Commercial Realities, Republican Principles

Abstract

After 1776, especially in the Anglo-American world, practical as well as philosophical understanding of commercial realities increasingly depended on the work of Adam Smith, whether by absorption or reaction. In this respect the wider world came to appreciate what Smith's Scottish friends were the first to welcome when the Wealth of Nations was published. William Robertson predicted that the book would ‘necessarily become a Political or Commercial Code to all Europe, which must be often consulted both by men of Practice and Speculation’, an opinion seconded by Adam Ferguson when he said that Smith was ‘surely to reign alone on these subjects, to form the opinions and I hope to govern at least the coming generations’ (Smith 1987: 192–3). Smith was not the first member of his generation of Scottish philosophers to analyse the benefits and drawbacks associated with commercial society: David Hume and Ferguson had preceded him in both these respects. Nevertheless, Robertson and Ferguson proved correct: Smith became the premier late-eighteenth-century guide to the science and art of the legislator faced with the problems and possibilities associated with this type of society. This has ensured that Smith remains the validating agent for much that we, in retrospect, wish to say when assessing the moral and political implications of commercial societies, despite the long accumulation of experience of living in such societies since Smith's death. Which position or positions Smith does in fact validate or even instantiate, however, remains a matter of dispute.

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