“The System of Natural Liberty” — The Scottish Enlightenment, Part II: Smith and Ferguson
SELF-EVIDENT The Road to 1776 Article 13 of 22
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.— Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759¹
Kirkcaldy
The town sits on the Fife coast, across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh, and in the middle of the eighteenth century it was one long street facing the water. Coal came out of the ground nearby. Salt was boiled from seawater in pans along the shore. There was linen, and there were nails — enough that Smith would report, in the fourth chapter of the book he wrote there, that a village in Scotland still had workmen carrying nails instead of coin to the baker and the alehouse.² Ships came in from the Baltic and the Low Countries and, when the trade allowed, from the American colonies. Customs officers walked the quay and counted what came ashore. Smith’s father had been one of them, and had died a few months before his son was born.³
Adam Smith came home to Kirkcaldy in the spring of 1767, at forty-three, having resigned a professorship at Glasgow to travel through France as tutor to a young duke. He had met Voltaire at Ferney and Quesnay and Turgot in Paris. He came back to a small port town with a life pension and a manuscript, and stayed roughly six years.⁴ The letters from those years are the letters of a man in difficulty. The work went slowly, and he said so.
What he was writing was an account of how a nation becomes rich — not how a king becomes rich, which was the older question, and not how a treasury fills with silver, which was the question European policy had been built to answer. How the ordinary people of a country come to have more food, more linen, more shoes. It was a question about the baker’s shop and the men making nails. Earlier writers had investigated national wealth and population; what Smith did was recenter the subject on annual output and the condition of ordinary people rather than on bullion or the treasury.
The previous article in this series left the Scottish thinkers at the point of a discovery and a limit. They had worked out that the deepest institutions of human life — language, money, law, manners — display an order that no one designed, that emerged from the actions of people pursuing much smaller ends than the results they produced. What they had not yet done was carry that insight into the getting and spending of ordinary life, and ask what an undesigned order looks like when the thing being ordered is an entire economy.
That is the work brought toward completion in Kirkcaldy. It is only half of what this article has to cover. A second man was asking a different question at the same time, thirty miles away in Edinburgh, and arriving at an answer that cut against the first. A rich nation divides every task into smaller and smaller pieces, and defense is a task like any other. What becomes of a free people that hires its fighting done?
The Making of a Moral Philosopher
Smith was baptized at Kirkcaldy on June 5, 1723, and entered the University of Glasgow at fourteen.⁵ There he sat under Francis Hutcheson, whose lectures and whose influence on the whole Scottish generation the previous article described. In 1740 he went to Balliol College, Oxford, on a Snell exhibition, and left six years later without a degree. Thirty years later he put in print what he thought of the place: the endowed teachers there had given up even the pretense of teaching, because their income did not depend on whether they taught.⁶
From 1748 he gave public lectures in Edinburgh on rhetoric and belles-lettres, expanding them over three years to take in the history of philosophy and jurisprudence. In 1751 Glasgow elected him to the Chair of Logic, and in 1752 he moved to the Chair of Moral Philosophy — Hutcheson’s chair. He held it until 1764 and called those the happiest and most honourable years of his life. In that period he formed the friendship with David Hume that lasted until Hume’s death, and he published, in 1759, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.⁷
In 1764 he resigned to tutor Henry Scott, the young Duke of Buccleuch, on a European tour, for a life pension.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published on March 9, 1776.⁸
Four months later the Continental Congress adopted a declaration in Philadelphia. The coincidence of the year has been made to carry a great deal of weight and will not carry it. What connects the two documents is not causation but a common intellectual world. The connection that can actually be documented — who read Smith in America, and when, and what they took from him — is a matter for the close of this article, where the evidence can be set out rather than assumed.
Part I: Adam Smith
Sympathy, and What It Is Not
The Theory of Moral Sentiments opens with the sentence that stands at the head of this article, and the sentence is doing something precise. Smith is not saying that people are kind. He is saying that whatever else is true of human beings, they are built in such a way that the condition of other people registers on them.
The mechanism he proposes for this is what he calls sympathy, and the word is a trap for a modern reader. Sympathy in Smith does not mean pity. It does not mean feeling sorry for someone, and it does not mean agreeing with them. It means fellow-feeling arrived at by imagination: I cannot feel your pain, because I am not you, but I can imagine myself into your circumstances and produce in myself some fainter version of what I suppose you are feeling. Smith is explicit that this works for any passion, not only the painful ones. We sympathize with joy, with resentment, with gratitude, with grief. The greatest ruffian, he notes, is not altogether without the capacity.⁹
Two consequences follow, and they run through everything Smith wrote afterward.
The first is that moral judgment is comparative. When I watch you respond to something, I judge whether your response is proportionate by producing my own imagined response and measuring yours against it. If your grief at a small loss exceeds what I can work myself up to, I judge it excessive. Propriety, in Smith’s vocabulary, is that correspondence.
The second is that we do the same thing to ourselves. We cannot see our own conduct directly, so we look at it the way we look at other people’s. Smith calls this the only looking-glass by which we can examine the propriety of our own behavior.¹⁰ The figure we use to do the looking is the one he made famous.
The Impartial Spectator
The impartial spectator is not an innate rulebook and not a synonym for private feeling. It is Smith’s account of conscience — the man within the breast, formed out of a lifetime of judging others and being judged by them. Smith says so directly. The chapter is titled “Of the Influence and Authority of Conscience,” and the power he credits with overriding self-love is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.¹¹ Smith sometimes describes this faculty in providential terms, but his account of its operation proceeds through sympathy and social experience.
The device does real philosophical work: it explains how a standard built out of ordinary human feeling can nonetheless correct ordinary human feeling. My self-love inclines me to think my own injury enormous and my neighbor’s trivial. The impartial spectator does not share my self-love. He weighs the two as a stranger would, and the stranger’s verdict is the one I must accept if I am to think well of myself.
This is a moral theory built from below. It begins neither with a divine command nor with a self-evident axiom about rights, but with what human beings do when they watch each other, and it builds a standard out of that. Smith’s own religious position is contested among scholars and is not resolved here; his text contains providential language, and the argument does not depend on stripping it out. What matters is the shape. The foundation is sentiment refined by an imagined observer, and it is not natural right in the manner the American arc will eventually require.
