Nicholas Phillipson’s new biography, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, is a pleasure to read, and it provides us with a clear and thorough account of Smith’s life. It also presents a rich and lively picture of both the social and the intellectual context in which Smith worked, describing the Glasgow and Edinburgh of his day in vivid detail and presenting in depth the ideas of Mandeville, Hutcheson, Montesqueiu, Rousseau, Lord Kames, and David Hume and their influence on Smith. These are great virtues, and together with the accessibility and elegance of Phillipson’s writing, they will make this volume the definitive introduction to Smith’s life and thought for decades to come.

It is less clear what impact the book will have on scholarly discussion of Smith. Both from a historical and from a philosophical point of view, the book is somewhat disappointing. As a work of history, it essentially synthesizes what is already known about Smith, rather than adding to that knowledge, and as an analysis of Smith’s ideas, it presents them in an odd and in some ways misleading framework.

The historical limitations of the book may not be Phillipson’s fault. It is a frustration to many scholars that Smith, for all his fame, remains an enigmatic figure to this day. We are unsure of his political sympathies; we do not know exactly what he thought about religion (some assume he was an atheist; others, a Stoic theist; still others, a Christian); we do not know why he never married. As Phillipson remarks in his prologue, we have few sources on Smith’s life other than his published writings. Smith kept no diary and was not much of a letter writer; he also had almost all of his unpublished work burned just before he died.

Nevertheless, an enterprising historian might scour every scrap of paper written by Smith’s friends and acquaintances to reconstruct the more puzzling aspects of the man from indirect evidence. Phillipson does make use of descriptions of Smith in the memoirs of James Boswell and Walter Scott, for instance (247, 260). But far too much of his book relies solely on the texts and letters that have already been poured over by countless scholars, together with a surprising amount of speculation: Phillipson frequently says Smith “could have” read or done this or “must have” read or done that (e.g., 29, 61, 63, 87, 244, 256), without saying much about why these possibilities seem plausible to him.

The philosophical limitations of the book are rather different; they certainly do not reflect an excess of scholarly caution. On the contrary, Phillipson advances a bold hypothesis about Smith’s work: that it derives throughout from a concern with human “need.” For Smith, says Phillipson, “earthly needs were the parents of morality and virtue” (41). He tells us that a “needs-driven view of the making of the human mind” runs through Smith’s reflections on morality and religion as well as his political economy (280) and that Smith’s philosophy as a whole “is the work of a … man who set out to reflect on a simple, apparently unremarkable characteristic of human nature—our desire, when all things are equal, to improve our own lot, that of our families and that of the civil society to which we belong” (276).

There are several reasons to question this reading. First, Smith himself never said that morality arises out of our needs. Indeed, he barely used the word “need” at all in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), and on one of the few occasions when he did use it, it was as a rebuttal to those who try to “deduce all our sentiments from … self-love” and therefore suppose that human sympathy arises out of the need we have for the assistance of others; sympathy, Smith insists, cannot possibly be derived from our needs (TMS I.i.2.1).

Second, Smith was at pains to tell us that it is a distortion of our moral sentiments to seek to better ourselves primarily by way of an increase in material goods. There are two paths to self-improvement, he said: “the road to virtue and that to fortune.” This point is reasonably clear even in the first edition of TMS, but Smith added chapters in the final edition to drive it home. So even when he said in Wealth of Nations (WN) that “an augmentation of fortune is the means by which the greater part of men propose and wish to better their condition” (II.iii.28), we need to bear in mind that he thought there was another and superior way of bettering ourselves.

In this light, it is hard to see how Phillipson could read TMS as showing how morality arises out of our needs or our interest in material improvement. Perhaps by “need” Phillipson does not mean material need. His claim that the impartial spectator arises in response to the pressure of “moral need” allows us to suppose that he uses the word “need” rather broadly. So he might acknowledge that we “need” sociability or need to be praiseworthy. This would be much closer to what Smith said in TMS. But then the claim that our beliefs and practices arise out of our needs will become a mere tautology: anything we take seriously will be such that we can say we “need” to do it.

Alternatively, we could read Smith’s work in exactly the opposite direction from the one Phillipson chooses. Smith, we may say, is concerned in TMS with a central and deep moral problem: how to hold ourselves together as independent entities—to have integrity—while at the same time adjusting ourselves to the normative expectations of our societies. In the face of Mandeville’s cynical and Rousseau’s lamenting proclamations that we develop simulacra of virtues in order to gain the approval of others, in the face of Hume’s dissolution of the self into a constantly changing play of attitudes and opinions imbibed by sympathy from those around it, Smith presents an account of an “impartial spectator” within us that simultaneously reflects and corrects social opinion. Smith develops, that is, the first modern view to attempt to reconcile the social constitution of the self with something recognizably like individual autonomy. He then goes on, in WN, to investigate not just the way societies have improved their stock of material goods but the conditions that allow societies to make room for an increase in individual liberty (III.iv.4). Thus, his work can be read as concerned throughout with the balance between sociability and individual freedom, not with our desire for material goods.

One irony about this reading is that I learned it in good part from Nicholas Phillipson—in his previous lectures and essays. Some of this material reappears in the chapter on TMS, but it is less clear here that Smith was rejecting the views of Mandeville and Rousseau. I do not know why Phillipson presents a less nuanced account of Smith in this book than in his earlier work. Perhaps his purpose here is to offer an accessible introduction to Smith for the wider public. If so, he has succeeded. But those of us looking for what one of the great intellectual historians of our day thinks Adam Smith believed are bound to be a bit disappointed.