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Home , Dugald Stewart, John Ramsay McCulloch, Joseph Black, Josiah Child

Donald Winch and Cosmopolitanism in the Early Histories of Political Economy1

One indication that had acquired a secure place on the European map of knowledge by the end of the eighteenth century was the sound of the first shots being fired in disputes over the original nationality of the infant . Then as now, these disputes concerned the respective claims of different founding figures and precursors classified according to nationality, priority, and relative importance. The chief contenders were, and have largely remained, French, Italian, and British, though for my purposes it will also be necessary to distinguish between English and Scottish writers. I shall not present new evidence designed to settle what have frequently been sterile debates, but I shall be particularly concerned -- to begin with at least -- with what has come to be known as Scottish political economy. In Britain, during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, there was an early association of the science with Scottish authors, chiefly but not solely as a result of Adam

Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of . For those who had given the subject some thought, it could also be recalled that had published a penetrating sequence of essays on economic topics in 1752; that in one of those essays Hume had engaged in a learned dispute on the populousness of nations with a fellow-Scot,

Robert Wallace; and that Sir James Steuart had published his Inquiry into the Principles of

Political Oeconomy in 1767. It was entirely appropriate, therefore, that the first course of lectures on post-Smithian political economy should be given by , who for a decade after 1799 employed his Chair of Moral Philosophy at for this purpose. The result of Stewart’s initiative was to produce for Smith a small band of Scottish-educated grandchildren in the shape of those who founded the Edinburgh Review in 1802, making it the main organ for disseminating the latest views on political economy for the next three

1 This essay first appeared in M. Albertone and A. Masoero (eds), Political Economy and National Realities, Torino: Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, 1994.

1 decades. When David Buchanan produced a critical edition of the Wealth of Nations in 1814, and two other Scottish-born economists, John Ramsay McCulloch and , emerged in the 1820s as the leading popularizers of the new science, the association with Scotland was complete. Indeed, it was strong enough to form part of an English caricature of the ‘Scotch pheelosopher’, where an in the subject went along with another Scottish style of thinking -- the pursuit of the origins and development of civil society from ‘rudeness to refinement‘ by means of a form of in which universal psychological principles and social circumstances played twin illuminating roles.2 In retrospect, of course, the fact that McCulloch and Mill were both disciples of , the figure whose theories, along with those of Robert Malthus, were reshaping Smith’s legacy, may be more significant to the history of economic thought than their place of birth and education. This was a sign not merely that the science was capable of development, but that whatever it was that gave a distinctive Scottish flavour and breadth to the science was in the course of being diluted and narrowed as a result of the intellectual arena being shifted to London.3 In fact one could argue that having lost whatever significance it once had ‘Scottish political economy‘ has been reinvented in the late twentieth century. It has become a sophisticated term of interpretative art that has at least two different meanings, depending on the of those who employ it. When used by economists it becomes a means of recapturing historical, psychological, and sociological dimensions that have been lost to ‘English’, Anglo-American, and modern generally.4 Alternatively, and with different connotations, it has been widely employed by those who are chiefly concerned with the collective characteristics of another fairly recent coinage, the . Within the latter category falls the work of those cultural historians and political theorists

2 The term ‘Scotch pheelosopher‘ was coined by the radical publicist William Cobbett. For a somewhat better-informed contemporary caricature of Scottish political economy see Thomas Love Peacock’s novel, Crotchet Castle. 3 For studies of the early nineteenth-century fate of various Scottish intellectual enterprises, including political economy, see the first three essays in Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics; A Study in Intellectual History, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983), pp.23-126; and Biancamaria Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: the Edinburgh Review, 1802-32, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985), pp.1-111. 4 For a useful compendium of economists‘ views on this matter see Douglas Mair (ed), The Scottish Contribution to Modern Economic Thought, (Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen, 1990), especially the contributions of A. L. Macfie, Sheila C. Dow and Terence Hutchison.

2 who are anxious to relate Scottish ideas to the social and political context of eighteenth- century Scotland, thereby adding greatly to our knowledge of the context in which these ideas took shape.5 But if inquiry is confined to contemporary usage and reputation we can still say that while there was an early association of political economy with Scotland, the attribution of qualities to it that are only explicable in terms of special Scottish circumstances and intellectual preoccupations during the eighteenth century is of fairly recent origin.