The Book He Never Abandoned
In the nineteenth century German scholars proposed that the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the author of The Wealth of Nations could not be the same man in any coherent sense — that the first grounds human conduct in sympathy and the second in self-interest, and that Smith either changed his mind or never had one. The argument acquired a name, Das Adam Smith Problem, and it has had a long life.
The strongest evidence against it is bibliographic. Smith brought out six editions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The sixth appeared in 1790, the year he died, fourteen years after The Wealth of Nations, and it was substantially enlarged. A man who had repudiated his moral philosophy does not spend his last year expanding it.
The scholarly picture is more layered than a flat dismissal. The editors of the Glasgow Edition called the problem a pseudo-problem founded on ignorance and misunderstanding, and most current work treats the two books as parts of one incomplete project rather than as rivals.¹² But the question has not gone quietly. Later scholars have revived versions of it in more careful forms — not as a claim that Smith contradicted himself, but as a claim that the relation between the two books is genuinely difficult and was settled too fast.
The useful thing for a reader is the ordering rather than a verdict. Smith wrote the moral philosophy first, taught it for twelve years, and revised it last. The Wealth of Nations was never meant to stand alone.
What Mercantilism Actually Was
The Wealth of Nations is an attack, and to feel its force a reader has to know what it was attacking.
What Smith attacked was less a single doctrine than a varied cluster of policies and arguments, grouped together partly by his own polemic and known since as the mercantile system. Its recurring commitments overlapped: that a nation’s wealth lay in its stock of gold and silver; that trade was a contest in which one country’s gain was another’s loss; that policy should therefore aim at selling more abroad than was bought. Shipping, employment, revenue, and relative state power ran alongside these as objects in their own right. From that followed the machinery: tariffs and outright prohibitions on imported manufactures; bounties paid to favored exporters; drawbacks and rebates; chartered companies granted exclusive rights to whole regions of the world; and colonies held for the specific purpose of buying the mother country’s manufactures and selling her raw materials, with the trade carried in her ships under navigation laws.
This was not a theory a few economists held. It was a central organizing logic of much European commercial policy, written into statute, defended by fleets, and administered by a bureaucracy of collectors and searchers and tide-waiters. Smith called it the mercantile system and devoted the fourth book of The Wealth of Nations to taking it apart.¹³
His central objection is that it mistakes the end for the means. Silver is not wealth. What people consume is wealth — the annual produce of a country’s land and labor. A policy that accumulates bullion while restricting the exchanges that create goods has impoverished the nation to enrich its treasury.
The System of Natural Liberty
Having spent a book dismantling the mercantile machinery, Smith states the alternative. The passage is the one this article takes its title from, and it deserves to be read as he wrote it, including the part that is usually left off.
All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society.¹⁴
Two things are worth marking in that passage before going further.
The first is the phrase as long as he does not violate the laws of justice. Natural liberty in Smith is bounded liberty. Justice is not a competing value that limits freedom from outside; it is the frame within which the freedom is defined.
The second is the reason Smith gives for discharging the sovereign from the direction of industry, which is not that the sovereign has no right to direct it. The reason is that no one could possibly do it well. No human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient. The objection is to the capacity, not merely the authority — an argument about what any central director can know, made a hundred and fifty years before the twentieth century made it famous.
And then, immediately, Smith says what the sovereign is still for. The passage continues without a break:
According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.¹⁵
Defense, justice, and public works. The third is elastic, and Smith spends the fifth book stretching it. Anyone who wants to enlist him as a minimal-state theorist has to reckon with what he put inside that category, and the objections at the end of this article do so.
The Butcher, the Brewer, and the Baker
The sentence everyone quotes appears early, in the second chapter of the first book, and it is regularly cited as a claim that human beings are selfish. It is not that claim. It is a claim about how strangers get things from each other.
The argument runs this way. Almost every other animal, once grown, is independent. A human being is not; he needs help constantly, and cannot expect it from goodwill alone, because he needs it from thousands of people who have never heard of him. So he must show them that helping him serves them. Then the famous lines:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.¹⁶
Smith does not say that benevolence does not exist. He wrote a book about fellow-feeling and revised it until he died. He says that benevolence does not scale. The affection that binds a family cannot be stretched across a city of strangers, and a society that had to run on it would starve. Exchange is the mechanism that lets people who feel nothing for each other nonetheless serve each other, reliably, every day.
There is a further point in the passage that is almost always lost. The sentences are about persuasion. We address ourselves — Smith’s picture of the market is people talking each other into things, offering reasons, making a case for the advantage on the other side. In the chapter’s opening paragraph he suggests that the propensity to exchange may itself be a consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, while declining to settle the question.¹⁷ The butcher and the baker are not machines responding to incentives. They are people being talked to.
The Invisible Hand
Few phrases in economic writing have been asked to do more work than this one, and the first thing to establish is how little of it Smith wrote.
The expression appears three times in the whole of his published output. Once in a posthumously published essay on the history of astronomy, where it refers to the superstitions of polytheism — the invisible hand of Jupiter, invoked by the ignorant to explain irregular events they could not otherwise account for. Once in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in a passage about a proud and unfeeling landlord, where the point is that the rich consume little more than the poor and are led to distribute the necessities of life among those who work for them roughly as an equal division would have done. And once in The Wealth of Nations.¹⁸
The occurrence in The Wealth of Nations is in the second chapter of the fourth book, inside an argument about import restrictions. Smith is explaining why a merchant tends to prefer investing at home rather than abroad: he can watch a domestic venture, he knows the people, he can assess the risk, and so, from ordinary caution about his own capital, he keeps it in his own country. The aggregate effect is that domestic industry is supported without anyone having intended to support it. In directing that industry so as to produce the greatest value, Smith writes, the merchant intends only his own gain, and is in this as in many other cases led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
That is the entire textual basis. One clause, in a narrow argument about the location of capital, offered as an illustration of a pattern Smith says occurs in many other cases too. The clause is not, by itself, a general theory of markets, and it is not a claim that self-interested action always produces good outcomes — Smith spends much of the same book showing that it does not, whenever the self-interested actors can get a law passed. For roughly a century after publication the phrase attracted little attention.
None of which makes the underlying idea small. It is the same idea the previous article traced through the Scottish thinkers, applied here to an economy: order can arise from the actions of people who did not intend it and could not have described it. The mistake is to think the idea rests on the metaphor. It rests on the division of labor, on the extent of the market, on the adjustment of market prices, and on the sentence about innumerable delusions — the argument that no director could hold in one mind what the whole of a country’s industry requires.
