Knud Haakonssen's Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith has been eagerly awaited for some time so it is a pleasure to see it in print at last. Comprising 13 essays plus an Introduction by Haakonssen the volume aims to provide a multidisciplinary overview of Smith's range of interests. This is no easy task. Although Smith is known to many now simply as “the father of economics” he was in fact a polymathic figure in what has come to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment, with a prodigious range of interests including: history of the sciences, particularly astronomy; history of language; philosophy including history of philosophy and moral philosophy; theory of mind and moral psychology; rhetoric and belles lettres; jurisprudence; history of law, government and social change; and, of course, economics. The context of that period of European letters is also extremely rich so that understanding the particular matrix of intellectual influences to which Smith was responding also raises challenges for the disciplinary specialization of the modern academy. Furthermore, assessing Smith's reception and his influence over the years needs to take account of the fact that his “oeuvre” has filtered down to us incomplete. Although Smith's modern reputation derives largely from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1st edn. 1776) – as his depiction on the UK £20 note introduced in 2007 indicates – in his own time Smith's published reputation stemmed initially from The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1st edn. 1759), yet these were the only volumes published during his lifetime. Some smaller pieces were published in his lifetime or sanctioned for publication after his death, but much of his life's work was consigned to flames shortly before he died. Patching together Smith's oeuvre has thus relied on later discoveries of student notes taken of his lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, and on jurisprudence and the history of law and government.
This raises a question of what is the particular stance of this volume on Smith. We might have expected the editor's Introduction to provide some guidance, alerting the reader to the debates engaged in by contributors and providing shape to the contours of the volume. Instead, what is given as the Introduction is largely taken verbatim from Haakonssen's Introduction to a student edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (2002), in which he sets out his own view of Smith's work. There is a little reshuffling of the order of sections, but the two introductions are virtually identical except for two sentences added at its start, the addition of a paragraph on language, and a final section on the history of civil society and political economy. Although the Introduction is impressive as a summary of Haakonssen's viewpoint, an implication of this arrangement is that references to the contributors' chapters that follow are inserted parenthetically (simply as chapter numbers, without title or author name) into a discourse written for another occasion. The reference to the editor's concluding chapter, authored jointly with Donald Winch, is the only one referred to substantively. There is thus no discussion of the contributors' chapters that follow, no indication of how they might relate to existing debates, and no attempt to register important points of agreement or disagreement, unresolved or contentious issues of interpretation, or points that merit further discussion. This leaves as somewhat opaque the overall project of the volume, an opacity that is not relieved by the scant and dated referencing of Haakonssen's Introduction, a characteristic of many of the chapters that follow, thus giving an impression of a received orthodoxy in Smith scholarship with little scope for different interpretations. The scant referencing is only partly relieved by the bibliography provided at the back of the volume. Furthermore it is a curious feature of the volume that there is little correlation between the authors listed in the bibliography and the contributors to the volume, revealing that, although a few of the contributors are Smith scholars of distinction, most are not Smith specialists.
In the absence of editorial guidance the reader must shift for herself in making sense of the Companion. If we start with the Introduction, we might note that it has the title added to it of “The Coherence of Smith's Thought”. Haakonssen notes in passing that “the overall coherence of his [Smith's] work remains a controversial matter of reconstruction” (p. 4), yet no indication is given as to why this is so, what the issues might be, or how Haakonssen's own reconstruction compares with others. The view that Haakonssen presents here is of Smith as a “natural historian of humanity” for whom “morality” is a “matter of fact about the human species' history” rather than a directly normative issue (p. 5). Smith is thus a kind of historical anthropologist of human beliefs and behaviours, such that it is his historical study of humanity that binds together the diverse elements of his oeuvre.
This historicized interpretation of Smith's oeuvre is reflected in a number of the contributions, although this itself raises some questions concerning Smith's conception of “history” and the precise sense in which his natural history of humanity is “history”. In ‘Adam Smith, Belletrist’, Mark Salber Phillips emphasizes the importance of the genre of historical writing in Smith's lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, and he identifies Smith's conception of historical writing as a bare narration of the facts in contrast to oratory and didactic writing. Phillips notes that this classical stance on historical writing does not sit entirely happily with what is identified as Smith's sentimentalist aesthetic in writing, nor with Smith's pioneering of new forms of social enquiry (p. 73). This suggests, although Phillips doesn't make the point, that commentators should pause before applying the categories Smith employed in his rhetoric lectures to his published writings. J. G. A. Pocock, the most distinguished of the historians contributing to the volume, offers some reflections in “Adam Smith and History” on the distinction between “conjectural history” (or “natural history”), which was imputed to Smith by John Millar and Dugald Stewart, and “civil history” as the “art of presenting the contingent in narrative form” (p. 276); and he concludes that Smith “wrote history to isolate and illustrate general principles” (p. 287). He cites Gibbon in this context as one whose praise of the Wealth of Nations as a “science” and a “system” did not lead him to call Smith a “historian” (p. 286). Unfortunately other contributors don't reflect on this judgment. Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen in “Adam Smith's Economics” describe the Wealth of Nations as “in a profound sense a work of history”. Furthermore, they urge, “historical explanation was also, and above all, the most important way to understand economic life” (p. 361). Here the sense of the analytic “system” of the Wealth of Nations, which has traditionally been admired and debated by economists, and which has been seen as motivating the historical aspects of the work (in the sense perhaps indicated by Pocock), is eclipsed by a kind of economic sociology construed historically. And when Rothschild and Sen do briefly consider Smith's “economics” they do so ahistorically since, according to their account, recognition of the core of Smith's economics had to await late twentieth-century evolutionary game theory, endogenous growth theory and Sen's work on capabilities (pp. 357–60).
