Review: What He Thought and Why It Matters by Jesse Norman

Reviewer: Alan Taylor

AS MSPs wend their way down the Royal Mile to the the parliament at Holyrood they must pass the Canongate Kirk. How many of them take a moment to pop in and look around its graveyard? One of its former incumbents was the Rev. Robert Walker, portrayed by Henry Raeburn as ‘the skating minister’. At its entrance is a statue of Robert Fergusson, the short-lived Edinburgh poet whom Burns described as “my elder brother in muse”. But perhaps the most significant person to lie within the church’s grounds – and the one whose work would undoubtedly benefit our lieges – is Adam Smith who died on 17 July, 1790, aged sixty-seven, and was buried there five days later. As the Conservative MP Jesse Norman notes, in his rather excellent and imperative study of the sage’s life, work and influence, his last recorded words, delivered to friends on retiring to bed after dinner, were “I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place”.

Alexander Stoddart’s statue of Smith is to be found at the other end of the Royal Mile, near St Giles Cathedral. There, he stands, looking across the cobbled street at David Hume. Together these two men represent the essence of the Scottish Enlightenment. It was here, where today tourists gather in their thousands, that you could loiter for a few minutes and, as an English visitor attested, “take fifty men of genius by the hand”. The term may now be overused but back then no one was in any doubt that both Hume and Smith were the real deal. Hume, who was born in 1711, was Smith’s elder by a dozen years and to an extent his mentor. The two met around 1750 and formed what Norman says was “the most intellectually important friendship” of Smith’s life. Like Samuel Johnson – whose great dictionary of the English language Hume gave a damning review – Hume was adept at one-liners. When his publisher chivvied him for a book to follow up the success of his History of England, he replied: “I have four reasons for not writing: I am too old, too fat, too lazy and too rich.”

Hume was a non-conformist and to a degree a much more radical thinker than his acolyte. He was, for example, an atheist, which led to him being denied chairs at both Edinburgh and Glasgow universities which, with the possible exception of the rejection of the Beatles by EMI, must be the most among the most disastrous corporate decisions ever made. In contrast, Smith, as Norman suggests, was on balance “a moderate small-c conservative”. Best known for his seminal and still very readable book, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Smith was an inspired pragmatist whose views are so open to interpretation that he has been claimed – shamelessly and often ignorantly – by all shades of political opinion, some of it extreme and often misrepresentative. It’s worth noting that Smith himself was never allied to any political party, in part probably because he was, philosophically speaking, too elastic in his thinking. As Norman writes: “He repeatedly emphasized the importance of ‘slow and gradual’ change, and of reform over revolution; he reasoned more from cases than first principles. He was realistic about the importance of the state, and about its weaknesses. As he wrote, ‘No government is quite perfect, but it is better to submit to some inconveniences than make attempts against it’.”

Such hard-headed sensibleness was surely a product of Scotland’s recent history and his own upbringing. Smith was born between the two failed Jacobite rebellions and less than two decades after the Union with England. Norman, like his subject, deals judiciously with these still much-debated events. The Union, he reckons, may not have been quite what the Scottish population at large had willed but it did have immediate economic benefits for a country suffering from a variety of disasters, some visited upon it, others self-inflicted. The much-romanticized campaigns of Bonnie Prince Charlie were no less cathartic and led to a period of upheaval and uncertainty. “For Adam Smith,” writes Norman, “it must have raised a still deeper question, about the very basis of human sociability.”

It is amazing now to reflect that in a time of such turmoil Smith managed to remain cool-headed. By all accounts, he was a good man; well-liked, convivial, and endearingly absent-minded. He was a proud Scot, convinced of the superiority of the Scottish education system – when England had two universities, Scotland had five – yet drawn to London and aware of the benefits the Union had brought to his homeland. He was also, “Remarkably egalitarian in thought and practice, he appears to have disliked hierarchy in any form.” The more one reads about him, the more one likes and admires him. Though he never married, indeed never seems to have had a physical relationship, he was father of economics and sociology. The great love of his life was his mother who, in a grim portrait attributed to Conrad Metz, looks uncannily like Whistler’s. His father, Comptroller of Customs in Kirkcaldy, died before he was born. Aged three, Smith was abducted by gipsies but rescued almost immediately. Who know what would have become of him if he had remained lost. As it is, as Jesse Norman eloquently testifies in this book which should be on every parliamentarian's summer reading list, his achievement was “colossal” and the fruits of his genius more needed “in a world of uncertainty, extremism and misunderstanding” than ever before.

EIBF appearance Wednesday 15 August