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When the Wealth of Nations had begun to make its way in the world -- a process that was slower than was once thought to be the case6 -- the question of Smith’s borrowings from other, chiefly French, authors began to be the subject of speculation and argument. Only three years after Smith’s death in 1790 Stewart found it necessary to answer this question in his Account of the Life and Writings of , and he opened his discussion with an acceptance of similarity followed by a counter-claim: ‘That [Smith’s] doctrine concerning the freedom of trade and of industry coincides remarkably with that which we find in the writings of the French Economists, appears from the slight view of their system which he himself has given. But it surely cannot be pretended by the warmest admirers of that system, that any one of its numerous expositors

5 One could date the beginning of such attempts to the first Marxist-inspired interpretations of why Scotland, despite its comparative economic backwardness, should have been the seed-bed for political economy and a stage-view of social development that bore a family resemblance to Marx’s materialist theory of history. Here the work of Roy Pascal (1938) and Ronald Meek is preeminent: for bibliography and comment see A. S. Skinner, ‘A Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology?‘ in I. Bradley and M. Howard (eds), Classical and Marxian Political Economy, (Macmillan, London, 1982), pp. 79-114. More recently detailed work has been undertaken on the social and cultural history of the Scottish Enlightenment, where the work of three representative authors can be mentioned: N. Phillipson, ‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth- Century Province; The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment‘ in L. Stone (ed), The University in Society, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1974), volume II, pp. 407-48; J. Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, (John Donald, Edinburgh 1985); and R. B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment; The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh, (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh,1985). For an indication of my for differing with both the Marxist and more recent cultural and ‘ideological‘ attempts to interpret Adam Smith within a purely Scottish context see ‘Adam Smith’s "Enduring Particular Result": A Cosmopolitan and Political Perspective‘ in I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue; The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983), pp. 253-69. This collection also contains some of the best material illustrating the new approach by cultural historians to Scottish political economy. 6 For evidence of the slowness with which the Wealth of Nations actually made its way in the world see K. Willis, ‘The Role in Parliament of the Economic Ideas of Adam Smith, 1776-1800’, History of Political Economy, XIV (1979), 505-44; S. Rashid, ‘Adam Smith’s Rise to Fame; a Reexamination of the Evidence’, The Eighteenth Century, XXIII (1982), 64-85; and R. F. Teichgraeber, ‘"Less Abused than I had to Expect": the Reception of the Wealth of Nations in Britain, 1776-90’, Historical Journal, XXX (1987), 337-66.

3 has approached to Mr. Smith in the precision and perspicuity with which he has stated it, or in the scientific and luminous manner in which he has deduced it from elementary principles.’7 Stewart also noted that French economists had published their views on freedom of trade before Smith, mentioning Turgot’s articles in the Encyclopédie in 1756 in particular. On this question of priority Stewart first called upon the recollections of those who had attended Smith’s lectures in the early , but fortified them by citing a document in which Smith himself laid claim to having first lectured on the importance of leaving trade to the ‘natural course of things‘ at Edinburgh in 1748 and in all the lectures he had given at Glasgow after he was appointed to a Chair at that university in 1752/3. At this time, Stewart emphasized, ‘there existed no French performance on the subject, that could be of much use to [Smith] in guiding his researches’, basing this statement on Du Pont de Nemour’s early exercise in the history of French economic thought published in the Ephèmérides du Citoyen in 1769.8 This citation was not as innocent as might appear at first sight. Du

Pont’s bibliothéque raisonée was devoted to establishing, simultaneously, the French and physiocratic title to priority as the founders of the new science. In reply, Stewart was using Du Pont’s evidence on Smith’s behalf. According to Stewart, in the early 1750s only Hume’s essays could have been of any help to Smith, and these not only contained ‘some fundamental mistakes‘ but showed ‘that, in considering a subject so extensive and so complicated, the most penetrating sagacity, if directed only to particular questions, is apt to be led astray by first appearances.’9 Stewart returned to the defence of Smith’s claims to originality when he added notes to the Account during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Here again Du Pont provided the rival position. Stewart was aware of the following disparaging comparative judgement registered in Du Pont’s Mémoires sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de M. Turgot (1782), a judgement

