Adam Smith as Theologian

Paul Oslington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136721984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Adam Smith wrote in a Scotland where Calvinism, Continental natural law theory, Stoic philosophy, and the Newtonian tradition of scientific natural theology were key to the intellectual lives of his contemporaries. But what impact did these ideas have on Smith's system? What was Smith's understanding of nature, divine providence, and theodicy? How was the new discourse of political economy positioned in relation to moral philosophy and theology?

In this volume a team of distinguished contributors consider Smith's work in relation to its Scottish Enlightenment religious background, and offer stimulating theological interpretations of his account of fallible human nature, his providential account of markets, and his invisible hand metaphor. Adam Smith as Theologian it is a pioneering study which will alter our view of Smith and open up new lines of thinking about contemporary economics.

Part I

Smith in Context

1 The Influence of Religious Thinking
on the Smithian Revolution

Benjamin M. Friedman

The idea of religious influences on Adam Smith’s thinking, or indeed on that of his contemporaries like David Hume, will probably strike many as implausible on its face. Smith’s great friend Hume was an open opponent of any known form of religion. Smith, as far as one can tell, was at best what American students of that time think of as a Jeffersonian deist. There is little if any evidence of Smith’s active religious participation, much less religious enthusiasm.

But Smith and his contemporaries lived in a time when religion was both more pervasive and more central than anything we know in today’s Western world. Just as important, intellectual life was far more integrated than now. Not only were the sciences and the humanities (to use today’s language) normally discussed in the same circles and often by the same individuals, but theology too was part of the ongoing discussion. At least in the Englishspeaking Protestant world, no one had yet thought to segregate theologians in distinct ‘divinity schools’ located at some physical distance from the center of university campuses (think, for example, of the Yale Divinity School, now splendidly situated ‘on the hill’ a mile or so away from the Old Campus). Especially in Scotland, informal intellectual life was well integrated in this regard. When Smith and his fellow moral philosophers dined out, their regular interlocutors included professional divines. Of the 100-plus members of the Select Society, Edinburgh’s elite dining and debate club in the 1750s and early 1760s—to which Smith, Hume, Adam Ferguson and most of the distinguished Scottish figures of that day belonged—14 were ministers (including Ferguson, who also held the chair of moral philosophy in Edinburgh, as well as William Robertson, the leader of the Moderate Party in the Scottish church and also principal of Edinburgh University).

Moreover, in Smith’s day religion was coterminous with politics. In 18thcentury Scotland the Moderates and the Evangelicals were of course debating matters of theology. But their debates were also about political matters: issues of liberty, such as the allowable degree of toleration; issues of authority within the established Church, and therefore of political influence; and issues of patronage in the awarding of church livings, honors and other offices. The Latitudinarian debates in England, earlier on, had borne similar implications. To ignore theological dispute was therefore to refuse participation in politics—something neither Hume nor Smith would have considered doing. Furthermore, the Moderates dominated the Scottish church during the 1760s and 1770s, and Smith was very much a part of the ‘Moderate literati’ circle. His teacher, Francis Hutcheson, had been the principal philosophical mentor of Smith’s contemporaries among the Moderates. Smith’s admiration, expressed in The Wealth of Nations, was straightforward: “There is scarce perhaps to be found any where in Europe a more learned, decent, independent, and respectable set of men, than the greater part of the presbyterian clergy of Holland, Geneva, Switzerland and Scotland.”

Hence Smith and his contemporaries would continually have been exposed to what were then current debates, tensions and new ideas in theology, in the same way that most economists in university life today might be exposed to thinking in physics, or biology, or demography. And in the same way that economists today often draw on ideas from those other lines of inquiry—think of ‘gravity’ models, or ‘penetration’ models, or ‘migration’ models—these 18th-century thinkers who created what became the field of economics could easily have been influenced by what they heard, and read, and saw, of religious thinking. The idea here is most certainly not that Smith, or any of the others, self-consciously sought to bring religious principles to bear on their writings in moral philosophy. Rather, the theological ideas to which they were exposed helped shape the pre-analytic vision (to use Schumpeter’s phrase for it) that they brought to their new thinking.

All this—if true—matters because Smith in particular, along with other key 18th-century thinkers, brought about the crucial transition that established what we today regard as economics. In brief, economics as we know it emerged as a consequence of the transition in thinking that took place over much of the 18th century, culminating in the publication and widespread recognition of Smith’s Wealth of Nations:

• At the beginning of the 18th century, people who thought about such matters sometimes did and sometimes didn’t ascribe to individuals the ability to perceive what actions and pursuits were in their own self-interest. But there was no sense that their pursuing that self-interest, even if they perceived it correctly, had any broader beneficial consequences; the standard adjective used to characterize individual behaviour motivated by self-interest was ‘vicious.’
• Although there were of course identifiable antecedents (most obviously Pierre Nicole, whose ideas also had a clearly identifiable origin in theological thinking, in his case Jansenist/Augustinian), the transition began in earnest with Mandeville’s publication of the Fable of the Bees, first in 1714 and then, in revised form, in 1723. As is well known, Mandeville had the basic insight that pursuit of individual self-interest might lead to generally favourable outcomes, but he did not fully work out this idea, or the conditions under which it would play out; correspondingly, he continued to refer to such behaviour as ‘vicious’.
• Mandeville’s Fable led to widespread debate, especially in the English-speaking world (Mandeville was Dutch, but he lived in London and wrote in English) and even more so in the intellectual circles centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Much of what Hume, Hutcheson and others wrote about such matters during the middle two quarters of the century was in reaction to Mandeville.
• Smith’s Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, achieved the full working out of the private-interest-leads-to-public-good idea as it has come down to us: individuals do correctly perceive their selfinterest (in their roles as producers, although not necessarily as consumers); their desire to pursue their self-interest is a fundamental aspect of human nature; their doing so under the right conditions leads to outcomes that are optimal more broadly; and the key condition that allows these more broadly optimal outcomes to ensue is competition. Not surprisingly, the vocabulary of ‘vicious’ behavior is gone.
• By the end of the century Smith’s idea was well known and broadly accepted.

