[I start with intellectual autobiography because, perhaps, my journey may serve as a warning to students who let the secondary sources do their thinking while reading primary sources.--ES]
One of the dogmas that I encountered and accepted uncritically when I started doing scholarship on eighteenth-century figures is that they were 'Newtonian.' This conceit wrecked my dissertation (on David Hume and Adam Smith) because I had to conclude that Hume either was an ignoramus or dishonest.
Later, by teaching Berkeley to very inquisitive Wesleyan undergraduates, I realized that very smart philosophers could be informed critics of Newton, and contest the authority of natural philosophy (this paper is the finding of my scholarly voice, which resulted in a more ambitious project.) I returned to Hume and started to see the un-Newtonian and anti-Newtonian aspects. In the wake of my more recent scholarship on Spinoza, I started to discern a whole eighteenth century debate over the application of mathematics to human affairs.
But Adam Smith was not touched by my revisionism. I continued to stand by my reading of the Wealth of Nations, and to see in Smith a very sophisticated Kuhnian-naturalistic defense of the Newtonian paradigm. After all, it was Smith's student, the great jurist-sociologist John Millar, who tagged Smith as the Newton of civil society. [Millar pairs Smith with Montesquieu, presumably to keep Hume out of the picture.]
Now, however, reflection on work by a young Argentinian visiting scholar, Leondro Stieben, and, especially, a fascinating manuscript-monograph on Adam Smith by the distinguished scholars Mike Hill and Warren Montag, which usefully compares Spinoza and Smith, has led me to reconsider Adam Smith. Consider the following paragraph:
"From arranging and methodizing the System of the Heavens, Philosophy descended to the consideration of the inferior parts of Nature, of the Earth, and of the bodies which immediately surround it. If the objects, which were here presented to its view, were inferior in greatness or beauty, and therefore less apt to attract the attention of the mind, they were more apt, when they came to be attended to, to embarrass and perplex it, by the variety of their species, and by the intricacy and seeming irregularity of the laws or orders of their succession. The species of objects in the Heavens are few in number; the Sun, the Moon, the Planets, and the Fixed Stars, are all which those philosophers could distinguish. All the changes too, which are ever observed in these bodies, evidently arise from some difference in the velocity and direction of their several motions; but the variety of meteors in the air, of clouds, rainbows, thunder, lightning, winds, rain, hail, snow, is vastly greater; and the order of their succession seems to be still more irregular and unconstant. The species of fossils, minerals, plants, animals, which are found in the Waters, and near the surface of the Earth, are still more intricately diversified; and if we regard the different manners of their production, their mutual influence in altering, destroying, supporting one another, the orders of their succession seem to admit of an almost infinite variety. If the imagination, therefore, when it considered the appearances in the Heavens, was often perplexed, and driven out of its natural career, it would be much more exposed to the same embarrassment, when it directed its attention to the objects which the Earth presented to it, and when it endeavoured to trace their progress and successive revolutions."Smith, History of Ancient Physics.
Smith is not making a merely historical point here, although it is a bit tricky given that it is opening paragraph to a treatment of Ancient physics (and elsewhere in the essay he writes in adopted voices). But for the crucial argument below this does not matter. In context, Smith is extending the Spinozistic-Humean view that empirical, mathematical scientific theories are the product of the imagination. Smith seems to be saying that celestial phenomena are simple; phenomena in the air (we would say, atmosphere) more complex; while terrestrial phenomena are infinitely complex (something stressed by Hill and Montag). The simple phenomena are clearly capable of being subject of a science, but the terrestrial phenomena (note the flagging of fossils, by the way) are, if they are subject to science, of a very different kind. And, indeed, if there are literally infinite variety then there is a Spinozistic point lurking here (that a quantitative science may be inappropriate--see Letter on Infinite, etc). So, Smith may, in fact, be agreeing with Locke (see Mary Domski's brilliant paper), Mandevile, Diderot, and Buffon that mathematical science is appropriate for the celestial sphere and much less so for terrestrial sphere, and by implication human affairs. Here's a very clear statement of a variant of the position (math is only useful in astronomy and optics) by the great naturalist Buffon:
“This union of mathematics and physics can be accomplished only for a very small number of subjects...it is necessary that the phenomena we are concerned with explaining be susceptible to being considered in an abstract manner and that their nature be stripped of almost all physical qualities. For mathematics is unapplicable to the extent that subjects are not simple abstractions....there are very few subjects in physics in which the abstract sciences can be applied so advantageously. And I scarcely see anything but astronomy and optics to which they might be of any great service.” Buffon, “Initial Discourse” Histoire naturelle, trans. By Lyon,
We know that Smith was an admirer of Diderot's Encyclopedia and Buffon. Now, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is much discussed and little read by modern critics. One sentence in it has always troubled me. Smith writes: "I have no great faith in political arithmetick, and I mean not to warrant the exactness of either of these computations." Here Smith is going after an earlier generation of scholars who relied heavily on statistics in their political economy. I have never seen a satisfactory treatment of the passage in the (gigantic) secondary literature on Smith. But clearly Smith thinks that theirs is a kind of fake exactitude in political economy which pretends to an unattainable level of accuracy in describing the "almost infinite variety" to be found in the (terrestrial) human sciences. But unlike, say, Hume, Diderot, Buffon (etc) Smith is much impressed by the universal reach of Newton's natural philosophy and he shows very subtle grasp of both Newton's methodology as well the argumentative arguments in favor of Newtonian natural philosophy. So, I never had been tempted into thinking of Smith as wishing to constrain the reach of Newton's program. But intrigued by the Hill/Montag reading of Smith, I looked again at Smith's treatment of Newton. Here is the crucial passage summing up Newton's achievements:
"They not only connect together most perfectly all the phaenomena of the Heavens, which had been observed before his time, but those also which the persevering industry and more perfect instruments of later Astronomers have made known to us; have been either easily and immediately explained by the application of his principles, or have been explained in consequence of more laborious and accurate calculations from these principles, than had been instituted before."