7 See the Account as edited by I. S. Ross and published in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, The Glasgow Edition of The Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, edited by W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980), volume III, pp. 319-20. 8 See ‘Notice abregée des different Ecrits modern qui ont concouru en France a former la Science de l’economie politique’, Ephèmérides du Citoyen, 1769, I, xi-lii; II, iii-xlviii; 3, iii-xix; IV, iii.xxxiv; V, iii-lvii, 5-52; VIII, 5-38; IX, 5-78. 9 Account, p. 321.

4 that was repeated when reprinted in the first volume of Du Pont’s edition of Turgot’s works in 1808-11:

‘[Turgot’s Réflexions] consists of a very short octavo volume of less than 80 pages which is, nevertheless, particularly clear: everything that is true in the estimable but difficult work that M. Smith has since published on the same subjects in two large quarto volumes can be found there; and everything that Adam Smith has added lacks precision and foundation.’10 To this opinion, which Du Pont admitted might have appeared dubious (‘hazardée’) when it was first printed in 1782, he added several pages dealing with the points on which Smith and Turgot were either in agreement or diverged from one another. These observations mark the beginning of one of the longest running stories in the history of economic thought.11 They also contain the orthodox physiocratic response to Smith’s criticisms of the ‘agricultural system’, showing those places, especially with regard to the effect of taxes on consumer goods, where Smith was in error in failing to press home the logic of his attack on the British fiscal system. Du Pont even allowed himself the freedom conferred by reminiscence to recall the time when he and Smith were ‘fellow-pupils of M. Quesnay‘ to state that ‘Smith at liberty, Smith in the privacy of his own room or that of a friend‘ would never have made such a mistake -- a thinly-veiled suggestion that Smith acted out of political prudence.12 Faced with Du Pont’s version of the history of political economy, Stewart now took a different line of defence by drawing attention to earlier English writers -- Josiah Child, , Thomas Culpepper, Jacob Vanderlint, John Law, Joshua Gee, Archbishop Berkeley, and -- who provided sources from which French authors, such as de Gournay, Quesnay and Turgot, could draw. He partly called on the bibliographic researches of Abbé Morellet on the earlier history of political economy, but the chief evidence cited by Stewart

10 See Du Pont’s edition of Oeuvres de Turgot, Paris, 1808-11, volume I, pp. 118-9. Given DuPont’s views on Smith, originally stated in 1782, it is hardly surprising that he chose to be more diplomatic when writing to Smith himself in 1788. On that occasion he flattered Smith by saying that his work had greatly hastened the policy revolution in favour of that Du Pont, working for Calonne’s ministry, was undertaking, merely adding, with ironic modesty perhaps, that the French Economistes ‘have not been without their uses’ (‘n’y auront pas nui’); see Correspondence of Adam Smith edited by E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross in Glasgow edition, 1987, p.313. 11 For a judicious review of the controversy and a resolution of the main issues see P. D. Groenewegen, ‘Turgot and Adam Smith’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, XVI (1969), pp.71-87. 12 Oeuvres de Turgot, vol. V, p. 136.

5 came from Turgot’s Eloge de Gournay.13 And the fact that he was able to cite Du Pont’s editorial comments on this work, without actually naming the ‘learned and ingenious‘ editor. may have added a little spice to the fact that, indirectly, he was once more using Du Pont to answer Du Pont.

