CityReads│Adam Smith's Words of Wisdom

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Adam Smith's Words of Wisdom

A wise-enough man can reach across more than two centuries and teach you a thing or two about yourself and what’s important.

Russ Roberts, 2014. How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness, Portfolio.

Adam Smith, 1759. The Theory of Moral Sentiments，ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, vol. I of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982).

Source: http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS.html

What is a good life?

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a Scottish moral philosopher addressed this question in a book with the unglamorous title The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The book was Adam Smith's attempt to explain where morality comes from and why people can act with decency and virtue even when it conflicts with their own self-interest. It's a mix of psychology, philosophy, and what we now call behavioral economics, peppered with Smith's observations on friendship, the pursuit of wealth, the pursuit of happiness, and virtue. Along the way, Smith tells his readers what the good life is and how to achieve it.

The book was a success in its day. But today The Theory of Moral Sentiments is virtually forgotten, dwarfed by the reputation Smith achieved with his second book. That book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, made Adam Smith forever famous and gave birth to the field of economics. While few people still read The Wealth of Nations, it's undeniably a famous book, a classic. Fewer still read or have even heard of Smith's other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

First published in 1759, the book went through six editions, the last one published in 1790, the year of Smith's death, when he made substantial revisions to the text. In a sense, The Theory of Moral Sentiments was Smith's first and last book.

Even though he's the father of capitalism and wrote the most famous and maybe the best book ever on why some nations are rich and others are poor, Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments wrote as eloquently as anyone ever has on the futility of pursuing money with the hope of finding happiness.

He dispenses timeless advice about how to treat money, ambition, fame, and morality. He tells the reader how to find happiness, how to treat material success and failure. He also describes the path to virtue and goodness and why it’s a path worth pursuing.

About Adam Smith

The details of Smith’s own life are fairly mundane. He was born in the village of Kircaldy, Scotland, in 1723. His father died a few months later. At the age of fourteen, Smith went off to school at the University of Glasgow, then Oxford, returning to lecture at the University of Edinburgh before being appointed at the University of Glasgow in 1751, as a professor first of logic and then of moral philosophy. His mother and unmarried aunt joined him in Glasgow at the house provided by the university. In 1763 he left academic life for a more lucrative job tutoring the wealthy young Duke of Buccleuch.

This must have been a rather dramatic change of pace for the forty-year-old Smith, giving him an intimate look at the lifestyles of the rich and famous of his day. For two and a half years, Smith traveled in France and Switzerland with the boy and, along the way, met some of the great European intellectuals of the time, including Voltaire, François Quesnay, and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. After returning from Europe, he spent the next decade in Kircaldy and then London, working on The Wealth of Nations.

In 1778, Smith moved from London to Edinburgh to live with his mother and several cousins. That same year he was appointed one of the five commissioners of customs in Scotland. Perhaps the most influential defender of free trade in the history of political economy spent the last years of his life reducing the flow of smuggled goods and collecting taxes for the government from importers. 

Other than his time in Europe, Smith appears to have led what most would call a particularly unexciting life. He was a lecturer, a professor, a tutor—three jobs that are renowned for being removed from what might be called reality. Joseph Schumpeter wrote, “No woman, excepting his mother, ever played a role in his existence: in this as in other respects the glamours and passions of life were just literature to him.” Schumpeter exaggerated a bit, but Smith never married. He died in 1790 at the age of sixty-seven.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments, you realize that morality and the meaning of life and how people behave haven't changed much since the eighteenth century. A wise-enough man can reach across more than two centuries, get your attention, and teach you a thing or two about yourself and what's important.

But the text of The Theory of Moral Sentiments is not an easy read. At first you need patience. The sentences and paragraphs are often long, and they're structured in ways our brains don't process well without some practice.

Here are some excerpts from The Theory of Moral Sentiments

On happiness

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

We must, here, as in all other cases, view ourselves not so much according to that light in which we may naturally appear to ourselves, as according to that in which we naturally appear to others. Though every man may, according to the proverb, be the whole world to himself, to the rest of mankind he is a most insignificant part of it. Though his own happiness may be of more importance to him than that of all the world besides, to every other person it is of no more consequence than that of any other man.

If the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved, as I believe it does, those sudden changes of fortune seldom contribute much to happiness.

We suffer more, when we fall from a better to a worse situation, than we ever enjoy when we rise from a worse to a better.

The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.

Examine the records of history, recollect what has happened within the circle of your own experience, consider with attention what has been the conduct of almost all the greatly unfortunate, either in private or public life, whom you may have read of, or heard of, or remember, and you will find that the misfortunes of by far the greater part of them have arisen from their now knowing when they were well, when it was proper for them to sit still and to be contented.

Are you in adversity? Do not mourn in the darkness of solitude, do not regulate your sorrow according to the indulgent sympathy of your intimate friends; return, as soon as possible, to the daylight of the world and of society. Live with strangers, with those who know nothing, or care nothing, about your misfortune; do not even shun the company of enemies; but give yourself the pleasure of mortifying their malignant joy, by making them feel how little you are affected by your calamity, and how much you are above it.

On justice

IT is thus that man, who can subsist only in society, was fitted by nature to that situation for which he was made. All the members of human society stand in need of each others assistance, and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. Where the necessary assistance is reciprocally afforded from love, from gratitude, from friendship, and esteem, the society flourishes and is happy. All the different members of it are bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection, and are, as it were, drawn to one common centre of mutual good offices.

But though the necessary assistance should not be afforded from such generous and disinterested motives, though among the different members of the society there should be no mutual love and affection, the society, though less happy and agreeable, will not necessarily be dissolved. Society may subsist among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection; and though no man in it should owe any obligation, or be bound in gratitude to any other, it may still be upheld by a mercenary exchange of good offices according to an agreed valuation.

Society, however, cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another. The moment that injury begins, the moment that mutual resentment and animosity take place, all the bands of it are broke asunder, and the different members of which it consisted are, as it were, dissipated and scattered abroad by the violence and opposition of their discordant affections. If there is any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least, according to the trite observation, abstain from robbing and murdering one another. Beneficence, therefore, is less essential to the existence of society than justice. Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence; but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it.

It (beneficence) is the ornament which embellishes, not the foundation which supports the building, and which it was, therefore, sufficient to recommend, but by no means necessary to impose. Justice, on the contrary, is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society, that fabric which to raise and support seems in this world, if I may say so, to have been the peculiar and darling care of Nature, must in a moment crumble into atoms.

As the greater and more irreparable the evil that is done, the resentment of the sufferer runs naturally the higher; so does likewise the sympathetic indignation of the spectator, as well as the sense of guilt in the agent. Death is the greatest evil which one man can inflict upon another, and excites the highest degree of resentment in those who are immediately connected with the slain. Murder, therefore, is the most atrocious of all crimes which affect individuals only, in the sight both of mankind, and of the person who has committed it. To be deprived of that which we are possessed of, is a greater evil than to be disappointed of what we have only the expectation. Breach of property, therefore, theft and robbery, which take from us what we are possessed of, are greater crimes than breach of contract, which only disappoints us of what we expected. The

most sacred laws of justice, therefore, those whose violation seems to call loudest for vengeance and punishment, are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbour; the next are those which guard his property and possessions; and last of all come those which guard what are called his personal rights, or what is due to him from the promises of others.

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