Adam Smith Real Newtonian

6 Adam Smith Real Newtonian Leonidas Montes Joseph Schumpeter was not an admirer of Adam Smith. But in his monu- mental History of Economic Analysis he praises ‘the rudimentary equilibrium theory of chapter 7, by far the best piece of economic theory turned out by A. Smith’ (1954: 189), simply because it was a theoretical predecessor of Walras. While Isnard, Smith, Say and Ricardo ‘struggled or rather fumbled for it’, for Schumpeter it was Walras who made the ‘discovery’ of economic equilibrium, ‘the Magna Carta of economic theory’ (ibid.: 242). Since then, it has been generally accepted that Smith was a forerunner, if not the founder, of general economic equilibrium theory.1 While some consider Walras’s general economic equilibrium to be ‘the peak of neo- classical economics’ (Samuelson 1952: 61), nevertheless Adam Smith is widely seen as the ‘father of our science’. Moreover, the most famous (and most elusive) metaphor in the history of economic thought, the invisible hand, has been interpreted as ‘a poetic expression’ that confirms Smith as ‘a creator of general equilibrium theory’ (Arrow and Hahn 1971: 2). One way or another, microeconomics textbooks too readily link Smith’s invisible hand with some sort of equilibrium.2 Although the interpretation of Smith as the father of general equilibrium theory has already been challenged, this chapter contributes to this debate by interpreting Smith as a real Newtonian. Within this particular debate an intellectual appreciation of the eighteenth-century context, which was thoroughly pervaded by Newton’s enormous influence, has led to an assessment of Newton’s influence on Adam Smith. Mark Blaug has argued that the pivotal role of sympathy in TMS and that of self-interest in the WN ‘must be regarded as deliberate attempts by Smith to apply this Newtonian method first to ethics and then to economics’ (1980: 52). Andrew Skinner also believes that Smith’s economics ‘was originally conceived in the image of Newtonian physics’ (1969: 110). Indeed, Adam Smith was very much influenced by Newton. The language of ‘gravitation’ and ‘centre of repose’ in chapter 7 of the first book of WN was thought a simple proof that Smith, by applying Newton’s method to political economy, was led to general economic equilibrium theory. Smith’s admiration for Newton, in addition to Newton’s Adam Smith 103 atomistic/mechanistic description of the celestial order, was taken as further evidence that he initiated the tradition of general economic equilibrium theory, relying upon the same ontological preconceptions (see Hetherington 1983). In this chapter I will challenge this view by arguing that emphasising Newton’s influence on Smith is right, but for different reasons. Smith was a real Newtonian, but his methodology does not necessarily lead to a notion of equilibrium, nor to a theory of general economic equilibrium that requires an axiomatic-deductive methodology. The latter has generally been attributed to Newton, but Newtonianism was not conceived in that way by the Scottish Enlightenment. It was the French who adopted and adapted Newtonianism, fostering a methodology similar to that of Walras. In the next section Newton’s methodology will prove to be much more complex and subtle. Newton’s method of analysis (method of resolution) and synthesis (method of composition) will be briefly analysed, and his conception of a potentially open-ended process of successive approximation will be discussed. The third section will start with a concise account of Smith’s life, then analyse his methodology with special emphasis on chapter 7 of the first book of WN. In the last section it will be concluded, pace Blaug, who claims that Smith ‘had a naïve view of what constituted Newton’s method’ (1980: 53), not only that Adam Smith was a careful interpreter of Newton, but that he actually mastered Newton’s methodology in a very sophisticated manner. In this section special emphasis will be given to the context of the Scottish Enlightenment. It will be suggested that Smith’s intentions in his History of Astronomy could be a consequence of a particular and distinctively Scottish reading of Newton. This chapter closes with some brief conclusions on the methodological approach fol- lowed in this chapter, and its import for our understanding of Smith’s Newtonianism. A brief account of Newton’s actual methodology In 1936 an auction at Sotheby’s sold, rather cheap, 329 lots of Newton’s manuscripts, nearly three million words. John Maynard Keynes managed to buy, and gradually reassemble, more than one-third of the collection (on all this, see Spargo 1992). Keynes, after reading the manuscripts, in his posthumous ‘Newton, the Man’3 wrote: ‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians’ (Keynes 1972: 364). If Newton’s reputation was built upon his scientific discoveries in mechanics, cosmology, optics and mathemat- ics, the fact that he had spent much energy dealing with alchemy, theology, prophecies