Turgot’s Eloge served Stewart’s main purpose perfectly because it revealed that de Gournay had pursued his interest in political economy by translating the works of Child and Culpepper on trade and the rate of interest. As Turgot put it, de Gournay recognized that the English literature on these subjects was ‘the richest of all in such works’. In another passage emphasized by Stewart, Turgot added that de Gournay ‘knew that for more than a century, all enlightened minds, whether in Holland or in England, had regarded these abuses [state intervention in trade] as remnants of medieval barbarism and of the weakness of all governments which had known neither the importance of public liberty, nor how to protect it against the invasions of the spirit of monopoly and of particular interests.’14 This provided Stewart with grounds for concluding that: ‘The leading opinions which the French Economists embodied and systematized were, in fact, all of British origin; and most of them follow as necessary consequences, from a maxim of natural law, which (according to Lord Coke), is identified with the first principles of English jurisprudence.‘ The only parts of the ‘economical system‘ that were truly original were those relating to ‘the power of the Sovereign’, which Stewart took as a clear sign that ‘its original authors and patrons were the decided opposers of political liberty.’15 Normally very cautious on the subject of political liberty, especially after the , Stewart had been drawn by the controversy over the national origins of political economy into reviving one of the most common criticisms of the physiocrats as a sect: their support for absolute monarchy. What seems clear from this controversy is that the scholarly history of political economy was already launched by 1769, and that it was generating disputes which rumbled on into

13 See Morellet’s, Prospectus d’un Nouveau Dictionnaire de Commerce, 1769, pp. 326-52, which, since it covers English, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian writings, contains a far more cosmopolitan bibliothéque raisonée than Du Pont’s work of the same date (see note 7 above). 14 As cited in Note I to Stewart’s Account, pp. 344-5. 15 Note J to Stewart’s Account, p. 349.

6 the early part of the nineteenth century. It is also clear from Stewart’s response that the nationalistic element he wished to stress was English or British rather than Scottish.16 Another point worth mentioning is that those who were not as firmly tied to Du Pont’s physiocratic version of history, notably Turgot and Morellet, were equally anxious to combat nationalistic interpretations and to recognize pre-Quesnay insights.17

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If we now turn to Adam Smith’s treatment of his contemporaries and predecessors another emphasis emerges, though it too underlines the retrospective nature of any use of Scottish political economy as a collective term. Bearing in mind Smith’s obvious centrality to any attempt to define this term -- an enumeration of its characteristics which did not fit Smith in almost every particular would be a strange one -- Smith’s lack of generosity in acknowledging the shared aims and achievements of his Scottish contemporaries is striking. It is well known that he unfairly dismissed Steuart by self-consciously choosing never to mention his name or work.18 But even in the case of Smith’s close friend Hume, it is significant that explicit invocations of Hume’s authority are far more likely to be reserved for Hume as historian and moral philosopher than they are for Hume as political economist.19 From a Scottish perspective it would have been far more fitting if Smith had wished to dedicate the Wealth of Nations to his dying friend in 1776. In fact, his original idea was to dedicate the work to the recently deceased Quesnay, possibly as some kind of gesture to cosmopolitanism, remembering Smith’s opinion that the agricultural system Quesnay had created was ‘the

16 Stewart also took issue with Du Pont’s classification of the founders of political economy into two separate but compatible schools of economic thought associated with the names of de Gournay and Quesnay respectively. Into the first school Du Pont placed Josiah Tucker, David Hume, Beccaria and Filangieri, with the more orthodox physiocrats being assigned to Quesnay’s school. Between these two schools, thus depicted, Du Pont placed Turgot, Smith, and some other more recent writers such as Germain Garnier, Lord Lansdowne, Jean-Baptiste Say and Simonde de Sismondi. Stewart pointed out that Hume had published his essays in 1752, at the same time as de Gournay published his translations of Child and Culpepper. He was also able to draw on a letter from Lansdowne saying that he owed his conversion to free trade to a journey he took with Smith from Edinburgh to London; see Note J to Stewart’s Account, p. 347. 17 See Turgot’s criticisms of Du Pont’s commentary on Beccaria’s ‘Discours d’ouverture de la chaire d’économie politique de Milan’, Ephèmérides, 1769, volume 6, pp. 53-152 in a letter to Caillard, January 1, 1771. Turgot thought Du Pont should have been more tolerant in his judgement of the merits of Melon’s work by bearing in mind that he had written before , Hume, Cantillon, Quesnay, and de Gournay had published their work. 18 Letter to W. Pulteney, 3 September, 1772 in Correspondence, p. 164: ‘I have the same opinion of Sir James Stewart’s Book that you have. Without once mentioning it, I flatter myself that every false principle in it, will meet with a clear and distinct confrontation in mine.’ 19 The exceptions to this in WN are to be found in the neutral reference to Hume on paper money (II.ii.96) and the explicit endorsement of Hume on interest (II.iv.9).

