On the Idea of Commerce as a Natural Means of Human Improvement: Adam Smith’s Theory of Progress

Abstract

This essay explores and interprets a conceptual tension within Adam Smith’s moral and jurisprudential philosophies where he, either advertently or inadvertently, subordinates providence to human industry and progress. It begins with a detailed outline of Smith’s moral philosophy as presented in The Theory of Moral Sentiments,1 making sense of its inner logic and highlighting concepts relevant to the broader inquiry. Next, it examines central claims of Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence in an attempt to expose concepts that do not obviously cohere with earlier moral considerations. To understand Smith’s economic theory, one must also understand his moral and legal philosophies. His public philosophy is an excellent example of tensions inherent to progressivist accounts of history, particularly when those historical hermeneutics are applied to faculties of moral reason. Notions of Providence are likewise grossly misshapen in Smith’s account of individual and social improvement, a malformation evinced by an irreconcilable tension between Smith’s conjectural historiography and the actual living of the moral life under political authority. To solidify this claim, a close expositional treatment of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Lectures on Jurisprudence demonstrates how Smith misconstrues the “natural” and theological ordering of civil society by favoring an idealized notion of progress. His liberal theory of political economy is supported and animated by conceptions of divine providence and moral development that do not themselves lend natural consistency, the authoritative benchmark of late eighteenth-century thought, and thus the commercial sphere cannot serve as the natural impetus of a morally progressive society directed by a hidden providence.