After two centuries, Adam Smith remains a towering figure in
the history of
economic thought. Known primarily for a single work, An
Inquiry into the
nature an causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) , the first
comprehensive
system of political economy, Smith is more properly regarded as a
social
philosopher whose economic writings constitute only the capstone to an
overarching view of political and social evolution. If his masterwork
is viewed
in relation to his earlier lectures on moral philosophy and government,
as well
as to allusions in The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759) to a work he
hoped to write on “the general principles of law and
government, and of the
different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and
periods of
society” , then The Wealth of Nations may
be seen not merely as a
treatise on economics but as a partial exposition of a much larger
scheme of
historical evolution.
Early Life
Unfortunately, much is known about Smith’s thought
than about his life. Though
the exact date of his birth is unknown, he was baptized on June 5,1723,
in
Kikcaldy, a small (population 1,500) but thriving fishing village near
Edinburgh, the son by second marriage of Adam Smith, comptroller of
customs at
Kikcaldy, and Margaret Douglas, daughter of a substantial landowner. Of
Smith’s
childhood nothing is known other than that he received his elementary
schooling
in Kirkcaldy and that at the age of four years he was said to have been
carried
off by gypsies. Pursuits was mounted, and young Adam was abandoned by
his
captors. “He would have made, I fear, a poor gypsy”
, commented his principal
biographer.
At the age of 14, in 1737, Smith entered the university of
Glasgow, already
remarkable as a center of what was to become known as the Scottish
Enlightenment. There, he was deeply influenced by Francis Hutcheson, a
famous
professor of moral philosophy from whose economic and philosophical
views he
was later to diverge but whose magnetic character seems to have been a
main
shaping force in Smith’s development. Graduating in 1740,
Smith won a
scholarship (the Snell Exhibition) and travelled on horseback to
Oxford, where
he stayed at Balliol College. Compared to the stimulating atmosphere of
Glasgow, Oxford was an educational desert. His years there were spent
largely
in self-education, from which Smith obtained a firm grasp of both
classical and
contemporary philosophy.
Returning to his home after an absence of six years, Smith
cast about for
suitable employment. The connections of his mother’s family,
together with the
support of the jurist and philosopher Lord Henry Kames, resulted in an
opportunity to give a series of public lectures in Edinburgh - a form
of
education then much in vogue in the prevailing spirit of
“improvement” .
The lectures, which ranged over a wide variety of subjects
from rhetoric
history and economics, made a deep impression on some of
Smith’s notable
contemporaries. They also had a marked influence on Smith’s
own career, for in
1751, at the age of 27, he was appointed professor of logic at Glasgow,
from
which post he transferred in 1752 to the more remunerative
professorship of
moral philosophy, a subject that embraced the related fields of natural
theology, ethics, jurisprudence, and political economy.
Glasgow
Smith then entered upon a period of extraordinary creativity,
combined with
a social and intellectual life that he afterward described as
“by far the
happiest, and most honourable period of my life” . During the
week he lectured
daily from 7: 30 to 8: 30 am and again thrice weekly from 11 am to
noon, to
classes of up to 90 students, aged 14 and 16. (Although his lectures
were
presented in English, following the precedent of Hutcheson, rather than
in
Latin, the level of sophistication for so young an audience today
strikes one
as extraordinarily demanding.) Afternoons were occupied with university
affairs
in which Smith played an active role, being elected dean of faculty in
1758;
his evenings were spent in the stimulating company of Glasgow society.
Among his circle of acquaintances were not only remembers of
the
aristocracy, many connected with the government, but also a range of
intellectual and scientific figures that included Joseph Black, a
pioneer in
the field of chemistry, James Watt, later of steam-engine fame, Robert
Foulis,
a distinguished printer and publisher and subsequent founder of the
first
British Academy of Design, and not least, the philosopher David Hume, a
lifelong friend whom Smith had met in Edinburgh. Smith was also
introduced
during these years to the company of the great merchants who were
carrying on
the colonial trade that had opened to Scotland following its union with
England
in 1707. One of them, Andrew Cochrane, had been a provost of Glasgow
and had
founded the famous Political Economy Club. From Cochrane and his fellow
merchants Smith undoubtedly acquired the detailed information
concerning trade
and business that was to give such a sense of the real world to
The Wealth
of Nations.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
In 1759 Smith Published his first work, The Theory
of Moral Sentiments.