7 nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy‘ (WN, IV.ix.38).20 Indeed, one could go further in the cosmopolitan direction by pointing out that, with the significant exception of Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and, to a minor extent, Lord Kames, Smith did not refer to other Scottish philosophers in his published work taken as a whole, even to those contemporaries and pupils, such as and John Millar, who, by 1776, had published works which later commentators on the Scottish Enlightenment regard as having sufficiently close affinities with his own to justify both the definite article and the national adjective. Whether we take this is as a sign of congenital mean-spiritedness on Smith’s part, or merely as evidence that he had a justifiable sense of his own originality as the architect of a substantially novel system, depends on the position one adopts towards the centre-piece of the Wealth of Nations as a guide to legislators, the ‘natural system of perfect liberty and justice‘ (WN.IV.vii.c.44). Smith’s claims to early and independent enunciation of this system, as we have seen, were the ones he was most anxious to register when he drew up the list of doctrines cited by Stewart in his biographical Account. Smith underlined this feature of his work by coining the pejorative term ‘mercantile system‘ to describe the dominant features of existing -making, and by signalling privately that he was intent on mounting a ‘very violent attack‘ upon it.21 It was this feature of the book too that several of his Scottish friends noticed when the long-awaited work first appeared. As said: ‘You have done great Service to the World by overturning all that interested Sophistry of Merchants, with which they had Confounded the whole subject of Commerce.‘ Ferguson believed that Smith would ‘reign alone on these subjects‘ and ‘form the opinions, and I hope to govern at least the coming generations’, though he predicted that merchants, along with the church and the universities, would be provoked by Smith’s attacks on them. The judgement that Smith had accomplished something without significant intellectual precedent or competition was also underlined by

20 Smith’s intention in this regard was reported by Dugald Stewart in his Account, p. 304. 21 See Correspondence. p. 251.

8 the letters he received from Hume, , and William Robertson, the last of whom stated that Smith had ‘formed into a regular and consistent system one of the most intricate and important parts of political science’, concluding that if the English showed themselves capable of going beyond the ‘narrow and illiberal arrangements‘ favoured by mercantile writers, Smith’s book would result in ‘a total change in several important articles both in police and finance.’22 Contrary to the tactic later adopted by Stewart when dealing with questions of national origin and priority, therefore, Smith was unwilling to credit the ‘pretended doctors‘ of the mercantile system with any insight or discovery. Although he did not follow the extreme line adopted with Steuart, Smith’s references to particular mercantile authors are sparse, with a tendency to suggest that after most writers, including ‘some of the best English writers on commerce’, were held in thrall by their confusion of wealth with specie, and hence by an erroneous obsession with a favourable balance of trade as the best means of ensuring the supply of specie. Apart from this pervasive doctrinal error, Smith’s aggregative treatment of his English predecessors provides few additional clues as to what led him to be so dismissive.23 This applies even to those, like Locke, whose philosophical reputation might have entitled his economic writings to greater consideration.24 It is well known that Smith had ‘little faith in Political Arithmetic‘ (WN, IV.v.b.30); and to this can be added the observation that he did not make use of the entry into matters of political economy provided by the eighteenth-century debate on ‘populousness‘ -- a route explored by several of his predecessors, including Montesquieu, Hume and Wallace, as well as Cantillon and Steuart.25

22 See letters numbered 150 to 154 in Correspondence, pp.186-94. 23 Those mentioned in WN are as follows: John Locke, Thomas Mun, and Bernard de Mandeville. From the earlier draft and LJ it is possible to add references to Joshua Gee and Jonathan Swift (see LJA, pp.392-4) together with the judgement that ‘allmost all authors after Mun [1664]‘ (up to Hume?) have defined wealth as specie (LJA, p.300). In WN (IV.i.35) there is a reference to ‘some of the best English writers on commerce’, but it prefaces a remark about how they allow their recognition that goods constitute wealth ‘to slip out of their memory.‘ But Smith’s library contained a fair sample of the works of the ‘best English writers’, and he makes use of their findings on specific matters: e.g. Josiah Child (WN,V.i.e.9.11-12), Mathew Decker (‘an excellent authority’, WN, IV.v.a.20), Charles Smith (‘ingenious and well-informed’, WN,IV.ii.20; IV.v.a.4). Joseph Harris has been suggested by the editors of the Glasgow edition as a pervasive source on money and other matters. 24 In LJA Smith says that Locke gave the system ‘somewhat more of a philosophicall air and the appearance of probability by some amendments’; see LJA, p.381 and repeated in LJB, p. 508. 25 See R.D.C.Black, ‘Le teorie della popolazione prima di Malthus in Inghilterra e in Irlanda’, Le teorie della popolazione prima di Malthus a cura di Gabriella Gioli, (Milan, 1987), pp. 47-69.