--Smith "The History of Astronomy" [emphasis added] Now, here Smith does not mention how Newton accounted for the tides or the Moon's attraction on the seas. In fact, Smith here treats Newton the way Locke treats Newton--as offering a terrific celestial mechanics. Arguments from omission are always tricky. So this does not settle anything. But there is another passage, in which Smith discusses the crucial evidence produced by Maupertuis' voyage to Lapland that ended eighteenth century debate over the status of Newton's system. I have repeatedly used the paragraph in my writing, but I am sad to say that in the grip of "Smith = Newtonian" meme, I missed the significance of it. I quote before I comment:
The Earth had hitherto been regarded as perfectly globular, probably for the same reason which had made men imagine, that the orbits of the Planets must necessarily be perfectly circular. But Sir Isaac Newton, from mechanical principles, concluded, that, as the parts of the Earth must be more agitated by her diurnal revolution at the Equator, than at the Poles, they must necessarily be somewhat elevated at the first, and flattened at the second. The observation, that the oscillations of pendulums were slower at the Equator than at the Poles, seeming to demonstrate, that gravity was stronger at the Poles, and weaker at the Equator, proved, he thought, that the Equator was further from the centre than the Poles. All the measures, however, which had hitherto been made of the Earth, seemed to show the contrary, that it was drawn out towards the Poles, and flattened towards the Equator. Newton, however, preferred his mechanical computations to the former measures of Geographers and Astronomers; and in this he was confirmed by the observations of Astronomers on the figure of Jupiter, whose diameter at the Pole seems to be to his diameter at the Equator, as twelve to thirteen; a much greater inequality than could be supposed to take place betwixt the correspondent diameters of the Earth, but which was exactly proportioned to the superior bulk of Jupiter, and the superior rapidity with which he performs his diurnal revolutions. The observations of Astronomers at Lapland and Peru have fully confirmed Sir Isaac’s system, and have not only demonstrated, that the figure of the Earth is, in general, such as he supposed it; but that the proportion of its axis to the diameter of its Equator is almost precisely such as he had computed it. And of all the proofs that have ever been adduced of the diurnal revolution of the Earth, this perhaps is the most solid and satisfactory.--Smith "History of Astronomy." [emphases added]
Now, Smith treats the Maupertuis expedition as settling two controversial, related issues at once: (i) the Copernican hypotheses and (ii) the controversy over the shape of the Earth (which pitted three hypotheses -- one implausible one offered by the Cassini family of astronomers/geographers, one proposed by Huygens in accord with his vortex theory of gravity, and one proposed by Newton based on universal gravitation). Smith misses, however, that the expedition also settles the debate between Newton and neo-Cartesians (Huygens). For in Newton's theory the flattening at the poles has TWO sources. One is rotation of the earth. And the pendulum measurements as well as the measurements in Lapland and Peru fully confirm this. So, this proves Copernicanism without a doubt. (I think that this question was settled by 1690 when both Newton and Huygens agreed on an earlier generation of pendulum measurements.) Second, universal gravity means that under the surface of the earth gravity does not act inverse-square but 1/r. Newton and Huygens both recognized that this could let pendulum measurements on the shape of the earth provide decisive empirical evidence between their theories; this is what was at issue between Newton and Huygens (and all then known vortex theories). [See this paper for useful background.] Maupertuis's evidence showed that Huygens' theory could not possibly be true because all the measured systematic deviations from his theory where in the wrong direction. The measurements in Lapland and Peru, thus, *also* showed decisively that universal gravity really existed--leaving aside questions over its mechanism. In his treatment, Smith misses this point entirely or prefers to ignore it. To put it a bit technically, in his writings Smith treats the Earth as a celestial body that can be fit into a widely successful astronomical scheme. So, Smith accepts the inverse law for celestial bodies. This is Huygens' position on Newton, in fact. But Smith never explicitly adopts the inverse-law as a *universal* law. As a consequence Smith confines Newtonian and mathematical science to the heavens without ever having to adopt the mathematical/Newtonian way in the human sciences.
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