What makes Smith’s philosophy of living any more worth our attention than many others that we’ve inherited?
Smith’s genius as an economist lay in his capacity to describe how all of the discrete parts of the "system of natural liberty" hang together.
Adam Smith was born in 1723. This year he turns 300.
To celebrate, National Review Capital Matters offers the Adam Smith 300 series. An essay on Smith will appear monthly throughout 2023, written by various students of Smith’s thought. Smith’s birthday is June 16, so the essays will appear on the 16th day of each month. Daniel Klein and Erik Matson of George Mason University are helping curate the series for Capital Matters along with Dominic Pino. To read previous months’ essays, click here.
Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from the Epilogue (pp. 133–138) of Ryan P. Hanley’s book, Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life (Princeton University Press, 2019). Republished by permission of Princeton University Press.
A dam Smith has an economic philosophy that deserves attention. He has a political outlook that deserves attention. But, perhaps most importantly, Smith has a philosophy of living that deserves attention.
Smith is, of course, not the only thinker who has something to say about such matters. So what makes his philosophy of living any more worth our attention than many others that we’ve inherited? I think three answers can be given to this question.
Traditionally there have been two sources of guidance to which those interested in the question of the good life have turned: religion and philosophy. On the former front, the world’s great spiritual and faith traditions all offer counsel on wise living from which many have drawn meaning. On the latter, the philosophers of ancient Greece and ancient Rome in particular have long served as sources of insight into what makes a life worth living, and by what standards we might judge a way of living to be good or bad.
Yet these traditional sources of wisdom seem unavailable to many among us today, or at least they are unavailable in the same sense in which they were available to previous generations for whom they had been indispensable anchors. Today we live in a secular age. Even as many of us today live lives of faith, it is yet the case that the organizing categories of our modern world are no longer those of the religious worldview. So too, Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics are still read by many today. Yet modern science has rendered implausible to most the metaphysical grounds on which their judgments of better and worse lives were grounded. So not everyone today has access to the wisdom available in these traditions and these texts — a point I appreciate, even as a person of faith who makes a living teaching and writing about these and related thinkers and traditions.
All of this leads me to think that we would do well to broaden our search for wise guides to living beyond these traditions and texts. What we need are guides who “speak our language” — that is, guides who not only provide us with insight and counsel, but can do so within the framework of the beliefs and categories that shape our world.
Our world values the trappings of wealth and fortune, the signs of success in modern markets. Yet while some wealth and fortune seems necessary for happiness, past a certain point more wealth and fortune doesn’t lead to more happiness, as we all know and much research confirms. So too, and as we have seen Smith emphasize, our world values signs of esteem and recognition: signs we can now more easily and precisely measure thanks to the metrics of social media. Yet these too seem increasingly unlikely to lead to happiness. And perhaps most interestingly, many in our world claim to value happiness above all else. But at least one effect of the pursuit of happiness is that those in the grip of that pursuit often become remarkably self-centered and less attuned to the happiness and well-being of others.
These features of our world are tied in large part to the emergence of what we today call capitalist society, and Smith himself called “commercial society.” Smith defended commercial society on the grounds of the significant material benefits it brings to the poorest among us, and history has vindicated him. The last 200 years have seen remarkable amelioration of global poverty — indeed to such a degree that in 2016 the United Nations adopted as the first of its 17 Sustainable Development Goals a total eradication of global extreme poverty by 2030. We cannot but be grateful for the progress that has enabled us to even conceive of this goal. But neither should we allow these welcome gains to blind us to the costs at which they have been bought. And if the gains are material, the costs are often moral, and include, among others, a rising sense of selfishness, isolation, and anxiety — phenomena pernicious to social trust and political order, but also to our efforts to live well.