9 This route was, of course, to provide Malthus with his point of entry into political economy in 1798. What this evidence underlines is the fact that Smith not only had a strong sense of his own originality, but that unlike those who later began to take a scholarly interest in the national origins of political economy, he had immediate political aims in view which did not allow him to adopt a tolerant view of his mercantile predecessors. As Stewart noted, Smith’s condemnation of those methods by which merchants and manufacturers, acting in concert, had duped legislators into creating an illiberal programme of bounties, monopolies. and other restrictions designed to serve their interest at the expense of the rest of society is expressed in ‘a tone of indignation which he seldom assumes in his political writings.’26 This accounts too for the fact that modern historians of economics who do not share Smith’s aims have found it relatively easy to discover interesting examples of economic analysis in earlier writers who were either overlooked or comprehensively dismissed by Smith.27 It was not simply a case of Smith being unwilling to recognize intellectual debts: he found something else in the mercantile literature that overshadowed whatever economic acumen was to be found there. Politically, we know the source of Smith’s distaste: it lay in his antagonism to ‘national animosities‘ and the malign influence of mercantile pressure groups on the ‘policy of ‘ in general and the British legislature in particular. Moreover, as moral philosopher he had other reasons for wishing to reject the entire method and style of thinking on questions of and justice that informed mercantile writings.28

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What we have seen so far is an unwillingness to stress purely Scottish credentials in the writings of two figures who might well have chosen to do so. Smith was, for example,

26 See Account, p.316. 27 The locus classicus of the opinion that Smith merely synthesized and rarely surpassed the best work of his predecessors can be found in Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis, pp. 183-94, 557-8; see also p.361, where Smith ‘s treatment of mercantile writings is described as ‘unintelligent criticism’, and the judgement on p.376: ‘If Smith and his followers had refined and developed the "mercantilist" propositions instead of throwing them away, a much truer and much richer theory of international economic relations could have been developed.‘ For a recent and extensive attempt to document a similar view, though without Schumpeter’s condescension, see T. W. Hutchison, Before Adam Smith; the Emergence of Political Economy, 1662-1776, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988). 28 I have dealt with this question at greater length in ‘Adam Smith: Scottish Moral Philosopher as Political Economist’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), pp. 91-113.

10 sufficiently proud of such Scottish institutions as the parish schools, the clergy of the Scottish Church, and the universities to recommend them as models for England. For his part, Stewart paid tribute to the native tradition in metaphysics when he surveyed the progress of philosophy in Europe.29 In both cases, however, though for different reasons, intellectual cosmopolitanism rather than nationalism proved to be the stronger impulse. It is also clear that when dealing with claims to priority or independent discovery, what was being stressed was the comprehensive working out of the system of natural liberty together with its policy implications. If we look more closely at the analytical components of the system, and how Smith chose to put them together, a different story emerges -- even if we continue to confine ourselves to contemporary perceptions.

In his Account Stewart was careful to distinguish between Smith’s claims to priority and the question, as he put it, of ‘how far Mr. Smith has availed himself of the writings of the Economists in his Wealth of Nations.‘ A sympathetic treatment of the writings of French economists was a marked feature of Stewart’s lectures on political economy. Though heavily reliant on the Wealth of Nations, the lectures did not assume that Smith’s reasoning on fundamental theoretical issues was the dernier mot. On several important questions, notably the distinction between productive and unproductive labour and that raised by Malthus’s criticisms of Smith for equating capital accumulation with rising real wages, Stewart refused to adopt Smith’s approach. He also devoted several lectures to the errors and injustices in Smith’s account of physiocratic doctrine: he believed that the French economists had been more accurate in their use of theoretical terms, while conceding that Smith’s usage was ‘of greater practical utility to those who are to engage in the general business of the world, especially to those who have a more particular reference to the business of political life’.30 Stewart was successful in conveying these opinions to his pupils, and most especially to , who for several years pursued the project of reconciling Anglo-French

