I know that conversations can cause trouble too – but the resolution of troubles requires conversation, as Smith notes:

“Men of retirement and speculation, who are apt to sit brooding at home over either grief or resentment, though they may often have more humanity, more generosity, and a nicer sense of honour, yet seldom possess that equality of temper which is so common among men of the world.” [Emphasis added]

Robert Burns, captured lonely brooding brilliantly when he wrote of the wife waiting at home in anticipation of her drunken husband's late return, in Tam O'Shanter: 'nursing her wrath to keep it warm'.
Burns read and admired Moral Sentiments and traces of his reading can be found in some of his poems.

Congratulations to Nick Nejad for selecting the extract.