Didactic, exhortative, and analytic by turns, The Theory
lays the
psychological foundation on which The Wealth of Nations
was later to be
built. In it Smith described the principles of “human nature
“, which, together
with Hume and the other leading philosophers of his time, he took as a
universal and unchanging datum from which social institutions, as well
as
social behavior, could be deduced.
One question in particular interested Smith in The
Theory of Moral
Sentiments. This was a problem that had attracted
Smith’s teacher Hutcheson
and a number of Scottish philosophers before him. The question was the
source
of the ability to form moral judgments, including judgments on
one’s own
behavior, in the face of the seemingly overriding passions for
self-preservation and self-interest. Smith’s answer, at
considerable length, is
the presence within each of us of an “inner man”
who plays the role of the
“impartial spectator” , approving or condemning our
own and others’ actions
with a voice impossible to disregard. (The theory may sound less naive
if the
question is reformulated to ask how instinctual drives are socialized
through
the superego.) The thesis of the impartial spectator, however, conceals
a more important
aspect of the book. Smith saw humans as created by their ability to
reason and
- no less important - by their capacity for sympathy. This duality
serves both
to pit individuals against one another and to provide them with the
rational
and moral faculties to create institutions by which the internecine
struggle
can be mitigated and even turned to the common good. He wrote in his Moral
Sentiments the famous observation that he was to repeat later
in The
Wealth of Nations: that self-seeking men are often
“led by an invisible
hand... without knowing it, without intending it, to advance the
interest of
the society.” It should be noted that scholars have long
debated whether Moral
Sentiments complemented or was in conflict with The
Wealth of Nations,
which followed it. At one level there is a seeming clash between the
theme of
social morality contained in the first and largely amoral explanation
of the
manner in which individuals are socialized to become the
market-oriented and
class-bound actors that set the economic system into motion.
Travels on the Continent
The Theory quickly brought Smith wide
esteem and in particular
attracted the attention of Charles Townshend, himself something of an
amateur
economist, a considerable wit, and somewhat less of a statesman, whose
fate it
was to be the chancellor of the exchequer responsible for the measures
of
taxation that ultimately provoked the American Revolution. Townshend
had
recently married and was searching for a tutor for his stepson and
ward, the
young Duke of Buccleuch. Influenced by the strong recommendations of
Hume and
his own admiration for The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
he Approached
Smith to take the Charge.
The terms of employment were lucrative (an annual salary of
£300
plus travelling expenses and a pension of £300 a year
after) ,
considerably more than Smith had earned as a professor. Accordingly,
Smith
resigned his Glasgow post in 1763 and set off for France the next year
as the
tutor of the young duke. They stayed mainly in Toulouse, where Smith
began
working on a book (eventually to be The Wealth of Nations)
as an
antidote to the excruciating boredom of the provinces. After 18 months
of ennui
he was rewarded with a two-month sojourn in Geneva, where he met
Voltaire, for
whom he had the profoundest respect, thence to Paris where Hume, then
secretary
to the British embassy, introduced Smith to the great literary salons
of the
French Enlightenment. There he met a group of social reformers and
theorists
headed by Francois Quesnay, who are known in history as the
physiocrats. There
is some controversy as to the precise degree of influence the
physiocrats
exerted on Smith, but it is known that he thought sufficiently well of
Quesnay
to have considered dedicating The Wealth of Nations
to him, had not the
French economist died before publication.