29 See his Dissertation Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and as reprinted in The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart edited by Sir William Hamilton, (Edinburgh, 1854), Volume I, pp. 427-84. He also claimed that that ‘it was by habits of metaphysical thinking that the minds of those authors were formed, by whom political economy was first exalted to the dignity of a science‘ (p. 477n). 30 See Lectures on Political Economy in Collected Works, volume 8, p. 306.

11 positions by examining Smith’s system in what for him was often the superior light of the French economists. Thus it was Turgot rather than Smith who furnished Horner with the best ‘model for the style of reasoning‘ in political economy: hence his plan to produce an English edition of all of Turgot’s works. Smith had not supplied a ‘correct and precise theory of the nature and origins of wealth’. On the theory of , for example, Horner criticized

Canard’s Principes d’Economie Politique for preferring ‘the errors of our English writers to the accurate and precise notions of exchangeable value which he might have found in various excellent works, published in his own language; particularly those of M. Turgot and of the Abb‚ Morellet.‘ Horner also found Smith to be in error on a number of practical issues which included the theory of money, taxation, and the analysis of corn bounties. Although he never succeeded in completing his study of the relative merits of Smith’s system when compared with that of the French economists, Horner felt confident enough to make the following pronouncement in 1803: ‘That Smith did not precisely distinguish the real import of the economical system, is now confessed, we believe, even by those who agree with him in rejecting it. We are further satisfied that he derived a much larger portion of his reasonings from them, than he himself perhaps recollected; that his principles on the formation and distribution of national riches approached more nearly to those of Quesnai, than he was himself aware; and that, to have recognized an entire coincidence, it was only necessary for him to have followed out his analysis a few steps farther.’31 Horner also recorded more practical, even political reasons, for not wishing to expose Smith’s theoretical shortcomings: ‘We owe much at present to the superstitious worship of Smith’s name; and we must not impair that feeling, till the victory is more complete.‘ For this reason he rejoiced in the good Smith’s influence had done in furthering the study of political economy among ‘the young men in Parliament‘ and refused to join Lauderdale, Wheatley and Brougham in their outright attacks on Smith’s authority.32

31 See The Economic Writings of Francis Horner edited by F. W. Fetter, (London School of Economics, London, 1957), p.73. 32 For Horner’s views on Smith see Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Horner, edited by L. Horner, (Boston, 1853), volume I, pp. 126-7 and 237-8. A more complete edition of Horner’s journals and correspondence edited by Kenneth

12 If Du Pont had been able to read any of this he would have felt justified in making his remarks about Smith’s borrowings from French sources. It would also have given him some comfort after reading Jean-Baptiste Say’s comprehensive betrayal of French models in the preliminary discourse to his Traité d’Economie Politique. Whatever claims might be registered on behalf of Italian authors such as Beccaria, Verri, and Filangieri, or French authors, including Quesnay and Turgot, or other possible precursors such as James Steuart, it was Say’s firm opinion that Smith was preeminent:

‘Whenever the Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations is perused with the attention it so well merits, it will be perceived that until the epoch of its publication, the science of political economy did not exist.... Many principles strictly correct had often been advanced prior to the time of Dr. Smith; he, however, was the first author who established their truth. Nor is this all. He has furnished us, also, with the true method of detecting errors; he has applied to political economy the new mode of scientific investigation, namely of not looking for principles abstractedly, but by ascending from facts the most constantly observed, to the general laws which govern them. As every fact may be said to have a particular cause, it is in the spirit of system to determine the cause; it is in the spirit of analysis, to be solicitous to know why a particular cause has produced this effect, in order to be satisfied that it could not have been produced by any other cause. The work of Dr. Smith is a succession of demonstrations, which has elevated many propositions to the rank of indisputable principles, and plunged a still greater number into that imaginary gulph, in which extravagant hypotheses and vague opinions for a certain period struggle, before being forever swallowed up.’33 No wonder then that Du Pont felt obliged to rebuke his young compatriot by attempting to remind him of his true lineage: ‘This idea that occurs to you to reject us, and which you do