Those are the load-bearing arguments. The hand is an ornament on top of them, and a tradition that leans on the ornament has misunderstood the building.
What Smith Said About Businessmen
A libertarian reader arrives at The Wealth of Nations expecting a defense of commerce and finds, alongside it, writing about merchants as harsh as anything in the book.
Smith’s view is that the interests of those who live by profit are systematically different from the interest of the public, and sometimes opposed to it. Merchants want a wide market and a narrow competition. The first is good for everybody; the second is good for them alone, and they will pursue it by law wherever they can. His conclusion is a rule for reading legislative proposals:
The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.¹⁹
And then the line everyone quotes and almost no one finishes:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices.²⁰
It is usually deployed as an indictment of business collusion, which it is. What follows is the part that gets cut. Smith immediately says that such meetings cannot be prevented by any law that could be executed or that would be consistent with liberty and justice. His remedy is not to forbid them. It is that the law should do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, and still less render them necessary — a warning against the guild and corporation structures that required tradesmen to organize, and that then gave the organized trade a standing venue for fixing its terms.
That is a genuinely libertarian conclusion reached from a thoroughly unsentimental view of merchants, and it is a better argument than the one that assumes commercial actors are benign. Smith did not assume it. He thought the case for economic freedom had to survive the fact that the people who would benefit from it most would also, given the chance, be the first to destroy it.
The Cost He Named Himself
The first three chapters of The Wealth of Nations are a celebration of the division of labor. The pin factory, the eighteen operations, the astonishing multiplication of output — the opening treatment is overwhelmingly admiring.
In the fifth book, several hundred pages later, Smith returns to the same subject and writes this:
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too 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.²¹
This is the author of the pin factory naming its human cost, in his own book and his own voice, after celebrating its productive power at the book’s opening.
The paragraph does not stop there, and the continuation is the reason this article can move from one man to the other without changing the subject. Smith goes on: of the great and extensive interests of his country such a man is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life corrupts the courage of his mind and makes him regard the soldier’s life with abhorrence.²²
A commercial society, on Smith’s own account, tends to produce a large class of workers who cannot fight and do not want to. He saw that. He named it. What he proposed to do about it — and it is not what a modern reader expects — belongs in the objections at the end of this article.
But the observation was not his alone. A man Smith knew well had put a closely related warning into print nine years earlier, and had drawn the opposite conclusion about what a free people should do in response.
Part II: Adam Ferguson
The Poker Club
In January 1762, in Edinburgh, a group of men founded a club.²³
The grievance was specific. The Militia Act of 1757 had provided for county militias in England and had not extended to Scotland, and a bill to give Scotland a militia of its own was defeated in Parliament in April 1760. Scotland had risen for the Stuarts in 1715 and again in 1745, and a government that had spent the years after Culloden disarming the Highlands was not eager to arm the country again on principle. To a good many Scots the exclusion was an insult written into statute: subjects of the same crown, subject to the same Parliament, and not to be trusted with weapons.
The club existed to change that. It was first called the Militia Club, which was thought too blunt, and was renamed. A poker stirs a fire; the club was to stir up the militia question, and the name had the advantage of meaning nothing to anyone who was not already in the room.²⁴
Its membership was the intellectual establishment of the city. David Hume belonged to it. Adam Smith belonged to it. Alexander Carlyle, William Robertson, Hugh Blair, John Home, Joseph Black, Henry Dundas, the Duke of Buccleuch — by the mid-1770s the roll ran past forty names.²⁵ These men agreed about very little else. They agreed that a country which could not be trusted to defend itself was not fully free.
One of the men at its center had spent nine years attached to a Highland regiment.
A Chaplain in the Ranks
Adam Ferguson was born at Logierait, in Perthshire, on June 20, 1723, the son of a minister of the Church of Scotland, and educated at Perth grammar school and St Andrews. He went to Edinburgh to study divinity. In 1745, with three of the required six years of theological study completed, he was licensed to preach by special dispensation and appointed deputy chaplain of the 43rd Regiment of Foot — soon renumbered the 42nd, the Black Watch. The qualification that got him the post was his Gaelic.²⁶
He became principal chaplain in 1746 and remained with the regiment until 1754.
There is a story about him that everyone repeats. At the battle of Fontenoy in May 1745, the story goes, the commanding officer found his chaplain in the ranks with a drawn broadsword, threatened him with the loss of his commission, was told what the chaplain thought of the commission, and watched him march off with the men. Sir Walter Scott told the story. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica printed it as fact — that Ferguson fought in the ranks throughout the day and refused to leave the field though ordered to do so by his colonel. A Victorian painter made a watercolour of it.²⁷
Recent accounts do not sustain it. Some scholarly treatments say only that Ferguson’s precise role at Fontenoy is uncertain. The regimental museum of the Black Watch, which displays a version of the scene, states that research indicates Ferguson could not have been the chaplain at Fontenoy, because he had not yet left Scotland, and that the story survives as regimental tradition rather than as history.²⁸
The story therefore belongs in the record of how Ferguson was remembered rather than in the record of what he did. The verified biography is unusual enough without it. A young minister with an incomplete divinity education spent nine years attached to a Highland regiment during and after a rising in which Highlanders fought on both sides, and then went home and wrote a book about what happens to a people that stops fighting for itself.
The rest of his career ran through Edinburgh. In 1757 he succeeded David Hume as librarian to the Faculty of Advocates. In 1759 he took the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and in 1764 moved to the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy. In 1767 he published An Essay on the History of Civil Society, against Hume’s advice. Hume, who had admired his earlier work and remained his friend, did not like the book.²⁹ It was translated across Europe and made his reputation anyway.
What “Civil Society” Meant
The title needs unpacking, because the phrase has since acquired a meaning Ferguson would not have recognized.
Civil society in modern usage names the space between the household and the state — charities, congregations, unions, clubs, the voluntary associations that are neither family nor government. Ferguson does not mean that. For him, civil society is the condition of a people living under settled law and government, as opposed to what he calls rude or savage society. It is roughly what an eighteenth-century writer meant by polished or civilized, and Ferguson notes that the word polished originally referred to a nation’s laws and government before it came to refer to manners and arts.