Smith understood as well as any how commercial society generates these benefits and these challenges alike. A philosopher of the Enlightenment, fortunate to have lived before the age of hyper-specialization, he combined the economist’s understanding of the mechanisms of market society with the ethicist’s appreciation of the challenges of market society. And this remarkable (and remarkably balanced) appreciation of market society’s opportunities as well as its challenges shaped his philosophy of living. As a result, he has what an economist would call a “comparative advantage” over other guides to wise living with whom we might be familiar. Thus the second reason why he is so useful to us today. Smith wrote for our world, in two senses. As we saw above, his philosophy is grounded in the language and concepts of our world. But in developing this philosophy, he also sought to respond to the unique challenges that our modern commercial world presents to living life well.
There’s at least one other reason why we do well to turn to Smith for guidance. This concerns the type of philosopher he sought to be. Smith made his living as a professor of moral philosophy, serving as a distinguished teacher at his alma mater, the University of Glasgow. But Smith would be a poor fit in most departments of philosophy today. Today’s professional philosophy is a specialized and technical field. To outsiders its questions are no more recognizable than questions in advanced mathematics or physics. In part, Smith would have welcomed this: a champion of the way in which divided and specialized labor increases productivity, he himself noted the payoffs of specialization for philosophy. But he also knew that what has been lost amid this specialization, as several other prominent philosophers have more recently emphasized, are the ancient questions about the nature of the good life and how to live it. Yet it is these that Smith himself thinks are the heart of philosophy itself.
Moral philosophy, he thus explains, has two tasks. One is to identify the “power or faculty of the mind” that enables us to make judgments. Now, if that sounds like a merely academic or technical question to you, you’ll be happy to know that Smith thought so too. He calls it “a mere matter of philosophical curiosity,” which, while “of the greatest importance in speculation, is of none in practice.” This is not to say he thought it wholly unimportant; much of his own book on moral philosophy (and most of the books that have been written about his moral philosophy) is dedicated to it. But for all that, he insists that the first task of moral philosophy is to answer a different question. That question, as he has it, is: “Wherein does virtue consist? Or what is the tone of temper, and tenour of conduct, which constitutes the excellent and praise-worthy character?”
Smith’s philosophy of living is shaped by his interest in this ancient question of what it means to have an “excellent and praise-worthy character.” Yet his way of answering this ancient question is very modern. A member in good standing of the Enlightenment, Smith is committed to empirical methods: observation and study of history and experience. His vision, and indeed the vision of the wise and virtuous man, of what is perfect and praiseworthy and noble and honorable, is grounded in his study of real people in the real world. Both Smith and his wise and virtuous man are always observers — “spectators” — describing details of what they’ve seen in different men and moments. This approach is part of what makes Smith’s work so readable, even today.
Also remarkable about Smith’s work is the way in which he holds up these insights for us, his readers, to see. In so doing, he trains us to become good spectators in our own right, better able to see and recognize good acts, good characters, and good lives when we come across them — in Smith’s words, he aims “to make us know the original when we meet with it.”
And yet another part of Smith’s method merits notice. Smith not only sees, he also reflects on what he sees. In particular, he reflects on how all the different little things that he’s seen can be thought of as going together. This is especially evident in his economics. Smith of course is famous today for his “invisible hand.” The invisible hand might be understood as the forces and mechanisms behind the works of what Smith calls the “system of natural liberty.” This system, like many other systems that Smith describes in his writings, is an extremely complex machine that coordinates the discrete activities of untold parts. Smith’s genius as an economist lay in his capacity to describe how all of these discrete parts hang together — to make visible the many resemblances between them that are invisible at first glance.
Reflection of this sort uncovers connections. And this same method is at work in Smith’s moral philosophy. Just as Smith’s economics shows how the discrete phenomena that we see before us can be understood as connected in a single, integrated whole, Smith’s philosophy of living shows us how the different parts of a life can be seen as hanging together. This is partly why his ethics focuses on helping us to recognize “the excellent and praise-worthy character” and not simply on classifying discrete actions as right or wrong. For this excellent and praiseworthy character, like the life it determines, is a unity, the sum of a staggering multitude of experiences and emotions. As such, it takes a trained eye to see it, to appreciate it, and to live it — this life of action and reflection, wisdom and virtue.