Haakonssen's interpretation amounts to a particular kind of historicism, however, since the overarching intellectual framework within which the coherence of Smith's works can be located is held to be a “science of human nature” (p. 4) according to which historical explanation of human behaviour is concerned with empirical findings rather than normative commitments. What is “universal” in morality is thus taken to be no more than a question of “empirically observable generality” (p. 4) so that Smith's moral philosophy is not a directly normative enterprise but an historically explanatory one. This interpretation, elaborated in the concluding essay, “The Legacy of Adam Smith”, co-authored with Donald Winch, is in fact something of a challenge to what is probably the mainstream view of Smith's work amongst philosophers and philosophically inclined scholars according to which its overarching intellectual framework is provided by a broad conception of moral philosophy that is both directly normative and an exercise in a socially based moral psychology. Although Alexander Broadie, in “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator”, seems to concur with Haakonssen and Winch in so far as he emphasizes Smith's naturalism and sees the Moral Sentiments as an example of a Humean experimental method of reasoning, other contributors adopt a normative interpretation. For example, Charles Griswold, in “Imagination: Morals, Science, and Arts”, argues that the impartial spectator has “normative force” and is “constitutive of the moral outlook” because it defines the moral point of view (p. 39); Pratap Bhanu Mehta, in “Self-Interest and Other Interests”, attempts to unpick the “complex moral valences of self-interest” (p. 249) and he too construes the impartial spectator normatively (pp. 259–60); and Robert Shaver, in “Virtues, Utility, and Rules”, suggests that Smith's emphasis on character, duty and context provides a means of answering to some of the motivations underlying the trio of virtue ethics, Kantian ethics and particularism.
Haakonssen and Winch's response to such arguments is that according to Smith people tend to “objectivize” their moral sentiments such that it is these objectivizations that then pass for universal moral categories. Thus once we have an historical account of the development of these moral concepts, they urge, there is nothing further to say about them “philosophically” since what Smith was offering was strictly “an empirical science of human nature”, one that was exemplified in Smith's historical work on natural jurisprudence (pp. 385–6, 388–90). It is thus perhaps no accident that there is no “disciplinary” essay on Adam Smith and philosophy. Indeed, Charles Griswold is the only contributor who is both a leading Smith scholar and a philosopher, and there is no entry from a philosopher who has engaged professionally with Smith's work. Thus both of the areas that might be of particular interest to readers of this Journal – economics and philosophy – are given short shrift in this volume.
Haakonssen and Winch's interpretation goes against the many occasions where Smith does apparently engage in normative issues. For example, his question “Wherein does virtue consist?”, his animadversions against infanticide and slavery, his distinction between seeking praise and aspiring to praiseworthiness, and his delineation of the “wise and virtuous man”, need to be drained of normative import before Haakonssen and Winch's interpretation could be made plausible. And further interpretative problems remain.
First, it is hard to know how to reconcile their statement, that the thesis that the non-normativity of Smith's project is “particularly striking in Smith's extension of his moral philosophy into jurisprudence and politics” (p. 388), with Haakonssen's earlier work on Smith's jurisprudence (much cited by contributors to the volume) which defends the direct normativity of Smith's natural jurisprudence. In The Science of the Legislator (1981) Haakonssen argues for the “normative discipline of natural jurisprudence” such that natural justice is “an ideal standard which is to be searched for” (pp. 181, 149). Indeed, in David Lieberman's essay, “Adam Smith on Justice, Rights, and Law”, which relies almost exclusively on the earlier work of Haakonssen and Winch, it is accepted without question that Smith's natural jurisprudence had “an explicitly normative and universalistic orientation” (p. 224; also 228–9). He argues that Smith's legal history in his lectures on jurisprudence, which provided the bedrock for the later Wealth of Nations, presupposed the “moral reality of natural justice itself” (p. 231) so that actual systems of positive law are to be judged according to their congruence with the “rules of natural justice” (p. 242). Douglas Long, in “Adam Smith's Politics”, also takes it that Haakonssen had earlier argued that natural justice and equity are “independent of civil society” (pp. 304–5), although he somewhat distances himself from this position. He seeks to argue that Smith sought “to moralize politics and to politicize morality” (p. 312).