This matters, and it cuts against a reading that would be convenient for a series like this one. Ferguson does not set civil society against the state. He treats the political community and the civil one as very nearly the same thing, which is why the health of a people’s public life is, for him, the health of everything else. A libertarian reader who arrives hoping for an eighteenth-century case for society against government will not find it here, and it would be dishonest to manufacture one.
What Ferguson does supply is a starting point that departs from the method the English arc of this series followed. He rejects the state of nature — not as a historical claim he doubts, but as a way of reasoning he thinks is wrong at the root. Human beings are found in groups wherever they are found at all, and the philosopher’s task is to study how those groups actually developed rather than to reason from an imagined starting condition.
The contrast with Locke is narrower than it first appears. Locke’s state of nature is not a world of solitary individuals: it already contains marriage, families, servants, property, and exchange, and his argument from consent concerns entry into a commonwealth rather than the invention of human association.³⁰ The real difference is where legitimacy is grounded. Locke grounds lawful government in consent. Ferguson begins from political association as something that grew, and asks what sustains or corrupts it.
The difference will matter when this series reaches the men who wrote the American founding documents, because they had both traditions available and used both.
The Separation of Professions
Ferguson’s account of commercial progress is admiring and worried in almost equal measure, and the worry is concentrated in one place.
Specialization works, and he grants it completely. Separate the tanner from the clothier and the shoes and the cloth both improve. The productive power of a nation that divides its labor finely is beyond anything a society of generalists can reach.
What he sees, and states nine years before The Wealth of Nations was published, is what the arrangement does to the people inside it:
Even in manufacture, the genius of the master, perhaps, is cultivated, while that of the inferior workman lies waste. The statesman may have a wide comprehension of human affairs, while the tools he employs are ignorant of the system in which they are themselves combined. The general officer may be a great proficient in the knowledge of war, while the soldier is confined to a few motions of the hand and the foot.³¹
The chronology is a claim about dates and not about influence. Ferguson published this in 1767; Smith published his version in 1776; and Smith had been developing the material in his Glasgow lectures well before either book appeared.³² No claim of borrowing in either direction is made here, and the evidence does not support one. What can be said is that the cost of dividing labor was as visible to these men as its benefits, and that the one who published the objection first is not the one remembered for it.
Ferguson’s phrase for the danger is that specialization tends to break the bands of society and to substitute form in place of ingenuity. Society, he writes, is made to consist of parts, of which none is animated with the spirit of society itself.³³ Everyone is expert at his fragment. Nobody understands the whole. And that observation, which begins as a remark about manufacture, arrives at a subject that would matter profoundly in the American debate.
What a Standing Army Meant
An eighteenth-century reader did not need to be told why a permanent professional army in peacetime was frightening. That fear had been formed by the previous century, and this series has already followed it: the New Model Army in English politics, the rule of the major-generals, the quartering of troops on civilians, and the settlement of 1689 that made a standing army in time of peace unlawful without the consent of Parliament. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun had argued the militia side of that controversy from Scotland.
Underneath the constitutional worry was a simpler one. A professional army exists apart from the people, is paid by the government, is trained to obey, and is available for whatever the government wants done. It might be used against an invader. It might be used against a city. Military service is their trade, and their institutional loyalty runs through the government and the officers who pay and command them.
The militia alternative held that a free people should defend itself: the men who own the country should be the men who carry the arms, trained in their own districts, returning to their farms and shops when the emergency ends. The argument is as old as the Roman republic, and every generation that made it pointed back to Rome for what happens when the legions stop being citizens.
The Arts of Policy and War
Ferguson’s contribution is to connect that ancient argument to his own analysis of commercial society, and the connection is what makes it more than a repetition.
If a rich nation specializes every task, then defense becomes a task like any other, contracted out to men who do nothing else. That looks like efficiency. Ferguson says it is dismemberment:
The subdivision of arts and professions, in certain examples, tends to improve the practice of them, and to promote their ends. By having separated the arts of the clothier and the tanner, we are the better supplied with shoes and with cloth. But to separate the arts which form the citizen and the statesman, the arts of policy and war, is an attempt to dismember the human character, and to destroy those very arts we mean to improve. By this separation, we in effect deprive a free people of what is necessary to their safety; or we prepare a defence against invasions from abroad, which gives a prospect of usurpation, and threatens the establishment of military government at home.³⁴
The distinction is the heart of it. Some things can be divided without loss, and shoes are one of them. Citizenship is not. A man who has contracted out his share in the defense of his country has contracted out part of what made him a citizen, and he will not get it back by paying his taxes on time.
Ferguson pushes the point to its uncomfortable conclusion in the same section. Against the reply that hired troops are precaution enough, he answers that a people’s own troops are sometimes the very enemy it is obliged to fight.³⁵ And he foresees the settled arrangement that follows: that citizens and soldiers might come to be distinguished as much as women and men; that the citizen would come to possess property he was neither able nor required to defend; and that the soldier would be appointed to keep for another what he had been taught to want and was able to seize.³⁶
His summary is one sentence. If nations form disciplined armies, they reduce the military spirit of entire nations; and by placing the sword where they have given a distaste for civil establishments, they prepare for mankind the government of force.³⁷
Where the Two Men Part
The two halves of this article disagree.
Smith addressed the same question in the fifth book of The Wealth of Nations, and came down on the other side. His argument is that a militia cannot be as good as a professional force, for the reason his whole book would predict: men who drill once a month cannot match men who drill every day, because in war as in manufacture, practice is what produces skill. He concludes that a well-regulated standing army is superior to every militia, that only such an army can defend a wealthy nation against a poorer and more warlike neighbor, and that it is only by means of a standing army that civilization can be preserved for any length of time.³⁸
He goes further, in a passage that will not sit comfortably with anyone who has followed this series through the English arc. A sovereign secured by a well-regulated standing army, Smith argues, can tolerate criticism a weaker sovereign would have to suppress, because he is not endangered by every popular tumult. That degree of liberty which approaches to licentiousness, he writes, can be tolerated only in countries where the sovereign is secured by a well-regulated standing army.³⁹
The claim comes with a condition that is usually dropped from both sides of the quarrel. Smith concedes at the outset that men of republican principles have been jealous of a standing army as dangerous to liberty, and that it certainly is dangerous wherever the interest of the general and the principal officers is not necessarily bound up with the support of the constitution. His examples are Caesar’s army, which destroyed the Roman republic, and Cromwell’s, which turned the Long Parliament out of doors — the same two cases the English arc of this series has already followed. His defense is conditional on an arrangement in which the sovereign commands the army and the interests of its principal officers are bound to the civil constitution — men who have the most to lose by overturning it.⁴⁰
Two men in one small city, members of the same club, working from the same premise about what commercial life does to the martial spirit of a people, reached opposite conclusions. Ferguson concluded that the people must be armed and trained. Smith concluded that the army must be professional and the citizen educated. Neither position is the caricature of either man, and neither can be quietly dropped by a tradition that wants to claim them both.
