2023-06-17 11:42:37
Adam Smith grew up in a world in which the church still had something to say, a world of banned books: when he was reading David Hume’s “Treatise on Human Nature” in his room in Oxford, professors on duty stormed the room, to confiscate the heretical book, because Hume was considered a blasphemer because of his empiricist skepticism. Student Smith was reprimanded, but was hardly surprised. In a letter, the oldest document that has survived from his hand, he had previously complained to his mother about the wrong focus at his university: “Our only business here is to go to prayer twice a day and to lecture twice a week go.”
The anecdote suggests that progress in the 18th century did not emanate from the English center of the British Empire. In the Scottish periphery, on the other hand, the universities were more progressive, which is why the North produced a whole range of great minds. Smith’s affiliation with what has become known as the Scottish Enlightenment is sometimes cited to exonerate him. Because few thinkers are under stronger suspicion of ideology than the founder of bourgeois economic theory. Of course, hardly any other thinker finds it easier to refute the suspicion weighing on him than Smith.
Contemporary interpreters rightly point out that his interests were more diverse than the prejudice about him would like – as is the case with the volume with texts by Smith recently published by Suhrkamp. In addition to excerpts from the two main works (“Theory of Moral Feelings”, “Prosperity of Nations”), it also contains two essays by the honoree that have not yet been translated into German. Philosophical writings is the title that sums up the program of the volume: Smith was more than an economist – a comprehensive scholar, an enlightener.
The Origin of Knowledge
The essays, which have now been translated into our language for the first time, provide good evidence of this. They cover topics such as aesthetic imitation and epistemology. In particular, the essay with the unwieldy title “The Principles which Guide and Guide Philosophical Inquiries Illustrated by: The History of Astronomy” stands for the fundamental claim of Smithian philosophy. The author ventures into the field of historical philosophy and asks about the origin of knowledge.
For this, Smith begins in the earliest prehistory, or at a time when mankind probably still had its problems with the explanation of the vast majority of natural phenomena. His reasoning is that even then, people would have found any disruption in the ordinary course of things disturbing. Smith therefore sees the sometimes embarrassing, sometimes admiring feeling of inconsistencies – lightning and thunder are the example – at the origin of all theory formation: “Amazement is the first principle that drives people to study philosophy.” The unknown should be transformed into the known become – this is the formula of Smith’s theory of theory formation, which Norbert Paulo brings to the term “psychology of scientific knowledge” in his epilogue, which is well worth reading.
In the previously more difficult to access “Lectures on Jurisprudence”, which complete the volume, Smith uses a historical method and outlines an ideal-typical history of the forms of government. He had kept her in Edinburgh from 1748, where he had been drawn to after graduating in exile in England. A private educational association gave him the opportunity to give public lectures, the quality of which got around: soon the venerated David Hume was also in the audience.
Smith’s performances in Edinburgh were such a success that the then 28-year-old, who had not previously published, was immediately offered a chair at his home university in Glasgow. Here Smith taught for the next 12 years and authored the first of only two books he published during his lifetime, The Theory of Moral Feelings. It makes up the largest part of the volume that has now been published.
Ethics as Affection
The Germans are accustomed to Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, whose strictness of duty does not exactly enhance sensuality; That’s why the guiding principle of emotional ethics sounds a bit frivolous to her ears, but Smith actually takes the view in his moral philosophy that the good stirs in our body as an emotional impulse, so to speak. Sympathy is the basic concept of his ethics, understood as affection but in a different sense than we are familiar with, namely as the ability to put oneself in another person’s shoes and to empathize with their actions and suffering. The highest point in Smith’s design is a fictitious observer who watches over everything impartially and panoptically. In our minds, we take His perspective, which fills us with pride or shame depending on how we behaved.
This moral teaching, which is not only psychologically extremely far-reaching, is now better known in the professional world. At that time, she was also enthusiastically received by the audience. The Theory of Moral Feelings was long considered Smith’s greatest work. Translations quickly followed, making the author well-known on the continent as well, particularly in France and Germany.
Smith would soon be able to see for himself mainland Europe. He left Glasgow University to accompany a young nobleman on his grand tour of the continent. The first destination was Paris, where the company also lured Humes, whom Smith now referred to as his friend. Oddly enough, he left the capital after a short time to spend a full year and a half with his protégé in the south of France, where the traveling teacher Smith was terribly bored.
“I have begun to write a book to pass the time,” he wrote from Toulouse to Hume in Paris. Biographers emphasize that Smith began work on the main economic work referred to here much earlier in Glasgow and actually during his lectures in Edinburgh. And yet the story has its appeal: the birth of economics from the demon of tourist Ennui.
Die „Inquiriy into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations“ is considered the script for capitalism and therefore politically questionable by some, but the book was a critical theory in its time. In it, Smith attacks the mode of production based on personal relationships of dependency, i.e. the feudalism that prevails in Europe, together with its superstructure of a mercantilist theory of the state. Mercantilism understood wealth to be an effect of skilful trade: the prosperity of those economies that are able to outwit their competing neighbors through skilful import and export policies grows.
Such a clash seemed problematic to Smith in practice, and the theory involved superficial. He turned away from the market and towards the production of goods, which enabled him to grasp the origin of economic value creation much more concretely. This shift in perspective to the sphere of production also made Karl Marx Smith stand out among bourgeois economists.
Involuntarily subversive
Today the font is one of the classics. It fares like all substantial works that are no longer taken seriously because they are all too well known. In addition, in contemporary economics, any systematic claim is pushed aside in Smith’s thinking. The belief in the market that still prevails in the discipline, actually something pre-bourgeois/mercantilist, says that supply and demand will do the trick. But the metaphor of the invisible hand also referred to a sensible organization of the whole. This idea that germinated in Smith, that the wealth of a society can be measured objectively and consequently distributed fairly, has remained revolutionary.
As subversive as his thinking was, the mature Smith as a person did not correspond to the revolutionary type. If he was subversive then involuntarily. This is the case with the question of the administration of the estate of his best friend David Hume. His state of health deteriorated just a few weeks after the publication of the “Wealth of Nations” and the British feuilletons looked eagerly to Edinburgh, where the avowed atheist lay on his deathbed: one wanted to know whether the heretic, who was denied any academic position during his lifetime , would still accept baptism; just in case, so to speak.
But instead of worrying about the afterlife, Hume worried about who might edit his final work, the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and naturally he thought first of his closest companion Smith. Although he could not bring himself to accept the commission, he published an account of the last days of his friend that was as honest as it was loving. He died shortly afterwards without being baptized. For this, Smith was covered with insults, as they can only ennoble a scout. He summed up that his account of Hume’s bravery earned him “ten times more insults than the very violent attacks on the entire trading system of Britain”.
As the words suggest, Smith didn’t particularly enjoy the role of the rebel. He was more of an institutional man. When he was later presented with the honorary title of Rector of the University of Glasgow, he accepted, saying: “The thirteen years which I have lived as a member of this body I remember as the most useful, and therefore the happiest and most honorable, period of my life.” . There wasn’t much to do in the position of rector. Nevertheless, Smith wrote no more great work. Partly because he preferred a social life, partly because he was busy with other duties as a customs commissioner.
There would have been enough research material available. We can only imagine what might have become of the 16 volumes of manuscripts that he had friends throw into the fire shortly before his death, when he himself could no longer move. Only a handful of essays from the huge corpus were spared and it is very fortunate that two of these texts are finally available in German. The “Philosophical Writings” are a worthy gift for the 300th birthday and will promote the confrontation with Adam Smith. His philosophy deserves it.
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