Seduced by System: Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Embrace of Adam Smith's Philosophy

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Acknowledgements

A very early version of this article was written for Daniel J. Cohen's undergraduate seminar on British Conservatism at Yale University. Revised versions were then presented at meetings of the American Political Science Association, the New York Political Science Association, and the Brown University Political Philosophy Workshop. In addition to all those who offered feedback at these meetings, I would also like to thanks Jennifer Page for her research assistance, Anik Waldow for her editorial guidance, and the anonymous reviewers at Intellectual History Review for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. W.C. Dunn writes that it is “in these lights – Smith as an economic liberal, and Burke as a political conservative – [that] these men have been traditionally considered” (Dunn, “Adam Smith and Edmund Burke,” 330–346). And the view has long outlived Dunn; see, for example, Pack, Capitalism as a Moral System, 121.

2. Smith, Correspondence, no. 208, 251. As with all quotations from eighteenth-century texts in this essay, the spelling and punctuation have been modernized for purposes of clarity.

3. Bisset, The Life of Edmund Burke, vol. 2, 429; as cited in Winch, Riches and Poverty, 125. Winch laments how this undocumented anecdote has found its way into virtually all biographies of both Smith and Burke (Riches and Poverty, 128) – see, for example, Rae, Life of Adam Smith, 387.

4. Some have attempted, rather unconvincingly, to deny the importance of this fact. Peter Minowitz, for example, writes, “Although Burke proclaimed himself Smith's disciple, Smith contributed to the Enlightenment enterprise that Burke decried: tearing away life's “decent drapery” and “pleasing illusions'” (Minowitz Profits, Priests and Princes, 44; quoting Burke, Reflections, 67).

5. On this point, see Willis, “The Role in Parliament.”

6. The best non-reductive overview of the relationship between Smith's ideas and Burke's is Winch, Riches and Poverty, esp. 125–220. Winch compares and contrasts Smith's and Burke's respective positions on such issues as the independence of the American colonies (ibid., 137–165), the social utility of aristocracies and established churches (ibid., 166–197), and support for the laboring poor (ibid., 198–220). Yet Winch's nuanced study never focuses on the respective social roles of the philosopher and the statesman, or the aesthetic appeal of system, which are the subject of the present essay.

7. As Palyi, “The Introduction of Adam Smith,” 181, has observed, “their ideas, their methods, even their problems were decidedly different, as different as the men themselves and their personal careers.”

8. Burke, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Adam Smith,” and Burke, “An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.” (Authorship disputed for the latter.)

9. Smith, Correspondence, no. 31, 33. For the treatise to which Hume is referring, see Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 49–200.

10. Smith, Correspondence, no. 36, 42–43.

11. Ibid., no. 38, 46.

12. Burke, “An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.” (Authorship disputed.)

13. Smith, Correspondence, no. 38, 46.

14. Ibid., 46–47.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 47.

17. Ibid.

18. Burke, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Adam Smith,” 484.

19. Ibid., 484–485.

20. Ibid., 485.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 485–489; citing Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 9–13

25. Viner, “Guide,” 24.

26. Ibid.

27. During this time, Samuel Johnson is alleged to have remarked “Smith too is now of our club. It has lost its select merit.” See Rae, Life of Adam Smith, 268. The other details on Smith's admission to The Club are drawn from Bell, “Adam Smith, Clubman’; as well as Ross, The Life of Adam Smith, 251–252.

28. See Mossner and Ross's notes to Smith, Correspondence, 47.

29. Burke, “An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith,” 241.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., 241–243; citing Smith, Wealth of Nations, 10–12.

33. Eindaudi, “The British Background,” 589, is one of such works in which the attribution is given to Burke, whereas it is questioned, e.g., in Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics, vol. 2, 490.

34. For Smith's political support of Burke, see letters 216 and 217 in Smith, Correspondence, 258–259. For Burke's praise of Smith as a wise philosopher, see Letter 230. Ibid., 268.

35. Burke, A Letter to a Noble Lord, 192.

36. Ibid.

37. Burke, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Adam Smith,” 485.

38. Burke, “A Letter by M. Rousseau,” 479–484. The essentially aesthetic character of Burke's reviews of the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations has yet to receive adequate attention in the secondary literature. Winch, for example, attributes Burke's enthusiastic reception to the Theory to his substantive philosophical agreement with Smith on the issue of moral anti-rationalism, to their common belief that morality is a product of our moral sentiments, and not of our reason alone (Winch, Riches and Poverty, 170).

39. Smith, “The Principles,” 66.

40. Ibid., 74.

41. Ibid., 115.

42. Winch, for one, cannot help but marvel at the intricate “connections between the overlapping sub-systems that compose Smith's highly ambitious and systematic enterprise – the most ambitious enterprise to be carried through to near-completion in an age and place that was notable for the compendious quality of its intellectual projects” (Winch, Riches and Poverty, 253).

43. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 678.

44. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 232.

45. Ibid., 233.

46. Ibid., 234.

47. Smith's man of system thus represents one example of a larger phenomenon described by Kateb, “Aestheticism and Morality,” 5–37, in which aesthetic considerations lead individuals to act immorally.

48. Burke's Act 1773, 13 Geo. III, c. 43.

49. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 541.

50. Ibid., 542–543.

51. Horner, The Economic Writings, 98.

52. Ibid.

53. Jefferson, Papers, vol. 8, 59; see also Viner, “Guide,” 26–28.

54. Burke, “Speech on a Petition of the Unitarians,” as cited in Dunn, “Adam Smith and Edmund Burke,” 66.

55. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 185.

56. On this topic, see Griswold, Adam Smith, 308; as well as Winch, Riches and Poverty, 94–96.

57. See Griswold, Adam Smith, 302.

58. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 471.

59. Ibid., 606.

60. Cited in Viner, “Guide,” 32–33; see also Dankert, “Adam Smith and James Boswell,” 331.

61. The quote appears in Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 229. See also Price, “A Discourse.”

62. See Ross, The Life of Adam Smith, 391–394.

63. Smith, Correspondence, no. 251, 290.

64. For a plausible account of the specific historical circumstances which may have inspired Smith's account of the “man of system,” see Rothschild, “Adam Smith and Conservative Economics,” 54–55.

65. Burke, Reflections, 77.

66. Ibid., 108.

67. Ibid., 146.

68. Ibid., 190.

69. Ibid., 116.

70. Ibid., 152.

71. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 231–232.

72. Paine, Rights of Man, 472.

73. For more on the moral dangers of the aesthetic elements of Burke's political writings, see Kateb, “Aestheticism and Morality,” 24–27.

74. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 527.

75. Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, 142–143.

76. Ibid., 156–157.

77. Ibid., 146.

78. Indeed, the differences between Smith's actual views and the views advanced by Burke are so great that Emma Rothschild has argued that the Thoughts and Details “is close, at several points, to being an open attack on Smith” (Rothschild, “Adam Smith and Conservative Economics,” 87). If this is taken to mean that a close reader of both Burke's work and Smith's will notice that the two are often in important disagreement, then it is certainly true. Yet if Rothschild is suggesting that Burke intended the Thoughts and Details as an attack on Smith, then the claim is a false one. Such a view is incompatible with the considerable evidence, outlined earlier in this essay, that Burke believed himself to be in full agreement with Smith on matters of political economy, however much he may have been blind to the real differences between them. Indeed, Rothschild acknowledges that almost all of Burke's contemporaries were also blind to these real differences. Rothschild writes that Burke's work “was received as little more than an exposition of Smith's ‘principles,’” with these “principles” understood to be nothing more than “the simple prescription for economic freedom” (ibid., 87). This oversimplification of Smith's position survives to our own day, as does the interpretation of the Thoughts and Details as a correct application of Smith's views (ibid., 88, fn. 83). There is no reason to believe that Burke himself was immune from this widespread error. To the contrary, there is considerable evidence he was one of the first to fall prey to it. In this respect, my own interpretation of the relationship between Burke and Smith is close to that of Gertrude Himmelfarb; see Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, 68–79.

79. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 81.

80. Smith's main suggestion for reform of the poor laws is not to abolish, or even lessen, governmental aid, but to remove local residency requirements to allow for the free movement of labor; see Smith, Wealth of Nations, 152–157. For more on Smith's position on the poor laws, see Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, 61.

81. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 96.

82. Ibid., 539.

83. For further discussion of this issue, see Winch, Riches and Poverty, 208–212.

84. Macpherson, Burke, 62.

85. Poynter, Society and Pauperism, 55.

86. For a similar observation, see Winch, Riches and Poverty, 204.

87. Many previous commentators have noted the disjoint between Burke's arch-libertarian economic views in the Thoughts and Details and the social conservatism of the Reflections, especially given that local forms of poor relief were well-established traditional practices in Britain at this time. For an overview of many competing attempts to resolve this inconsistency, all ultimately unsuccessful, see Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, 71–73. To mention only the most prominent such argument, Macpherson argues that Burke was able to be both a laissez-faire capitalist and a defender of traditional social institutions because “the capitalist order had in fact been the traditional order in England for a whole century” (Macpherson, Burke, 51). Yet this argument ignores both the all-important differences between a highly regulated mercantilist system and a system of genuine free trade which would be obvious to any reader of Smith and the entire history of the poor laws dating back to the reign of Elizabeth I; see Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, 73. Judith Shklar offers a more promising solution when she finds a deeper consistency behind Burke's seeming inconsistency only insofar as insistence on strict logical coherence is one of the qualities that “conservatives have resented most in their opponents” (Shklar, After Utopia, 225).