David F. Hardwick and Leslie Marsh, two scholars from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of British Columbia (Canada), have collected a series of articles by philosophers, economists, and political scientists specializing on Adam Smith. The foreword is by the economist Vernon L. Smith, 2002 laureate of the Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Though brief, this foreword shows the interest that Adam Smith’s work can hold for an experimental economist, provided one looks beyond the prejudices often conveyed about it. And, according to Vernon Smith, this is precisely the merit of Hardwick and Marsh’s book. Indeed, its aim is to do justice to Adam Smith’s work from three aspects: (1) its consistency, (2) its philosophical contribution/legacy, and (3) its ideological significance.
These three aspects run throughout the three parts into which the book is divided: the first part, entitled “Context,” deals with general issues concerning Smith’s intellectual, social, and cultural environment; the second, “Propriety,” emphasizes key concepts of his moral philosophy such as “sympathy” and the “impartial spectator”; and the third, “Prosperity,” is concerned with Smith’s use of the “invisible hand.”
Regarding the first aspect, consistency, the book seeks to dispel an apparent contradiction between Smith’s two major works, the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which we may say concerns “propriety,” and the Wealth of Nations (1776), whose subject is “prosperity.” This apparent contradiction is supposed to turn on Smith’s view of human nature in the respective texts: as benevolent in the former, and self-interested in the latter. The appearance of contradiction had already been called into question by commentators such as Robert B. Lamb (Reference Lamb1974), Terence W. Reference HutchisonHutchison (1976), David D. Raphael and Alec L. Macfie (1976), Athol Fitzgibbons (Reference Fitzgibbons1995), and Jeffrey T. Young (Reference Young1997). Thus, Hardwick and Marsh’s book is in line with other contributions that have tried to challenge the so-called Adam Smith Problem, at least since the publication of his complete edited works in the 1970s. An historian of ideas might well regret that the two editors are not explicit about the new light their collection sheds on the consistency between Smith’s two major works as compared with these older contributions, and all the more so in that there is no obvious link between part II of the book, which is mainly about Smith’s moral philosophy, and part III, which deals with the economic aspects of his work.
Yet, the book should be credited for establishing new connections among the different dimensions of Smith’s work, connections that go beyond the usual link between the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations. Brian Glenney, for instance, in his contribution, “Adam Smith on Sensory Perception: A Sympathetic Account,” draws parallels between Smith’s account of morality in Theory of Moral Sentiments and his account of sensory perception in “On the External Senses,” which is far less famous. Along the same line, Eugene Heath’s contribution, “Metaphor Made Manifest: Taking Seriously Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand,’” focuses on Smith’s development of metaphorical images in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, to illuminate the author’s metaphor of the “invisible hand” as it appears in the Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as in the Wealth of Nations.
Regarding the second aspect, the book aims at re-establishing Smith’s place in the history of ideas. According to the editors, though Smith’s contribution to economics is widely acknowledged, his legacy for philosophy has for too long been neglected, such that he has come to seem a philosopher of secondary importance compared with others of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as, for instance, David Hume. This encourages Hardwick and Marsh to put to the fore the originality of Smith’s thought from the perspective of recent developments in philosophy (philosophy of social science, philosophy of mind, social epistemology, moral philosophy). But, again, note that such an approach is not entirely new among Smith’s scholars (see, for instance, Bence Nanay Reference Nanay2010, and Michaël L. Frazer Reference Frazer2012).
Nevertheless, the book succeeds in offering new insights into Smith’s work. For instance, Spyridon Tegos, in “Friendship in Commercial Society Revisited: Adam Smith on Commercial Friendship,” focuses on a rather novel topic among Adam Smith scholars: “friendship” in commercial society. He emphasizes the originality of Smith’s conception of friendship, as compared, on the one hand, with the “virtue friendship” developed by classical philosophy before him, and, on the other, with what the commentator names “kinship friendship.” The above-mentioned paper by Glenney sets out Smith’s innovative contribution to the study of perception through the use of the modern philosophical concept of “qualia.” In a different way, the contribution by Jack Russell Weinstein, “What My Dog Can Do: On the Effect of The Wealth of Nations I.ii.2,” criticizes Smith’s claim, in The Wealth of Nations (I.ii.2), that there is a demarcation between animal and human cognitive capacities, in order to offer an alternative understanding of what makes human beings fully human.
Moreover, the collection exhibits the originality of Smith’s philosophy from the perspective of recent developments not only in philosophy but also in economics. Roger Frantz, in his “Adam Smith: Eighteenth-Century Polymath,” establishes a parallel between Smith’s assertions and some results from the famous dictator games and trust games experiments, after having made comparisons between Smith’s account of sympathy and Daniel Goleman’s notion of empathy, and between Smith’s impartial spectator and the modern concept of mirror neurons. Similarly, in his “Instincts and the Invisible Order: The Possibility of Progress,” Jonathan B. Wight interprets Smith’s idea that humans are subject to self-deceit as an anticipation of some developments in behavioral economics. Thus, the book deepens a process of inquiry already initiated by Stephen J. Meardon and Andreas Ortmann (1996), David M. Levy (Reference Levy1999), Ignacio Palacios-Huerta (Reference Palacios-Huerta2003), and Laurie Bréban (Reference Bréban2012).
To conclude, we come to the third aspect, the ideological significance of Smith’s work. In line with previous contributions, such as by Tom D. Campbell (Reference Campbell1971), Spencer J. Pack (Reference Pack1991), Donald Winch (Reference Winch1978), or Michaël Biziou (Reference Biziou2003), Hardwick and Marsh want to give a more subtle picture of Adam Smith than the one usually conveyed. As shown by the title of the editors’ introduction (“Epistemology Not Ideology”), the book seeks to counter instrumental readings of Smith that make him, to use the editors’ own words, a fervent defender of “marketocracy” (p. 2). Without naming the authors of these instrumental readings, Hardwick and Marsh aim at what they call “invisible hand explanations” of the following type: “[T]here is an inherent tendency for self-interest to promote the general good” (pp. 3–4). According to them, such an assertion relies on a misinterpretation of the concept of the invisible hand and of Smith’s work more generally. This is the reason why, primarily in part III, they oppose an epistemological reading of the invisible hand to an ideological one.
This ideological battle is precisely what seems to have encouraged these two scholars in medicine to undertake the edition of this collection of papers on Adam Smith. Indeed, they emphasize that they “have overseen the institutional design, management, and interrelationships of large institutions—hospitals, medical schools, research laboratories … as well as in international academy and a voluminous online open-access educational resource,” and that they are “well placed to make some observations to which the hardened ideologue would be oblivious” (p. 2).
This shows that the challenge to the conventional reading of Adam Smith, prevalent for several decades since the contributions generated by the bicentennial of the Wealth of Nations, is being continued today through works initiated by scholars for whom Adam Smith did not, indeed, seem to be a primary concern.