What they shared is more interesting than what divided them. Both saw that prosperity has a defect built into it, and both refused to pretend a commercial nation could grow rich indefinitely without paying for it somewhere. The disagreement is over the remedy, and it is the same one that ran through the American debates over the militia and the regular army from Lexington to the Constitutional Convention and long past it.
The Honest Reckoning
Both men later accepted public roles that complicate any simple appropriation of their arguments, and in each case the service was real work rather than a sinecure.
Ferguson’s case is the harder one, because it goes to the argument itself.
In 1776 an anonymous pamphlet appeared, printed at the expense of the government, answering Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty. Price had made the case for the colonies. The pamphlet argued against him, and while it recommended conciliation, it demanded concessions from the colonists and sided with the authority of Parliament. Ferguson wrote it.⁴¹
Two years later he crossed the Atlantic. After Saratoga, with a French alliance forming, Lord North sent commissioners empowered to offer broad colonial self-government within the empire, protection against parliamentary taxation, and suspension of the acts affecting America passed since 1763 — but not independence. The Earl of Carlisle headed the delegation. Ferguson served as its secretary, sailed with it, and reached Philadelphia in June 1778.⁴² He was to have carried a dispatch to Washington’s camp in person and turned back for want of a passport Congress declined to issue.⁴³ The commission failed; Congress would discuss nothing short of independence.
So the man who had warned that a nation which hires its fighting done will lose the habits that keep it free argued in print against the American case, and then sailed to Philadelphia to help end the war on British terms.
Smith’s case is quieter and stranger.
In early 1778 he was appointed a Commissioner of Customs for Scotland, and a commissioner of the salt duties, at six hundred pounds a year — on top of the three hundred pound pension from Buccleuch, which the duke refused to discontinue. He moved from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh, to Panmure House, and held the office until his death.⁴⁴ The posts were not honorary. They required his presence in the city most of the week, year round, and the office placed him inside a customs establishment that contained a great deal he had attacked — prohibitions, bounties, monopolies, and the pursuit of smuggling, which The Wealth of Nations had treated as the natural consequence of unnatural laws — alongside revenue duties he regarded as legitimate. In September 1779 his duties extended to gathering intelligence on the Firth of Forth when John Paul Jones appeared in it under American colors with French support.⁴⁵
There is a story, from his own correspondence, that on taking the office he examined his wardrobe, found he scarcely owned a cravat or a handkerchief whose import was not prohibited, and burnt them.⁴⁶ It is usually told as a joke about an absent-minded professor. It is also a man discovering that prohibitions he had argued against were prohibitions he had been violating, and that he was now the officer charged with enforcing them. The same letter argues for abolishing import prohibitions outright, on the ground that they breed monopoly and raise no revenue except through fines and forfeitures, and for substituting moderate duties in their place.
Neither of these facts is a gotcha, and neither cancels what the men wrote.
The resolution most available is the one this article’s own subject supplies: that arguments, once published, are not the property of their authors and can travel independently of what their authors intended. That is true in general, and this article has not shown that Americans took this particular argument from Ferguson. It is also the thesis of the article applied to the article, which is exactly the kind of tidiness to distrust.
The plainer facts deserve to sit first. Ferguson thought the colonial case was wrong and worked against independence while seeking an imperial settlement. Smith took a salary inside a system that included measures he had condemned, and did the job conscientiously. Neither man was the frictionless partisan of liberty a later tradition needed, and the tradition has generally preferred not to mention it.
The Skeptic’s Case
Smith Was Not a Libertarian, and a Series Like This One Has to Say So
The objection is the strongest one in this article, and it is made from Smith’s own text.
Begin with the third duty. Public works and public institutions that no private party would find it profitable to build: Smith puts roads, bridges, harbors, and canals there, and he does not stop at infrastructure. He puts education there, and argues for it at length — that the state should establish schools in every parish, subsidize them, and require an examination in reading, writing, and arithmetic before a man could obtain the freedom of a corporation or set up in a trade. His reason is the one already quoted: the division of labor produces a population incapable of judging the interests of its country and incapable of defending it. The remedy he proposes is publicly established and partly subsidized instruction — a little school in every parish, the master partly but not wholly paid by the public, and a fee kept low enough that a common labourer can meet it — together with the power to impose on almost the whole body of the people the necessity of acquiring it.⁴⁷ That is a state remedy for a defect created by commercial life, proposed by the man who described both.
Then the explicit exception. Discussing a restriction on banks issuing small-denomination notes, Smith concedes that the regulation violates natural liberty and endorses it anyway: those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals which might endanger the security of the whole society are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments, of the most free as well as of the most despotical.⁴⁸ That is not a stray remark. It is a general principle with a wide mouth, offered by Smith himself, in the same book.
Add the navigation laws, which Smith criticized on economic grounds and then defended on grounds of defense, calling defense of much more importance than opulence. Add his acceptance of taxation, his discussion of when retaliatory duties may be good policy, and his support for a professional army.
Smith was a moral philosopher who concluded that people generally know their own business better than a distant legislator does, and who assigned the state the tasks he thought exchange could not perform. He is an ancestor of the case for economic freedom. He is not a partisan of a minimal state, and a series that claimed him as one would be reading him the way the mercantilists read a trade balance.
The Invisible Hand Cannot Carry the Weight
If the metaphor appears once in a thousand pages, inside a narrow argument about where a merchant puts his capital, then two centuries of theory have been built on a foundation the author did not lay.
The objection deserves its full force. The overuse has substituted a slogan for an argument, and a tradition that cites the hand rather than the reasoning has not made the case it believes it has made. The slogan version is also refutable in a way the argument is not: show one instance where self-interested action produced a bad outcome and the slogan collapses, which is why critics reach for the phrase as eagerly as advocates do.