The stay in Paris was cut short by a shocking event. The
younger brother of
the Duke of Buccleuch, who had joined them in Toulouse, took ill and
perished
despite Smith’s frantic ministration. Smith and his charge
immediately returned
to London. Smith worked in London until the spring of 1767 with Lord
Townshend,
a period during which he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and
broadened still further his intellectual circle to include Edmund
Burke, Samuel
Johnson, Edward Gibbon, and perhaps Benjamin Franklin. Late that year
he
returned to Kirkcaldy, where the next six years were spent dictating
and
reworking The Wealth of Nations, followed by
another stay of three years
in London, where the work was finally completed and published in 1776.
The Wealth of Nations
Despite its renown as the first great work in political
economy. The
Wealth of Nations is in fact a continuation of the
philosophical theme
begun in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The
ultimate problem to which
Smith addresses himself is how the inner struggle between the passions
and the
“impartial spectator’ explicated in Moral
Sentiments in terms of the
single individual - works its effects in the larger arena of history
itself,
both in the long-run evolution of society and in terms of the immediate
characteristics of the stage of history typical of Smith’s
own day.
The answer to this problem enters in Book 5, in which Smith
outlines he four
main stages of organization through which society is impelled, unless
blocked
by deficiencies of resources, wars, or bad policies of government: the
original
“rude’ state of hunters, a second stage of nomadic
agriculture, a third stage
of feudal or manorial “farming” , and a fourth and
final stage of commercial
interdependence.
It should be noted that each of these stages is accompanied by
institutions
suited to its needs. For example, in the age of the huntsman,
“there is scar
any established magistrate or any regular administration of justice.
“With the
advent of flocks there emerges a more complex form of social
organization,
comprising not only “formidable” armies but the
central institution of private
property with its indispensable buttress of law and order as well. It
is the
very essence of Smith’s thought that he recognized this
institution, whose
social usefulness he never doubted, as an instrument for the protection
of
privilege, rather than one to be justified in terms of natural law:
“Civil
government,” he wrote, “so far as it is instituted
for the security of
property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against
the
poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at
all.”
Finally, Smith describes the evolution through feudalism into a stage
of society
requiring new institutions such as market-determined rather than
guild-determined wages and free rather than government-constrained
enterprise.
This later became known as laissez-faire capitalism; Smith called it
the system
of perfect liberty.
There is an obvious resemblance between this succession of
changes in the
material basis of production, each bringing its requisite alterations
in the
superstructure of laws and civil institutions, and the Marxian
conception of
history. Though the resemblance is indeed remarkable, there is also a
crucial
difference: in the Marxian scheme the engine of evolution is ultimately
the
struggle between contending classes, whereas in Smith’s
philosophical history
the primal moving agency is “human nature “driven
by the desire for
self-betterment and guided (or misguided) by the faculties of reason.
Society and “the invisible hand”
The theory of historical evolution, although it is perhaps the
binding
conception of The Wealth of Nations, is
subordinated within the work itself
to a detailed description of how the “invisible
hand” actually operates within
the commercial, or final, stage of society. This becomes the focus of
Books I
and II. In which Smith undertakes to elucidate two questions. The first
is how
a system of perfect liberty, operating under the drives and constraints
of
human nature and intelligently designed institutions, will give rise to
an
orderly society. The question, which had already been considerably
elucidated
by earlier writers, required both an explanation of the underlying
orderliness
in the pricing of individual commodities and an explanation of the
“laws” that
regulated the division of the entire “wealth” of
the nation (which Smith saw as
its annual production of goods and services) among the three great
claimant
classes - laborers, landlords, and manufacturers.
This orderliness, as would be expected, was produced by the
interaction of
the two aspects of human nature, its response to its passions and its
susceptibility to reason and sympathy. But whereas The Theory
of Moral
Sentiments had relied mainly on the presence of the
“inner man” to provide
the necessary restraints to private action, in The Wealth of
Nations one
finds an institutional mechanism that acts to reconcile the disruptive
possibilities inherent in a blind obedience to the passions alone. This
protective mechanism is competition, an arrangement by which the
passionate
desire for bettering one’s condition - a “desire
that comes with United States
from the womb, and never leaves United States until we go into the
grave “- is
turned into a socially beneficial agency by pitting one
person’s drive for
self-betterment against another’s.
