Gavin Kennedy

The Hidden Adam Smith in His Alleged Theology

The paper examines assertions that Adam Smith was in some sense a Christian, and examines how much current opinion ignores his biography and the dangerous religious context of eighteenth-century Scotland. Zealots regularly intervened against suspected heresy, which created an atmosphere of intimidation. Adam Smith’s biography shows that he too was intimidated, and avoided scandals that would upset his very religious mother, for whom he felt a special protective bond, and that he hid his private skepticism to ensure that nothing he published would provoke the zealots. A close reading of his Works shows how he amended them consistently as he grew older to modify their religious content, particularly after his mother died in 1784, and up to just before he died in 1790.

Adam Smith and the Role of the Metaphor of an Invisible Hand

Daniel Klein and Brandon Lucass In a Word or Two, Placed in the Middle: The Invisible Hand in Smiths Tomes, following a vague hint by Peter Minowitz (2004), offers original physical evidence that Smith deliberately placed the phrase led by an invisible hand - at the physical centre of both his masterworks. Further, it suggests that the invisible-hand paragraphs are a response to Rousseau (1755); and that in numerous and rich ways, centrality holds special and positive significance in Smiths thought. This paper acknowledges the physical centrality of the invisible-hand metaphor, but questions whether centrality alone gives weight to wider claims that the invisible hand was Smiths central idea. It draws upon Smiths Rhetoric Lectures (1763), and argues that the invisible-hand paragraphs in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations identify the actual objects of the invisible-hand metaphor. This paper insists that Adam Smith is the most reliable source for revealing what he meant. In contrast, most modern attributions of special meaning to Adam Smiths use of the metaphor ignore Smiths teaching on the use of metaphors and, instead, make numerous, and often mutually exclusive, claims that Smith had a doctrine of an invisible-hand.

The Four Stages

Long before Smith sat in awe in Dr. Hutcheson’s class and heard him on the ‘Stages of Society’, he was already familiar with the Bible’s allegory for the origins and ages of mankind in the fable of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the paradise of the Eden Garden for eating the fruit of a forbidden tree.1

The Myth of the Invisible Hand – A View from the Trenches

This paper discusses the contrast between the near zero notice taken by Adam Smith’s contemporaries of his use of the “invisible-hand” metaphor, followed by the virtual absence of any notice of it for a just short of a century after his death in 1790 until it went “viral” following Paul Samuelson’s Economics textbook after 1948. An oral tradition at Cambridge discussed it from 1874 (Maitland), but until A. C. Pigou’s “Economics of Welfare,” it remained unrecorded in print. A summary of the post-1940s interest in a modern version of Adam Smith’s use of the now famous metaphor is discussed (Warren Samuels, 2011) and contrasted with Adam Smith’s teaching of the role of metaphors in his Rhetoric Lectures (1762).

Adam Smith’s Legacy

Adam Smith’s legacy has attracted a great deal of counterfeit baggage that has little to do with what is recognisably his own. Separating his legacy from that attributed to him is a task in itself and not a little controversial.1

Smith’s Wealth of Nations

The Wealth of Nations is Adam Smith’s best known Work. He started drafting materials for it before 1761–1763, whilst in his last years at Glasgow University. Some of these pages are known as the Early Draft, which were copied out from Smith’s draft notes by a professional amanuensis employed by Glasgow University, confirming their origins in the early 1760s.

Adam Smith and the ‘Invisible Hand’

Multiple references to Adam Smith’s use and supposed meaning of the 2-word metaphor of ‘an Invisible Hand’ today stand in stark contrast to the almost total absence of mentions of the same metaphor whilst Smith was alive and for many decades after he died in 1790. Contemporary sources such as the Monthly Review (1776) did not mention the ‘Invisible Hand’ and nor did his contemporary critic, Governor Pownall, September 1776, mention the ‘Invisible Hand’ in his long and detailed critique of the Wealth of Nations.

The ‘Invisible Hand’ Phenomenon in Economics

This chapter discusses Adam Smith’s rhetorical use of the ‘invisible hand’ in the context of his teachings on metaphors as figures of speech in his lectures on Rhetoric (Edinburgh, 1748–51; Glasgow, 1751–63 (LRBL). After Smith died (1790), a strikingly long period of silence about his three references to an ‘invisible hand’ followed until 1875, when traces emerged of a Cambridge University oral tradition of debate about laissez-faire and the ‘invisible hand’ that were closer to its modern, ‘selfish’ versions than those used by Adam Smith. That oral tradition eventually leached into print (Pigou, 1929; Gray, 1931). Paul Samuelson (1948) transmuted Smith’s ‘self-interest’ into ‘selfishness,’ which flooded across the discipline from the 1960s.

Adam Smith and

This paper discusses the contrast between the near zero notice taken by Adam Smith’s contemporaries of his use of the “invisible-hand” metaphor. Followed by the virtual absence of any notice of it for a just short of a century after his death in 1790 until it went “viral” following Paul Samuelson’s Economics textbook after 1948. An oral tradition at Cambridge discussed it from 1874 (Maitland), but until A. C. Pigou’s “Economics of Welfare”, it remained unrecorded in print. A summary of the post-1940s interest in a modern version of Adam Smith’s use of the now famous metaphor is discussed (Warren Samuels, 2011) and contrasted with Adam Smith’s teaching of the role of metaphors in his Rhetoric Lectures (1762). .

a certain propensity in human nature

Wealth of Nations opens by addressing the division of labour, which is his central theme for the creation of wealth, and the core of his historical conjectures. Schumpeter criticised him for ‘exaggerating’ its importance.1