What does all this have to do with religious thinking? The stuff of the Latitudinarian debate in England, which was at its height in the half-century or so before Mandeville wrote, as well as of the Moderates-versus-Evangelicals debate in Scotland during much of Smith’s pre-Wealth of Nations lifetime, was a highly significant and contentious change in thinking that religious historians—among recent ones, most prominently Daniel Walker Howe—have called “the decline of Calvinism” (although to the layman it may help to call it the decline of orthodox Calvinism). Four key elements in this transition were, at the very least, strikingly congruent with aspects of the transition from dismissal of the ‘vicious’ pursuit of self-interest (which people may not have perceived correctly anyway) to recognition that such behaviour would, under the right conditions, lead to broadly beneficial outcomes:

from:	belief in the ‘utter depravity’ of all individuals
to:	belief in the inherent goodness (and potential eligibility for salvation) of all individuals
from:	belief in predestination, in particular with no role for human choice or action to affect who is saved and who isn’t
to:	belief not only that anyone can potentially be saved but that individuals’ choices and actions—human agency—play a role in this determination
from:	belief that the sole reason humans exist is the glorification of God
to:	belief that human happiness is also a legitimate, divinely intended end
from:	belief in eschatological pessimism
to:	belief, at least in some quarters, in postmillennialism—that is, the idea that the thousand years of blissful existence will be part of human history and, furthermore, that human agency has a role in bringing it about.

While the mapping from these four elements of the transition in religious thinking to the subsequent transition in economic thinking is far from exact, there is a strong coherence nonetheless. The belief that men and women are born with an inherent goodness is surely more suggestive that they can understand their self-interest, especially if human happiness is a divinely warranted end of human existence, than if they are utterly depraved in the religious/moral sense. The belief that all men and women are potentially eligible for salvation, and, importantly, that human agency is a part of what enables that salvation, is clearly more suggestive that individuals’ acting in their perceived self interest can improve not only their lives but those of their fellow creatures, too, compared to the predestinarian belief that only some are saved and human agency has no bearing on the matter. In the same vein, the belief that ‘progress’ in living conditions brought about by human agency not only is possible but helps bring the millennium nearer in time is likewise far more consistent with the same idea about the favourable consequences—for themselves as well as others—of individuals’ acting in their own self-interest in the economic sphere. (Indeed, as postmillennialism went on to gain strength, in the 19th century, salient economic/scientific advances like the laying of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable were greeted in many Protestant circles as having millenarian implications.)

There is little or no evidence that Smith, or Mandeville, or any of the key thinkers in between except Hutcheson, personally held to any of these beliefs. The point, rather, is that they were continually exposed to arguments along these lines. Moreover, the fact that these beliefs were not yet fully accepted, in England of the first quarter of the 18th century or in Scotland of the third quarter, presumably made their salience and visibility all the greater. Most people devote little attention to ideas that everyone accepts and most take for granted (although, to be sure, Smith was a moral philosopher, and a probing and insightful one at that). What attracts attention and debate are instead claims that are disputed, and that bear implications over which there is tension. Arguments that cut against the officially received doctrine normally attract particular attention. Protestant theology was then undergoing a highly contested transition, and both Mandeville and Smith lived in the midst of it.

It would be difficult to argue that any of the four elements of the transition in religious thinking that constituted the decline of orthodox Calvinism was strictly necessary for the subsequent transition in economic thinking, or that even all four together were sufficient. But in light of the readily apparent resonances between these new ideas and the key elements of the Mandeville-to-Smith transition, it is plausible that the transition in theological thinking helped create a new view of individuals’ role in the world that was highly conducive to the Smithian revolution, and that the four taken together importantly helped foster its acceptance.

One reason that this idea (again, if true) is interesting, wholly apart from the narrow interest of economists in their discipline and in Adam Smith’s role in creating it, is that it runs counter to the usual notion that the Smithian revolution and the subsequent emergence of economics as we know it was part of the general trend toward modernism in the sense of the turn in thinking away from a God-centered universe toward what we broadly call humanism. This would still be true in some ways, even under the argument advanced here, but realizing that the Smithian revolution itself rested on these new ways of religious thinking, and drew inspiration and strength from them, clearly places a clearly different gloss on the matter.

It may also be helpful to point out an interesting relationship between the idea advanced here and Weber’s “Protestant ethic” hypothesis. The connection posited here between the down-from-Calvinism theological transition and the up-to-Smith economic revolution is parallel to Weber’s hypothesis, in a loose sense, in that it identifies a line of causation running from religious ideas to economics. But in Weber the posited effect is on economic behaviour; here it is on economic thinking. (Weber was doing sociology; the subject here is the history of ideas.) More important, the idea advanced here is directly opposite to Weber in th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction Theological Readings of Smith
• PART I Smith in Context
• PART II Analysis and Assessment of Adam Smith's Theology
• List of Contributors
• Index