The answer is to abandon the metaphor and point at what Smith established: that specialization and exchange produce gains no participant intended, that individuals judge the use of their own capital from circumstances they know and a distant legislator does not, and that no statesman can competently direct the whole of a nation’s industry. Later economists would describe part of this as the informational work done by prices; Smith’s own claim is the narrower one. It stands or falls on evidence, and it is the reason to read him.
Ferguson’s Militia Is Not a Small-Government Argument
A modern reader who cheers Ferguson’s warnings about standing armies should look carefully at what he is proposing instead.
An eighteenth-century militia was not private gun ownership. It was a legally organized obligation to serve, allocated by eligibility rules and often by ballot, and frequently allowing substitutes. Ferguson’s own scheme, set out eleven years before the Essay in a pamphlet on the establishment of a militia, was compulsory, socially selective, and explicitly hierarchical: county and borough lists graded by valuation, with colonels, field officers, and captains drawn from the top; freeholders of a hundred a year qualified as inferior officers and not obliged to serve in the ranks; a lower list of freemen from which men were drawn by lot; substitutes permitted; and that lower list excluding cottagers, day-labourers, servants, and anyone convicted of an infamous charge.⁴⁹ That is a substantial claim by the community on the individual, and it is closer to conscription than to a night-watchman state. The anti-standing-army position and the small-government position have often traveled together in American history, but they are not the same position, and Ferguson is the proof.
He says so himself, in language that should stop any reader who wants to enlist him. A constitution whose whole object is to secure the person and property of the subject, without regard to his political character, may be free, Ferguson writes, and its members may nonetheless become unworthy of the freedom they possess and unfit to preserve it.⁵⁰
Security of person and property is the classic liberal minimum. Ferguson’s argument is that the minimum is not enough — that a people who are merely safe, and who have handed the public business to specialists, will lose the capacities that made them free and will not notice until the loss is irreversible. That is a demanding republicanism, and it asks more of a citizen than most readers of this series would willingly give.
And the concession has to go further than that, because Ferguson did propose the machinery. The same pamphlet contemplates a compulsory statute, on the reasoning that in quiet times the government will be obliged to compel men to take their turn; a graded system of legal privileges for those who serve, including precedence on jury lists and at elections; and penalties for those who refuse or fail, running from public disgrace and forfeiture of privileges to being struck off the list of freemen for life.⁵¹ He preferred honour and shame to fines and the lash, partly because he thought severe physical punishment inconsistent with civil liberty. But the instrument is a statute, and the sanction is the state’s.
The reply left standing is narrow. What Ferguson establishes is that liberty has maintenance costs, that someone has to bear them, and that a people which has arranged to pay a professional class to bear them has changed its relationship to its own government in a way that no clause in a constitution will fix. Whether his own remedy is one a libertarian could accept is a separate question, and the answer is very likely no.
The Road Continues
The evidence for what Americans took from these two men is thinner than the tradition suggests, and it is better stated than improved on.
Smith was read. Jefferson, writing to his son-in-law on May 30, 1790, with a list of books for a young man studying law, said that in political economy he thought Smith’s Wealth of Nations the best book extant.⁵² Madison drew on it in thinking about faction.⁵³ Hamilton used it extensively in the Report on Manufactures of 1791, and departed from it where it suited him.⁵⁴ John Adams drew on the moral philosophy in the Discourses on Davila to argue that wealth is as dangerous a source of social dominance as aristocracy.⁵⁵ What the recent scholarship on Smith’s American reception establishes is that the founders treated him as an authoritative guide to statecraft and not as a foundational authority — one of several Scottish writers on the science of man, useful and admired, and not a scripture.⁵⁶ The image of The Wealth of Nations as an intellectual shot fired in 1776 is a later invention, and this series has no business repeating it.
Ferguson’s transmission cannot be established on the same terms. His book circulated widely and was translated across Europe, but its American reception cannot be established here.⁵⁷ The case against standing armies already belonged to a much older English and classical republican tradition — running back through the pamphlet wars of the 1690s to the Roman writers both sides quoted — and American writers did not need Ferguson in order to make it. What can be said is what the record shows: he argued in print against the colonial case and then crossed the Atlantic to help end the war on British terms.
There is one more line in Jefferson’s letter, immediately after the recommendation of Smith. In the science of government, Jefferson wrote, Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws is generally recommended — and then he added a warning, that it contains a great number of political truths and an equal number of heresies, so that the reader must constantly be on guard.⁵⁸
That is the next book, and the next article. The Scots had asked how a nation grows rich and what a free people owes to its own defense. The question still open was structural: how do you build a government that does not become the thing the whole argument was against? Not what a people should believe, and not what they should be willing to do, but how the offices should be arranged so that ambition is set against ambition and no single hand holds it all.
This is the road to 1776.
Self-Reflection Prompts
Smith argued that a stranger will serve you reliably when it is in his interest to do so, and that this is a better foundation for daily life than his goodwill. Think of something you obtained this week from someone who does not know you exist. What made the exchange work, and would benevolence have supplied it?
Smith named the human cost of the division of labor in the same book that praised it. When did you last state the strongest cost of a position you hold in the same breath as the argument for it, rather than leaving it for a critic to find?
Ferguson argued that a people who contract out their defense lose something they cannot buy back. Set aside whether he was right about armies. What have you handed to specialists for the sake of efficiency, and what capacity went with it?
Ferguson opposed the American Revolution in print and then crossed an ocean to help end it, while arguing elsewhere that a people who hire their fighting done will lose the habits that keep them free. How much does a thinker’s character or intention bear on whether the thinker’s argument is true?
The Liberty Test. Smith assigned the sovereign three duties — defense, justice, and public works no private party would build — and then put a great deal inside the third. Choose one function your government performs that fits that category. Did placing it there leave people more free, or more governed, and would Smith’s own reason for the category apply to it?
Endnotes
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), I.i.1.1. Cited from the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976; Liberty Fund reprint, 1982).
Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), I.iv.3, on commodities used as money. Cited from the Glasgow Edition, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976; Liberty Fund reprint, 1981). Smith writes that there is at that day a village in Scotland where it is not uncommon for a workman to carry nails instead of money to the baker’s shop or the alehouse.
