Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson: The Wealth of Nations, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, and the Militia Question
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Ep. 13
Adam Smith Made the Case for the Free Market. Then, in the Same Book, He Wrote the Strongest Objection to It.
Two men were born in Scotland in 1723, a county apart. They joined the same Edinburgh club, kept the same friends, and worked from the same premise about what commercial life does to a people. They never agreed about the remedy, and the disagreement is more specific and more difficult than it is usually made to sound.
The Smith half runs from the salt pans and nail-makers of Kirkcaldy to the Glasgow chair he called the happiest years of his life, and then to the argument itself. What the mercantile system actually was and why he gave a whole book to dismantling it. The system of natural liberty passage read in full, including the eleven words that get dropped and the reason he gives for discharging the sovereign — which is an objection about capacity, not about rights, and which arrives a hundred and fifty years before the twentieth century made that argument famous under another name. The butcher and the brewer and the baker, and why that passage is about persuasion rather than selfishness. The invisible hand, which appears three times in everything Smith published, once in an essay describing pagan superstition, and which became the famous line only when a tradition needed a slogan. And the writing about merchants and guilds, which is as harsh as anything produced on the left since.
Then the turn. The book opens with the pin factory, eighteen operations, ten men, forty-eight thousand pins. Several hundred pages later Smith goes back and writes down what that life does to the man living it — that he becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become, and that he is equally incapable of defending his own country. Nobody made him put that in. Adam Ferguson had printed a related warning nine years earlier and drawn the opposite conclusion: that some things divide without loss and some do not, that shoes are one kind and citizenship is the other, and that a nation which contracts out its own defense has dismembered the human character. Smith answered that a militia cannot match professionals, that only a standing army preserves a civilized nation — and then said the half almost nobody quotes, that the martial spirit of the people is worth preserving anyway and deserves the serious attention of government.
The hour closes with an honest reckoning neither man survives cleanly. Ferguson wrote an anonymous pamphlet against the American case, printed at government expense, and then crossed the Atlantic as secretary to a peace commission sent to end the war on British terms. Smith spent his last twelve years as a commissioner of customs, inside the establishment his own fourth book had attacked, having first gone through his wardrobe, found almost nothing in it whose import was legal, and burned it. Then three objections, all built from the primary text, including the strongest thing anybody says against reading these men the way this series reads them.
Did this leave us more free, or more governed?
⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00:00 - The Legend of Fontenoy and Adam Ferguson
0:02:41 - Two Men, One Premise: Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith
0:03:57 - Podcast Introduction and Previous Episode Recap
0:05:31 - The Select Society, The Militia Club, and Scotland’s Grievance
0:12:59 - Kirkcaldy and the Early World of Adam Smith
0:17:24 - Academic Postings: Hume, Hutcheson, and Smith
0:19:34 - The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Impartial Spectator
0:27:21 - Attacking the Mercantile System in The Wealth of Nations
0:31:28 - The System of Natural Liberty and the Duties of the Sovereign
0:37:32 - Deconstructing the True Meaning of the “Invisible Hand”
0:41:32 - Smith’s Warning About Merchants, Monopolies, and Guilds
0:44:29 - The Pin Factory and The Hidden Costs of Divided Labor
0:48:44 - Adam Ferguson: Life and Background as Chaplain to the Black Watch
0:53:13 - Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society
0:56:02 - Specialization and The Threat of Professional Armies to Free Citizens
1:02:26 - Smith’s Counterargument: The Necessity of a Standing Army
1:07:44 - The Reckoning: Ferguson and Smith’s Later Government Careers
1:13:40 - Three Objections to the Libertarian Reading of Smith and Ferguson
1:23:03 - The Scottish Influence on the American Founders
1:27:09 - The Liberty Test
1:29:47 - Episode Conclusion and Preview of Next Episode on Montesquieu
📚 The companion article for this week covers the same ground with full citations
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