By 1790, ill health had set in while Smith was working to produce a final revised edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Although he managed this task, he did not manage to complete unfinished books on jurisprudence and on the arts and asked his executors, the scientist Joseph Black (1728–99) and the geologist James Hutton (1726–97), to help him destroy his papers. On his death, the bulk of Smith’s estate passed to David Douglas, later Lord Reston, an influential judge. Smith left small bequests to his friends and gave significant amounts to charitable causes. All of the evidence we have of his character is that he was a modest and unassuming man who was a loyal friend. Beyond that he seems to have been a very private man who sought to avoid public controversy. Indeed, the care with which he revised his two great books suggests that he wanted them, rather than any details of his personal life, to stand as his reputation to posterity.2
The Scottish Enlightenment
While the details of Smith’s life give us some insight into the connection between his biography and the content of his ideas, we are limited in what we can build upon this as he was a poor correspondent and ultimately a very private man. We actually gain considerably more insight by examining the intellectual climate in which he lived, the so-called ‘Scottish Enlightenment’.3
The Scottish Enlightenment was an outpouring of intellectual achievement that occurred during the middle years of the eighteenth century (roughly 1740–90). It forms a subset of the wider phenomenon of the European Enlightenment. The ‘Century of Light’ or ‘Age of Reason’ was a time when many of the features of the modern world came into focus. Ideas of science, academic freedom, progress, and civil liberty became increasingly popular amongst a newly emerging class of public intellectuals. The idea that the darkness of superstition was being replaced by science and reason as part of a movement of cosmopolitan intellectuals, ‘daring to know’, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) would later describe it, and refusing to accept truths set down by authority, has become central to understanding the intellectual history of the eighteenth century. This idea of thinking for oneself as enlightenment takes a very particular form in Scotland.
At first glance, eighteenth-century Scotland might seem a surprising place for a world-changing flood of science and philosophy. At the time, many considered the country to be a poor, isolated, and war-ridden backwater, more notable for its warring clans, religious fanatics, and wild landscapes than for intellectual achievement. But a combination of historical circumstances, together with a generation of remarkably talented men (and they were all men – it is worth observing that the Scottish Enlightenment, unlike the French Enlightenment, was a remarkably masculine movement), put Scotland at the forefront of the Enlightenment. Some have conjectured that it was precisely a sense of shame at the country’s supposed backwardness that proved to be the spur for this group to pursue Enlightenment in its particular Scottish form.
The history of the time also gives us good reason to understand why the emerging Scottish middle class were so attracted to the idea of Enlightenment. Seventeenth-century Scotland had been torn apart by a series of civil and religious wars. The Church of Scotland (the Kirk) had developed a particularly rigorous form of Presbyterian Calvinism that stressed strict discipline and punished heresy with excommunication and even, in the infamous case of the student Thomas Aikenhead in 1697, with execution. Beyond the religious and political situation, things were not much better. A series of famines had ravaged the country in the 1690s and the failed attempt to found a colony in Central America had virtually bankrupted Scotland’s leading families by 1702. In this setting, the fraught negotiations for the Union of Parliaments in the early years of the century, in which Smith’s father played a minor supporting role, represent the emergence of a social grouping who saw themselves as forward thinking and modernizing.
As we noted above, the Union of Parliaments with England in 1707 and the defeat of the final Jacobite rebellion in 1745–6, ushered in a long period of relative civil and political security as part of the new Great Britain. This stability came with access to new markets in England and its American colonies and this led in turn to unprecedented economic growth in the second half of the century. Scotland became a place of development and growth. Industries such as linen, glass, and tobacco boomed. Glasgow became the centre of the global tobacco trade as the short journey times to Virginia gave it a comparative edge over other British ports. Tobacco ‘Lords’ such as William Cunninghame (1731–99), Alexander Spiers (1714–82), and John Glassford (1715–83) began to diversify and develop other industries in the city. The growth of Glasgow’s economy at this time saw the beginnings of industrialization and the concomitant development of a particularly advanced banking system to encourage the circulation of capital for investment in new industries. The small city that Smith knew as a student was subject to growing urbanization, with its population growing from 13,000 in 1707 to 77,000 in 1801, to over 200,000 by the end of the nineteenth century.
Stable government and economic growth allowed the already fertile soil of native Scottish institutions to thrive. This was particularly true of the school and university systems. Scotland had one of the most developed education systems of its time. During the Reformation, the spread of Calvinism, with its focus on reading the Bible, encouraged a desire for literacy and led to the creation of an extensive network of Burgh schools. Scotland was also well served for higher education, with its five universities outnumbering England’s two. This meant that the structures were in place for a group of young men to take advantage of this education system and launch themselves on professional careers in the universities, the law, and the church. And that, indeed, is precisely what did happen. A new class of public intellectuals, a gentleman class, arose and transformed the nature of Scottish society over the course of the century.
Smith was at the centre of this milieu. He saw the changes in Scotland, and had a first-hand view of the investment and development in Glasgow. He socialized with many of the merchants and was able to draw on this experience in his economic thinking. The changes that he saw at this time were generally regarded as a good thing: as an example of that most central of Scottish Enlightenment concerns, ‘improvement’. In many respects, this was a self-conscious movement. The Enlightenment belief in science and progress took on a very practical and applied meaning in Scotland. The lessons of science were to be heeded and deliberately applied to improve the state of the country. Some of these, such as the development of scientific agriculture and the reform of landholding, were uncontroversial, while others had a darker side, including the suppression of Highland dress and language.
The upheaval of the Jacobite rebellions convinced the new establishment of the need to civilize Scotland’s northern fringe. The military suppression of the clans was followed by attempts to encourage development in the Highlands through agricultural reform and by opening up the area with new roads and the imposition of a uniform system of justice. The proceeds of the estates confiscated from the Jacobite leaders were used to fund these investments and to encourage a series of planned villages which sought to offer employment to the Highlanders. Towns such as Ullapool and villages like Luss provided modern homes and the promise of employment. The old clan chiefs lost their civil and political power and the century saw movements of people from the Highlands to the towns and cities and to the colonies.
Scotland saw enormous social change in the eighteenth century, and in the circumstances of a rapidly changing country it is little surprise that its intellectual class, the so-called ‘literati’, became preoccupied with an attempt to understand social and historical change. The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment gathered in the cities could see the beginnings of urban commercial society and modern agriculture in the Lowlands, but they could also look north to the Highlands and see a much older form of clan-based subsistence economy. The difference fascinated them and posed the question of how the Highlands might be ‘improved’. If we look at Smith’s writings, the Wealth of Nations in particular is filled with Scottish examples. It is no surprise that Smith was interested in society