Bourne and William Taylor has now been published by Edinburgh University Press. The relevant documents in this work are numbered 132, 155, and 157. 33 The translation is that of Clement Biddle for the new American edition of the Treatise published in Philadelphia in 1836, pp. xxxviii-ix. In the 6th edition of the Traité‚ edited by Horace Say and published in Paris in 1841 the passage is on pp. 28-30.

13 not hide well, my dear Say, does not do away with the fact that you are through the branch of Smith a grandson of Quesnay, a nephew of the great Turgot.’34

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A revaluation of political economy in France during the immediate pre- and post- revolutionary period is now under way.35 When complete it will enable us to gauge the role played by Smith’s ideas, among those of others, during this period. The reception of these ideas through translation and plagiarism is likely, for instance, to show what kinds of ‘victory’, in Horner’s sense, the disseminators were seeking, and how the Wealth of

Nations could be of assistance when more domestic products were thought to be in need of supplementation. Some interesting new work has been done on this subject for Germany, and similar studies have been undertaken on Italy, where the most important publishing enterprise was the forty-eight volume edition completed by Pietro Custodi in the years 1803-5 under the title Scrittori Classici Italiani di Economia Politica. 36 Custodi’s aims may have been to serve a proto-nationalistic cause. Alternatively, and this would suit my preferences (prejudices?) better, one could simply see it as a legitimate attempt to draw attention to the Italian contribution to a European-wide phenomenon, thereby following the precedent set by Beccaria, Morellet, and Turgot. Writing in 1793, at the beginning of the scholarly process of assessing claims, Stewart too had put forward an international list of authors -- Smith, Quesnay, Turgot, Campomanes, and Beccaria -- as representative examples of those who had, during the previous thirty years, ‘aimed at the improvement of society, not by delineating plans of new constitutions, but by enlightening the policy of actual legislators’.37

The same spirit of tolerance and cosmopolitanism best captures the treatment of political economy in the period with which I have been concerned. But in order to emphasize this

34 As quoted in James J. McLain, The Economic Writings of Du Pont de Nemours, (University of Delaware Press, Newark, 1977), p. 201. 35 See G. Faccarello and G. Steiner (eds), La Pensée Economique pendant la Révolution Francaise, (Presses Universitaire de Grenoble, 1990). Work on this theme and period is also being undertaken at the Centre d’Histoire de la Pensée Economique, Université de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, under the direction of Daniel Diatkine and André Lapidus. 36 On Germany see K. Tribe, Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Economic Discourse, 1750- 1840, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988). On Italy see the contributions by D. Donnini-Maccio, R. Romani and F. di Battista to the work edited by Faccarello and Steiner in note 34 above. 37 See Account, p. 311.

14 some contrast is needed, and that is readily supplied by the more overtly nationalistic bombast of John Elliot Cairnes and Walter Bagehot in the 1870s, for whom, in the former’s words, ‘every great step in the progress of economic science...has been won by English thinkers; and while we have led the van in economic speculation, we have also been the first to apply with boldness our theories to practice.’38 That kind of statement could not have been made by any of the authors with which I have been dealing, and the confidence with which it was made owes something to developments in political economy in England by Smith’s classical successors, but probably more to national pride in the establishment of free trade as official British policy. As Turgot pointed out to , there could be no cause for English self-congratulation in 1778, at a time when the ‘system of monopoly and exclusion‘ set the fashion, as shown by British attempts to subdue the American colonies, and when only Josiah Tucker and Adam Smith could be cited as exceptions to the general English (or Scottish) rule.39

38 See J. E. Cairnes, Essays on Political Economy, (London, 1873), p. 232; and W. Bagehot, ‘The Postulates of English Political Economy’, written in 1876 and reprinted in Economic Studies, (London, 1908), p.1. 39 Turgot to Richard Price, March 22, 1778 in Oeuvres, ed. E. Daire, volume II, pp. 805-11.

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