Second, there are unaddressed philosophical issues relating to “science” and “causality”. Haakonssen and Winch make much of the causal processes that form the explanatory core of Smith's historicism. For example, they argue that for Smith: “Morality is a feature of the world that has to be explained causally in exactly the same way as any other part of human nature and of nature in general. . . . once we have an account of the origin and function of these moral concepts [i.e. moral obligation, rightness and goodness] – their causes and effects – there is nothing more to say about them in philosophical or ‘scientific’ terms” (p. 385). But “causality” itself is much debated by philosophers and scientists, and was so in the eighteenth century when Smith was writing. Haakonssen and Winch make the very strong claim not only that any part of human nature is to be explained causally in the same way as any part of nature, but also that “morality” as a feature of the world is to be explained causally in exactly the same way too. This is a hugely ambitious, and, as far as I can see, entirely unsupported, metaphysical claim.
The figure of David Hume lurks in the background here, as elsewhere. In the Introduction Haakonssen remarks that “Like his close friend and mentor, David Hume, Smith saw moral philosophy as central to a new science of human nature” (p. 4). Hume looms large in many entries; or rather Hume is a shadowy background persona, ostensibly providing Smith with barely articulated epistemological or metaphysical assumptions but also equipping the modern scholar with a benchmark for assessing Smith's philosophical originality. But modern philosophers are not in agreement over Hume's philosophy, so to explicate Smith's position in terms of Hume's is merely to defer philosophical debate by one stage. And even if Smith did sign up to Hume's “science of man” in some sense – and this needs to be argued for – this does not itself imply that he also signed up to Hume's position on causality, whatsoever that might be thought to be. Hume's reconciling project on causality, and on “necessity” and “liberty”, is still being debated by philosophers; but there's no doubt that Hume included the explanation of human action along with the explanation of physical events as falling under the same rubric of his conception of “causality”. Are we to infer that Smith also accepted Hume's brand of compatibilism?
Furthermore, howsoever Hume's influence is construed, interpretation of Smith's account of “science” is incomplete without acknowledgement of his emphasis on the role of the imagination. (Neil de Marchi, in “Smith on Ingenuity, Pleasure, and the Imitative Arts”, argues that Smith was looking for a way to place the arts on an equal footing with productive labour.) Considerable debate has been generated as to whether Smith showed evidence of having abandoned realist principles in his “History of Astronomy”, a view that Haakonssen and Winch seem to accept (p. 386) as congruent with his acceptance of moral or cultural relativism, although it is not clear how this relates to their interpretation of Smith's empirical science of human nature. Griswold, however, emphasizes Hume's influence on Smith's argument concerning the unifying power of the imagination in making the events of the world intelligible to us. According to Griswold, Hume argues that one of the ways in which the imagination unifies the world for us is by attributing relations of cause and effect to events, so that “causality” itself is an “illusion of the imagination” (pp. 53–4). Christopher J. Berry, in “Smith and Science”, seems to construe both Hume and Smith as causal realists. According to Berry, being under the influence of Hume and the budding scientificity of the Enlightenment, Smith adopts the view that social facts and physical facts are both to be explained scientifically by “tracing the chain of causes and effects” (p. 127). This difference in interpretation also has implications for the understanding of human action. Griswold argues that, although Smith doesn't explicitly connect morality with “autonomy”, Smith's theory nonetheless “insists on a place for moral agency or self-determination” (p. 41). This interpretation also leads to some differences on Smith's theory of mind with Marcel Dascal who, in “Adam Smith's Theory of Language”, argues that Smith on the whole remained faithful to “the traditional Cartesian and Lockean” account of the independence of mind even from language (p. 104). By contrast with Griswold's emphasis on self-determination, Berry seeks to argue that Smith's commitment to causal explanation leads him to what he (Berry) takes to be a Humean form of soft determinism. Relying on Hume's “Of National Characters”, rather than the Treatise or first Enquiry, he argues that for Smith moral causes operate through “habituation or socialisation”: “These are still causes and are still deterministic but, unlike the hard determinism of physical causation, they can accommodate change or variation” (p. 130; original emphasis). Haakonssen and Winch's emphasis on contingency suggests that they would be reluctant to accept any form of determinism, even such “soft determinism”, but they leave unaddressed how they theorize a causality that is common to nature, human nature, and “morality”.
As this brief consideration of the volume suggests, there is much that is stimulating in this Companion to Adam Smith, although such threads of debate aren't signalled in the Introduction or by the contributors so that readers will need to do their work of interpretative reconstruction unassisted. The general lack of engagement with wider debates will make it hard for newcomers to Adam Smith to find their way in making critical sense of the volume or of the current state of debate on Adam Smith. This suggests that in spite of much that is of interest the Companion falls short of being an “up-to-date examination of all aspects of Smith's thought” (as the back cover claims). Moreover, the volume fails to convey any sense of the explosion of interest in Adam Smith's works in the recent period or (apart from some brief remarks in the concluding essay) the political and intellectual histories associated with the various recoveries and reconstructions of Smith's thought, including those presented in this volume. This suggests that readers will be less well-equipped to decide upon the significance – including both the challenges and the internal tensions – of Smith's oeuvre than they might otherwise have been. We might well ponder the opportunity cost of this.