On Kirkcaldy in the mid-eighteenth century — the coal and salt works, the nail-making, the shipping, the customs establishment, and Smith’s father, a customs official who died a few months before his son’s birth — see Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chapter 1, and Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), chapter 1. Chapter-level references are given; page pinpoints in these editions are not asserted.
On Smith’s return to Kirkcaldy in the spring of 1767 and the period of work on The Wealth of Nations that followed, see Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The duration is given in the sources as roughly six years; no more precise figure is asserted here.
Smith was baptized at Kirkcaldy on June 5, 1723, Old Style; the corresponding New Style date is June 16. The date of birth is not recorded.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.f, on the endowments of schools and universities and the effect of an income independent of teaching. The paragraph number is not asserted.
On the Edinburgh lectures of 1748 to 1751, begun on rhetoric and belles-lettres and expanded to include the history of philosophy and jurisprudence, and on the Glasgow chairs, see Nicholas Phillipson, “Smith, Adam (bap. 1723, d. 1790),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Some accounts describe the Edinburgh course as rhetoric and belles-lettres only.
On the publication date of March 9, 1776, see Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.1.1–2, on sympathy, imaginative projection, and the observation that the most hardened violator of the laws of society is not altogether without fellow-feeling.
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, III.i.5, on society as the mirror in which a man examines the propriety of his own conduct.
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, III.3, “Of the Influence and Authority of Conscience,” and particularly III.3.4 for the identification of the faculty as “reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.” For the providential language, see III.2, where man is described as the vicegerent of the Author of Nature upon earth. Whether the impartial spectator and the man within the breast are strictly identical throughout the six editions is a live question in the scholarship, and it is not resolved here.
D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, introduction to the Glasgow Edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where Das Adam Smith Problem is described as a pseudo-problem founded on ignorance and misunderstanding. For the later revival of the question in modified forms, see Richard Teichgraeber, “Rethinking Das Adam Smith Problem,” Journal of British Studies 20 (1981), and Leonidas Montes, “Das Adam Smith Problem: Its Origins, the Stages of the Current Debate, and One Implication for Our Understanding of Sympathy,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 25, no. 1 (2003).
On the difficulty of treating mercantilism as a single doctrine, and on the varied body of policies and arguments gathered under the name partly through Smith’s own polemic, see Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind, eds., Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Smith, Wealth of Nations, IV.ix.51.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, IV.ix.51, continuing the passage quoted above. The two block quotations are consecutive in the original and are separated here for the reader.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, I.ii.2.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, I.ii.1. Smith writes that whether the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange is one of the original principles of human nature, or whether, as seems more probable, it is the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech, it does not belong to his present subject to enquire. The question is raised and expressly left open.
The expression appears three times in Smith’s published work: Essays on Philosophical Subjects, “The History of Astronomy,” III.2; Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV.1.10; and Wealth of Nations, IV.ii.9. On the phrase attracting little notice for roughly a century after publication, and on the divergence among the three uses, see Gavin Kennedy, “Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand: From Metaphor to Myth,” Econ Journal Watch 6, no. 2 (2009).
Smith, Wealth of Nations, I.xi.p.10, on proposals for new commercial legislation originating with dealers.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, I.x.c.27. The continuation, on what the law can and cannot do about such meetings, is in the same paragraph.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.f.50.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.f.50, continuing the same paragraph.
On the founding of the Poker Club in early January 1762, see the entry “Poker Club (act. 1762–1784)” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985).
The name is explained by Ferguson in a letter to Lord Shelburne of February 3, 1762, as an allusion to the use of that instrument when fires need to be stirred. Accounts differ on who proposed the change from Militia Club; the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography credits Ferguson, following Alexander Carlyle, and some later accounts credit Smith.
The club minute book for 1776 names forty-three members. See the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry cited above.
On Ferguson’s birth at Logierait on June 20, 1723, his appointment as deputy chaplain in 1745, the special dispensation, his elevation to principal chaplain in 1746, and his service with the regiment until 1754, see Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, s.v. “Ferguson, Adam.”
“Ferguson, Adam,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), which states without qualification that Ferguson fought in the ranks throughout the day at Fontenoy and refused to leave the field though ordered to do so by his colonel. The Dictionary of National Biography traces the account of the chaplain at the head of the column to Sir Walter Scott. The painting is William Skeoch Cumming’s watercolour of 1897, catalogued as The Black Watch at Fontenoy and exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy that year as The Black Watch at Fontenoy, 11th May, 1745; see the Bonhams sale record, The Scottish Sale: Pictures, sale 20655, lot 11, for the work signed and dated 1897, with the Royal Scottish Academy exhibition entry and catalogue number 573. Secondary aggregators give conflicting sale dates for this lot, and no date is asserted here. The Black Watch Castle and Museum displays a version of the scene; the accessible evidence does not establish that it is the same watercolour.
Bruce Buchan, “Adam Ferguson, the 43rd, and the Fictions of Fontenoy,” in Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 25–43. The Black Watch Castle and Museum likewise states that research indicates Ferguson could not have been the chaplain at Fontenoy because he had not yet left Scotland, and that the story survives as regimental tradition. Other accounts state more cautiously that Ferguson’s precise role at Fontenoy is uncertain. This article treats his presence as contested rather than established.
On the publication of the Essay in 1767 against Hume’s advice, and on Hume’s dislike of the book despite his admiration for Ferguson’s earlier work and his continued friendship, see Oz-Salzberger, “Ferguson, Adam,” and her introduction to Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, §§77–89, on conjugal, parental, and master-servant relations, and on the distinction between society and political society. Locke’s state of nature already contains families, property, and exchange; the consent argument concerns entry into a commonwealth.
Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, Part 4, Section 1, “Of the Separation of Arts and Professions.”
Smith’s Glasgow material on the division of labour survives in the student notes of 1762–1763 and 1766 and in the “Early Draft” of part of The Wealth of Nations, printed in Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein, Glasgow Edition, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). On the dating of these documents and the development of Smith’s thinking on the subject, see R. L. Meek and A. S. Skinner, “The Development of Adam Smith’s Ideas on the Division of Labour,” Economic Journal 83 (1973).
Ferguson, Essay, Part 5, Section 3.
Ferguson, Essay, Part 5, Section 4.
Ferguson, Essay, Part 5, Section 4.