It is in the unintended outcome of this competitive struggle
for
self-betterment that the invisible hand regulating the economy shows
itself,
for Smith explains how mutual vying forces the prices of commodities
down to
their natural levels, which correspond to their costs of production.
Moreover,
by inducing labour and capital to move from less to more profitable
occupations
or areas, the competitive mechanism constantly restores prices to these
“natural” levels despite short-run aberrations.
Finally, by explaining that
wages and rents and profits (the constituent parts of the costs of
production)
are themselves subject to this natural prices but also revealed an
underlying
orderliness in the distribution of income itself among workers, whose
recompense was their wages; landlords, whose income was their rents;
and
manufacturers, whose reward was their profit.
Economic growth
Smith’s analysis of the market as a self- correcting
mechanism was
impressive. But his purpose was more ambitious than to demonstrate the
self-adjusting properties of the system. Rather, it was to show that,
under the
impetus of the acquisitive drive, the annual flow of national wealth
could be
seen steadily to grow.
Smith’s explanation of economic growth, although not
neatly assembled in one
part of The Wealth of Nations, is quite clear. The
score of it lies in
his emphasis on the division of labour (itself an outgrowth of the
“natural”
propensity to trade) as the source of society’s capacity to
increase its
productivity. The Wealth of Nations opens with a
famous passage
describing a pin factory in which 10 persons, by specialising in
various tasks,
turn out 48,000 pins a day, compared with the few, perhaps only 1, that
each
could have produced alone. But this all-important division of labour
does not
take place unaided. It can occur only after the prior accumulation of
capital
(or stock, as Smith calls it) , which is used to pay the additional
workers and
to buy tools and machines.
The drive for accumulation, however, brings problems. The
manufacturer who
accumulates stock needs more laborers (since labour-saving technology
has no
place in Smith’s scheme) , and in attempting to hire them he
bids up their
wages above their “natural” price. Consequently his
profits begin to fall, and
the process of accumulation is in danger of ceasing. But now there
enters an
ingenious mechanism for continuing the advance. In bidding up the price
of
labour, the manufacturer inadvertently sets into motion a process that
increases the supply of labour, for “the demand for men, like
that for any
other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of
men.” Specifically,
Smith had in mind the effect of higher wages in lessening child
mortality.
Under the influence of a larger labour supply, the wage rise is
moderated and
profits are maintained; the new supply of laborers offers a continuing
opportunity for the manufacturer to introduce a further division of
labour and
thereby add to the system’s growth.
Here then was a “machine” for growth - a
machine that operated with all the
reliability of the Newtonian system with which Smith was quite
familiar. Unlike
the Newtonian system, however, Smith’s growth machine did not
depend for its
operation on the laws of nature alone. Human nature drove it, and human
nature
was a complex rather than a simple force. Thus, the wealth of nations
would
grow only if individuals, through their governments, did not inhibit
this
growth by catering to the pleas for special privilege that would
prevent the
competitive system from exerting its begin effect. Consequently, much
of The
Wealth of Nations, especially Book IV, is a polemic against
the restrictive
measures of the “mercantile system” that favoured
monopolies at home and
abroad. Smith’s system of “natural
liberty” , he is careful to point out,
accords with the best interests of all but will not be put into
practice if
government is entrusted to, or heeds, the “mean rapacity, who
neither are, nor
ought to be, the rulers of mankind.”
The Wealth of Nations is therefore far from
the ideological tract it
is often supposed to be. Although Smith preached laissez-faire (with
important
exceptions) , his argument was directed as much against monopoly as
government;
and although he extolled the social results of the acquisitive process,
he
almost invariably treated the manners and manoeuvres of businessmen
with
contempt. Nor did he see the commercial system itself as wholly
admirable. He
wrote with decrement about the intellectual degradation of the worker
in a
society in which the division of labour has proceeded very far; for by
comparison with the alert intelligence of the husbandman, the
specialized
worker “generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is
possible for a human
being to become” .
