The human good and the science of man

ABSTRACT

David Hume and Adam Smith are often regarded as preeminent contributors to the eighteenth-century Scottish ‘science of man.’ For our understanding of Hume’s and Smith’s contributions to this project, scholars today are especially indebted to Nicholas Phillipson, who influentially and persuasively demonstrated how the science of man that they developed sought to account for social progress as the result of man’s natural love of improvement in the face of conditions of indigence and want. Yet Phillipson’s work also helps us see the ways in which the Scottish science of man sought to account for man’s moral development as well as our material development, and specifically the ways in which individual human beings come to develop virtue. This contribution thus extends Phillipson’s pioneering insights into the methodology of the Scottish science of man to show how Smith conceived of the love of improvement not only as the engine driving society towards civilization and opulence, but also as an important element in the ethical development of the individual.

KEYWORDS:

• Nicholas Phillipson
• Scottish Enlightenment
• Adam Smith
• science of man
• virtue

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On this point, see the insightful overview and sympathetic appreciation of Phillipson’s work and scholarly trajectory provided in Colin Kidd, ‘The Phillipsonian Enlightenment’, Modern Intellectual History 11 (2014): 175–90.

2 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), xvi.

3 Among other crucial foundational studies, see e.g. Peter Jones, ed., The Science of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid, and Their Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989); and Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). More recently see Berry, ‘Hume’s Universalism: The Science of Man and the Anthropological Point of View’, British Journal of Philosophy 3 (2007): 535–50; and Craig Smith, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment, Unintended Consequences and the Science of Man’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy 7 (2009): 9–28.

4 See, respectively, Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith as Civic Moralist’, in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Hont and Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Porter and Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

5 See, respectively, Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith: A Biographer’s Reflections’, in The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, ed. Berry, Paganelli, and C. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Phillipson, ‘Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy, ed. Hanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

6 Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

7 Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, 20.

8 Phillipson, ‘Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment’, 108.

9 Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith: A Biographer’s Reflections’, 27.

10 Ibid., 29; see also ‘Language, Sociability, and History: Some Reflections on the Foundations of Adam Smith’s Science of Man’,in Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 71–72.

11 Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith as Civic Moralist’, 179.

12 I develop these points at greater length in my article ‘Social Science and Human Flourishing: The Scottish Enlightenment and Today’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy 7 (2009): 29–46.

13 Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, 20–21.

14 Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith as Civic Moralist’, 179.

15 See e.g. Phillipson, ‘Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment’, 111; and ‘Language, Sociability, and History’, 71.

16 Phillipson, ‘Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment’, 110–111.

17 Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, 280.

18 Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith: A Biographer’s Reflections’, 32; see also ‘Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment’, 108, 115.

19 This is a claim in which Phillipson was clearly invested but also one that I’m compelled to acknowledge that I do not myself accept for reasons I’ve sought to develop elsewhere. In this context, see also Kidd’s interesting suggestion that ‘the later portion of Phillipson’s oeuvre exhibits a compelling theological turn’ (‘The Phillipsonian Enlightenment’, 186).

20 See, respectively, Phillipson, ‘Language, Sociability, and History’, 71; ‘Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment’, 105; and ‘Adam Smith: A Biographer’s Reflections’, 24.

21 See e.g. Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, 6; and ‘Adam Smith: A Biographer’s Reflections’, 23.

22 See respectively Smith to La Rochefoucauld, 1 November 1785, in Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 286–87; and TMS Advertisement.2 (p. 3 in the Glasgow edition); cf. TMS 7.4.37.

23 Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith: A Biographer’s Reflections’, 23.

24 For a valuable interchange that captures much of what is at stake in this debate, see esp. Ian S. Ross, ‘“Great Works Upon the Anvil” in 1785: Adam Smith’s Projected Corpus of Philosophy’, Adam Smith Review 1 (2004): 40–59; and Charles L. Griswold Jr, ‘On the Incompleteness of Adam Smith’s System’, Adam Smith Review 2 (2006): 181–86.

25 Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, 279.

26 Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, 36.

27 Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, 2.

28 Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith: A Biographer’s Reflections’, 24.

29 Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, 22, see also 34–35; and ‘Adam Smith as Civic Moralist’, esp. 189–90.

30 Phillipson, ‘Language, Sociability, and History’, 83–84.

31 Phillipson himself interestingly described the first (1759) edition of TMS in this way, suggesting it sought to present ‘a theory which explained how men and women seek to satisfy their moral needs and learn to live at ease with themselves and the world around them’ (Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, 2).

32 Phillipson, ‘Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment’, 108.

33 Phillipson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, 20–21; see also ‘Adam Smith as Civic Moralist’, 181.