Ferguson, Essay, Part 5, Section 4, paraphrased from the passage on the Roman soldier and the separation of citizen from soldier.
Ferguson, Essay, Part 5, Section 4, paraphrased.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.a.39–41, on the comparison of militias and standing armies.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.a.39–41, on the security of a sovereign supported by a well-regulated standing army.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.a.39–41, including the concession that a standing army certainly is dangerous to liberty wherever the interest of the general and the principal officers is not necessarily connected with the support of the constitution of the state, and the examples of Caesar and Cromwell.
[Adam Ferguson], Remarks on a Pamphlet lately published by Dr. Price, entitled “Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty” (London, 1776), published anonymously and printed at government expense. See Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, s.v. “Ferguson, Adam,” which characterizes Ferguson as proposing conciliatory measures while demanding concessions from the colonists.
On the Carlisle Peace Commission, its instructions approved by Parliament in March 1778, its arrival at Philadelphia in June 1778, and Ferguson’s role as secretary, see the Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, s.v. “Peace Commission of Carlisle.” Sources differ on whether Ferguson was appointed secretary before sailing or shortly after arrival; the Dictionary of National Biography gives the latter.
Journals of the Continental Congress, June 1778, recording the commissioners’ statement that their dispatch had been carried toward Washington’s lines by Dr. Ferguson, secretary to the commission, who returned for want of a passport.
On the appointment as Commissioner of Customs and of the salt duties in 1778, the salary of six hundred pounds, the continuation of the three hundred pound Buccleuch pension, and the residence at Panmure House, see Ross, The Life of Adam Smith, and John Rae, Life of Adam Smith (London: Macmillan, 1895). Rae gives the six hundred pounds as five hundred for the customs commissionership and one hundred for the salt duties.
On Smith’s role in gathering intelligence during the appearance of John Paul Jones in the Firth of Forth in September 1779, see Ross, The Life of Adam Smith, chapter on the customs commissionership.
Adam Smith to William Eden, Edinburgh, January 3, 1780, letter 203, in The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross, Glasgow Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 244–46. In the same letter Smith argues for the outright abolition of import prohibitions, on the ground that they encourage monopoly and yield no revenue except through fines and forfeitures, and for the substitution of moderate and reasonable duties.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.f.55, on the little school in every parish, the master “partly, but not wholly, paid by the public,” and the fee kept low enough for a common labourer; V.i.f.54, on the public imposing on almost the whole body of the people the necessity of acquiring the essential parts of education; and V.i.f.57, for the mechanism — an examination or probation required before a man can obtain the freedom in any corporation or set up any trade in a village or town corporate.
Smith, Wealth of Nations, II.ii.94, on the regulation of small-denomination bank notes as an admitted exception to natural liberty.
[Adam Ferguson], Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1756), 50–52, for the county, city, and borough lists graded by valuation, the classes qualified for colonel, field officer, and captain, the hundred-a-year freeholders qualified as inferior officers and not obliged to serve as soldiers, the lower list of freemen, the exclusion of cottagers, day-labourers, servants, and persons convicted of a criminal or infamous charge, the drawing by lot, and the permission of substitutes. The pamphlet was published anonymously.
Ferguson, Essay, Part 5, Section 3.
Ferguson, Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia, 32–33, on being obliged in quiet times to compel the people to take their turn, and 49, on an act passing in the form of a compulsatory law; 40–41, for the proposed privileges, including precedence on jury lists and at elections; 44–46, for the graded penalties, from dismissal and published disgrace to forfeiture of militia privileges; and 51–52, for striking those who refuse to serve or to provide a substitute from the list of freemen for life. Ferguson’s stated preference is for honour and shame over fines and corporal punishment, which he argues are on the way to despotism.
Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., May 30, 1790.
Liu, Adam Smith’s America, 30–34, on Madison’s use of Smith in thinking about faction.
Liu, Adam Smith’s America, 34–52, on Hamilton’s use of and departures from Smith, chiefly in the Report on Manufactures (1791).
Liu, Adam Smith’s America, 58–66, on Adams’s use of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in the Discourses on Davila.
Glory M. Liu, Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 15, 17, 71, on the founders’ use of Smith as a guide to statesmanship rather than as a foundational authority, and on the overstatement of The Wealth of Nations as an intellectual shot fired in 1776. See also Samuel Fleischacker, “Adam Smith’s Reception among the American Founders, 1776–1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2002).
No claim of documented American transmission is made for Ferguson here. On the Essay‘s reception, its English editions, and its European translations, see Fania Oz-Salzberger’s introduction to Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). This article has not established ownership, citation, or identifiable textual borrowing by any named American writer, and the argument against standing armies was available from an older English and classical republican literature.
Jefferson to Randolph, May 30, 1790, the sentence immediately following the recommendation of Smith.
Sources and Further Reading
Primary Sources
Ferguson, Adam. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. 1767. Edited by Fania Oz-Salzberger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
[Ferguson, Adam]. Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1756.
[Ferguson, Adam]. Remarks on a Pamphlet lately published by Dr. Price. London, 1776.
Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., May 30, 1790.
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. 1689.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. Glasgow Edition, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Glasgow Edition, edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981.
Smith, Adam. The Correspondence of Adam Smith. Glasgow Edition, edited by Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
Smith, Adam. Lectures on Jurisprudence. Glasgow Edition, edited by R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Secondary Works
Buchan, Bruce. “Adam Ferguson, the 43rd, and the Fictions of Fontenoy.” In Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society, edited by Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle, 25–43. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009.
Fleischacker, Samuel. “Adam Smith’s Reception among the American Founders, 1776–1790.” William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2002).
Kennedy, Gavin. “Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand: From Metaphor to Myth.” Econ Journal Watch 6, no. 2 (2009).
Liu, Glory M. Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
Montes, Leonidas. “Das Adam Smith Problem: Its Origins, the Stages of the Current Debate, and One Implication for Our Understanding of Sympathy.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 25, no. 1 (2003).
Oz-Salzberger, Fania. “Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Phillipson, Nicholas. “Smith, Adam (bap. 1723, d. 1790).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Phillipson, Nicholas. Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
Rae, John. Life of Adam Smith. London: Macmillan, 1895.
Robertson, John. The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985.
Stern, Philip J., and Carl Wennerlind, eds. Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Ross, Ian Simpson. The Life of Adam Smith. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Next: Article 14 — “The Spirit of Laws”
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