In all of this, it is notable that Smith was writing in an age
of
preindustrial capitalism. He seems to have had no real presentiment of
the
gathering Industrial Revolution, harbingers of which were visible in
the great
ironworks only a few miles from Edinburgh. He had nothing to say about
large-scale industrial enterprise, and the few remarks in The
Wealth of
Nations concerning the future of joint-stock companies
(corporations) are
disparaging. Finally, one should bear in mind, that, if growth is the
great
theme of The Wealth of Nations, it is not unending
growth. Here and
there in the treatise are glimpsed at a secularly declining rate of
profit; and
Smith mentions as well the prospects that when the system eventually
accumulates its “full complement of riches” all the
pin factories, so to speak,
whose output could be absorbed - economic decline would begin, ending
in an
impoverished stagnation.
The Wealth of Nations was received with
admiration by Smith’s wide
circle of friends and admires, although it was by no means an immediate
popular
success. The work finished, Smith went into semiretirement. The year
following
its publication he was appointed commissioner both of customs and of
salt
duties for Scotland, posts that brought him £600 a year.
He thereupon
informed his former charge that he no longer required his pension, to
which
Buccleuch replied that his sense of honour would never allow him to
stop paying
it. Smith was therefore quite well off in the final years of his life,
which
were spent mainly in Edinburgh with occasional trips to London or
Glasgow
(which appointed him a rector of the university) . The years passed
quietly,
with several revisions of both major books but with no further
publications. On
July 17,1790, at the age of 67, full of honours and recognition, Smith
died; he
was buried in the churchyard at Canongate with a simple monument
stating that
Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, was
buried there.
Beyond the few facts of his life, which can be embroidered
only in detail,
exasperatingly little is known about the man. Smith never married, and
almost
nothing is known of his personal side. Moreover, it was the custom of
his time
to destroy rather than to preserve the private files if illustrious
men, with
the unhappy result that much of Smith’s unfinished work, as
well as his
personal papers, was destroyed (some as late as 1942) . Only one
portrait of
Smith survives, a profile medallion by Tassie; it gives a glimpse of
the older
man with his somewhat heavy-lidded eyes, aquiline nose, and a hint of
protrusive lower lip. “I am a beau in nothing but my
books,” Smith once told a
friend to whom he was showing his library of some 3,000 volumes.
From various accounts, he was also a man of many
peculiarities, which
included a stumbling manner of speech (until he had warmed to his
subject) , a
gait described as “vermicular” / and above all an
extraordinary and even comic
absence of mind. On the other hand, contemporaries wrote of a smile of
“inexpressive benignity,” and of his political tact
and dispatch in managing
the sometimes acerbic business of the Glasgow faculty.
Certainly he enjoyed a high measure of contemporary fame; even
in his early
days at Glasgow his reputation attracted students from nations as
distant as
Russia, and his later years were crowned not only with expression of
admiration
from many European thinkers but by a growing recognition among British
governing circles that his work provided a rationale of inestimable
importance
for practical economic policy.
Over the years, Smith’s lustre as a social
philosopher has escaped much of
the weathering that has affected the reputations of other first-rate
political
economists. Although he was writing for his generation, the breadth of
his
knowledge/ the cutting edge of his generalization, the boldness of his
vision,
have never ceased to attract the admiration of all social scientists,
and in
particular economists. Couched in the spacious, cadenced prose of his
period,
rich in imagery and crowded with life, The Wealth of Nations
projects a
sanguine but never sentimental image of society. Never so finely
analytic as
David Ricardo nor so stern and profound as Karl Marx, Smith is the very
epitome
of the Enlightenment: hopeful but realistic, speculative but practical,
always
respectful of the classical past but ultimately dedicated to the great
discovery of his age - progress.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
John Rae. “Life of Adam Smith” 1985
William Scott. “Adam Smith as Student and
Professor” 1987
Andrew S. Skinner. “Essays on Adam Smith”
1988
Не подходит? Заказать реферат нашим авторам? Вы также можете добавить свой реферат
Реферат прочитали 612 чел.