This is from a footnote in Wilberforce's Correspondence, presumably added by the editors (his sons I believe). The second, more amusing part of the anecdote (starting with "one day") is usually attributed to Sir Walter Scott, who turns it into a satirical moral on how two great teachers of philosophy engage each other.
Now that I have hooked you with such fine biography: biographers often mention that in the last few years of his life Smith was welcomed by William Pitt the Younger and his fellow politicians and much admired by them. This tends to be presented in the context of discussing how Smith's views on free trade became politically fashionable in London (see, e.g., N. Philipson's Adam Smith, p. 267-8). No surprise there.
But the presence of Wilberforce should alert us to another shared interest: Pitt and, especially, Wilberforce (an evangelical Christian) were abolitionists--a cause close to Smith's heart. [In doing a little bit of research for this post I noticed that Ross, who draws on the letter by Wilberforce to which the anecdote above is attached as a footnote, explicitly denies there is an anti-slavery connection between Wilberforce and Smith.] Even the host, Dundas, who is often criticized for his later quite visible opposition to abolition, ensured the passage of that the crucial vote that put parliament on an abolitionist course on record. So, during Smith's life, Dundas could well have been thought of as sympathetic to the cause of abolition.
I started reflecting on the Wilberforce-Smith connection because Abe Stone goaded me into re-read Thoreau's Walden. Thoreau writes, "None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty." One might think that Thoreau styles himself in contrast to Smith -- the theorist of impartial or wise spectatorship par excellence! -- as the true moral judge of our society. (After receiving a generous life-time pension for tutoring a Duke, Smith also accepted a very well compensated job as commissioner of customs toward the end of the life; that is when he met Pitt, Wilberforce, et. all.) But things are not so simple because we have it on the testimony of Dugald Stewart that Smith gave away much of his income to charity. [On the road to virtue in Smith, see here.]
Now one might also think that Thoreau is hostile to Adam Smith because of this passage:
"if I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life;...Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably."But notice that the criticism is really directed at the way Smith is taught to the poor man's son--namely in too narrowly specialized a spirit. (One might be tempted to say that in the education of the ambitious poor in the new American republic, Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments is ignored in favor of Wealth of Nations, but this would be also misleading.) In light of the quote above (on the voluntary poverty of the wise observer), Thoreau's position entails, in fact, that the poor man's son's ambition (and his father's!) is misdirected entirely (he studies economics in order to grow wealthy) but he will neither become moral (for that he should choose to remain in poverty) nor wise in the economy of living (philosophy). To put this in Smithian terms: the unintended, but foreseeable consequences of studying economics by the working poor are neither moral nor prudent (assuming that his father's debt are not desired ends).
As an important aside, Thoreau leaves it entirely unclear here if the wealthy man's son (e.g., a Wilberforce!) may not be corrupted by such study. In particular, Thoreau allows that a poor man can grow wealthy; such a man "is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels."
Of course, the idea that Thoreau is hostile to Smith is not so far-fetched because Walden is organized around an elaborate experiment (a man goes to a lake, builds himself a solid and cheap house, helps runaway slaves, reads a lot, becomes an eye-sore to neighbors concerned about property values, and writes the greatest tract for anarchy and the noblest and most self-righteous elements of 1960s legacy, etc) that seems meant to undercut the rousing conclusion to the opening chapter of Smith's Wealth of Nations: "and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages." In this rhetorically charged passage Smith makes three surprisingly related points: (i) the famous claim (with a trope originating in Locke, I think, and given wide currency by Mandeville) that in societies with a division of labor the working and prudent poor are sometimes much better off than the most powerful members of non commercial societies; (ii) that even under still quasi-feudal system of eighteenth century Britain the division of labor actually promotes relative income equality; (iii) that slavery (i.e., absolute mastery) is very inefficient.
Thoreau is familiar with the Smithian argument:
"But, answers one, by merely paying this tax [i.e., house-rent--ES], the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the savage's...If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man—and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages—it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly."There is a lot to say about all the various, brilliant moves in political economy by Thoreau in response to Smith; they anticipate some of the most profound economic criticisms of commercial societies. (Thoreau redefines the notion of cost; focuses on abject poverty under division of labor; etc.) Here I want to focus on five aspects that emphasize the commonalities between Smith and Thoreau. First, in the passage Thoreau insists that in commercial society only the wise genuinely improve their advantages. There is a sense in which Smith agrees. I quote from a long set-piece inThe Theory of Moral Sentiments:
"The poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, when he begins to look around him, admires the condition of the rich...The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it....It is this deception which which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life." [I have treated this passage at length here and here.]
So, first, Thoreau and Smith agree that the too ambitious poor man's son is deluded in his ambition, and "sacrifices a real tranquility that is at all times in his power." But Smith emphasizes an unintended, potentially beneficial consequence of such ambition: the growth of the sciences (for Smith this includes philosophy) and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life. Second, I believe this is exactly the sense in which Thoreau means "only the wise improve their advantages." One might think that Thoreau disparages the arts & sciences, but this is not so ("Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour")--he disparages the way they are taught at the expense of the art of living; and he thinks the arts are wasted on the poor when they are treated as status symbols, embellishment of class attainment.
For all of Thoreau's apparent criticism of Smith, Walden has, of course, a powerful anti-slavery message. (Here is one of my favorite bits of philosophic prophecy: "But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these [items for the conveniences in life--ES], and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.") Part of the force of Thoreau's position is that he takes a classic Smithian stance ("Every tax...is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty. It denotes that he is subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master."), and pushes it to its logical conclusion: "I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its senate-house." For Thoreau the tax can only be a badge of liberty if the state recognizes the liberty of all individuals. And this is the third agreement.
But in order to capture the harm that comes from being enthralled to version of the Protestant work ethic in consumer society and with it the far worse sense of spiritual deprivation, Thoreau also extends the notion of slavery. (He does this in a very dangerous, even jarring bit of rhetoric: "we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.") Capitalism causes spiritual deprivation and destroys our imagination. But, fourth, this, too, has solid Smithian roots:
In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.
Smith's response to this torpor is to promote the "education of the common people." Thoreau probably does not disagree, but (echoing Plato) he notes that in a slavery-corrupted (and economic elites-protecting [he is very keen in exposing the anti-free-trade policies of Congress]) American democracy, "legislators...contemplate no essential reform in the existing government." In particular, "they serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it." So, for Thoreau in a democracy we seem trapped between uneducated voters and devilish legislators--even if he advocated "better government" as the solution he offers no institutional-reformist pathway to the promised land.
And, here, we come to our conclusion. A few days ago, I quoted Thoreau's "What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate." The sentence is followed by his solution to the problem of uneducated voters and devil-serving legislators (and another dangerously worded passage): What's needed is "Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination—what Wilberforce is there to bring that about?" (it is dangerous because it flirts with a racially charged distinction between dark-skinned "fancy and imagination" vs a perhaps lighter-toned "reason," but he is also explicit that all men have an "innate faculty of reason.") So, on Thoreau's account we must create the conditions for that (spiritual?) legislator who promotes the circumstances such that we root out the inner slavery that is corrosive to our society. This cannot be achieved, at first, by political action, but it can be achieved by the right kind of education, "youths better learn to live... by...trying the experiment of living." This is a directed experiment. In Smithian terms: ""The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects."
Wilberforce's education was guided by his Aunt Hannah, Joseph Milner, and Isaac Milner, who directed his devoted self-study of the Bible and, for all his flaws, let his conscience speak on the great moral question of his day. Thoreau approves: the "New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?" If one Wilberforce is possible, then another is, too.
{Some day, I return to this story and explore how Hume fits into this narrative.}
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