and ancient wisdom was simply ignored. After Keynes’s path-breaking essay, different biographies have offered a more detached and objective account of the real Newton,4 leading to a renewed interest in Newton’s ‘private science’. Newton was not only 104 Leonidas Montes exceptionally well read in alchemical literature, but also had extensive practical experience. He was further a voracious reader of the Scriptures and theological treatises. Convinced that ancient sages knew the law of universal gravity, he spent much of his energies studying the prophecies in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. Many scholars would now agree that Newton’s speculations about the nature of matter may have been influenced by his knowledge of alchemy, theology and ancient wisdom. As Patricia Fara nicely put it: ‘for him gravity, alchemy, and God were intimately linked . Newton’s alchemical pursuits were not ancillary to his natural philosophy but rather formed an essential part of his religious endeavor to study God’s activities from as many aspects as possible’ (2003: 501). But what is the nature of Newtonianism? For answering this question, we must first uncover what Newton really said about his methodology. Principia and Opticks are the best known and most important public sources for understanding Newton’s method. Regarding Principia,5 its complete title Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica resembles, and explicitly pretends to supplant, Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae (1644). One of the greatest achievements of Newton’s ‘experimental philosophy’ resides in his method of resolution (analysis) and composition (synthesis). In his famous General Scholium, appended to the end of the second edition of Principia, Newton refers to the nature of his ‘experimental philosophy’ in which ‘propositions are deduced from the phenomena and are made general by induction’ (Newton 1687: 943). Then in the last query of his Opticks (numbered 31),6 he explicitly declares that ‘analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclu- sions from them by Induction. Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discover’d, and establish’d as Principles, and by them explaining the Phaenomena proceeding from them’ (Newton 1704: 404–5). In sum, the method of resolution allows us to infer causes from phenomena, and the method of composition allows us to infer a (or some) principle(s) from which we can explain other phenomena.7 Newton’s understanding of scientific progress through his analytic-synthetic method clearly differs from the axiomatic-deductive approach that underpins general economic equilibrium theory. At the end of the first paragraph of Principia’s preface, aware of, and concerned about, the unknown nature of the force of gravity, Newton concludes: ‘But I hope that the principles set down here will shed some light on either this mode of philosophizing or some truer one’ (Newton 1687: 383, emphasis added). Newton was attacked for appealing to occult qualities, as he would be following the discredited Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. His efforts to rebut this accusation, or to explain his system, uncover another very interesting facet of Newton’s methodology: a desire to uncover the real nature of things that even allows the existence of another possibility (recall ‘or some truer one’). The father of the universal Adam Smith 105 law of gravitation, talking about attraction in the last query of his Opticks, was even open to the possibility ‘that there may be more attractive Powers’ (Newton 1704: 376). Moreover, the four ‘rules for the study of natural philosophy’ have become emblematic for understanding Newton’s ‘experimental philosophy’. In particular, controversial rule 4, which was added for the third edition of Principia, states: In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypothesis, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions. (Newton 1687: 796) This statement is very different from the commonly-received view of Newton’s legacy. Instead of an emphasis on the apodictic character of a theory, or a concern with its permanent explanatory powers, Newton simply leaves theories open-ended. This is a serious argument corroborat- ing that an axiomatic-deductive model of science alone is neither Newton’s, nor Smith’s, inheritance, as will be discussed in the next section. Schliesser (2005) has given additional evidence for interpreting Smith’s Newtonian theory of science as a research tool for a potentially open-ended process of successive approximation.8 Newton accepts that the progress of natural philosophy is open-ended, arguing for partial truth until proven otherwise, and does not consider mathematical event regu- larities as the hallmark of scientific progress. Laws, for Newton, including the ‘universal’ law of gravity, can be open to refinement as part of this successive approximation process.

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