A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith

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A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith

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A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith General Editor Keith Tribe Advisory Editor Hiroshi Mizuta

LONDON

PICKERING & CHATTO 2002

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Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London, WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. Copyright © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 2002 BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Critical bibliography of Adam Smith 1. Smith, Adam, 1723–1790 2. Economics – Great Britain – History – 18th century – Bibliography I. Tribe, Keith, 1949– II. Mizuta, Hiroshi, 1919– 016.3’3’0092 ISBN 1851967419 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Critical bibliography of Adam Smith / general editor, Keith Tribe; advisory editor, Hiroshi Mizuta. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 1-85196-741-9 (alk. paper) 1. Smith, Adam, 1723–1790–Bibliography. 2. Economists–Great Britain–Bibliography. I. Tribe, Keith. II. Mizuta, Hiroshi, 1919–

HB103.S6 C69 2002 016.33015’3–dc21

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2001045933

This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper in Printed Library Materials. Typeset by P&C Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Trowbridge

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Contents Acknowledgements General Introduction: Keith Tribe

vii 1

Early Editions of Adam Smith’s Books in Britain and Ireland, 1759–1804: Richard B. Sher Adam Smith in English: From Playfair to Cannan: Keith Tribe The Glasgow Edition of the Collected Works of Adam Smith: D. D. Raphael The Diffusion of the Work of Adam Smith in the French Language: An Outline History: Gilbert Faccarello and Philippe Steiner The German Reception of Adam Smith: Keith Tribe Adam Smith in Russian Translation: Tatiana V. Artemieva The Reception of Adam Smith’s Works in Poland from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries: Stefan Zabieglik Adam Smith in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking World: John Reeder and José Luís Cardoso Translations of Adam Smith’s Works in Japan: Hiroshi Mizuta Adam Smith in China: Zhu Shaowen

61 120 153

Notes to the Bibliographies

219

Main Bibliography: All Editions, Chronologically Ordered

227

Bibliography by Individual Work

331

Bibliography by Language Group

361

Note on Dutch Editions: Hans Blom Note on Italian Editions: Marco E. L. Guidi Note on Romanian Editions: Roxana Bobulescu

391 392 397

Index

399

13 27 50

168 184 198 209

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Acknowledgements I would first of all like to thank Anna Crago of Pickering and Chatto for proposing this project and overseeing its early development, providing clear guidance in what turned out to be an increasingly complex project. Julia Benest, followed by Sarah Brown, assumed editorial responsibility during the last few months and have been of great help as the work was completed. The ESRC has provided funding for the year and a half of editorial work that the project has required, and I am very grateful both for the help I have had from them and for the assistance of Keele University in providing me with the time that I needed to compile this new survey of the impact of the writings of Adam Smith. Various individuals have been of great help at different stages of my work: I would like to thank Monika Altgeld, Marea Arries, Karen Bailey, Vincent Barnett, Stephanie Blankenburg, Vivienne Brown, Lilia Bull, Tony Cross, Mark Curthoys, Knud Haakonssen, Iraj Hashi, Robert Holman, Istvan Hont, Ed Hundert, Cheng-chung Lai, Liberty Press, Peter Lord, Richard Machesney, Carlos Mallorquin, Martin Maw, Tamotsu Nishizawa, Fania Oz-Salzberger, Nick Phillipson, Ken Roberts, Doris and Jürgen Rudolph, John Simmons, Andrew Skinner, Tony Sneddon, Chris Stray, Nigel Swain, Michael Tochtermann, Michael Twyman, Sue Walker, John Winckler, and Björn Wittrock. The following are responsible for tracking the international diffusion of Adam Smith’s writings, in some cases confirming that there were no editions in their part of the world: Tatiana Artemieva (Russian) Rabeea Assy (Arabic) Hans Blom (The Netherlands and Belgium) Roxana Bobulescu (Romania) Hans Erich Bödeker (Germany) Michal Brzezinski (Poland) José Luís Cardoso (Portuguese) Kenneth Carpenter (French) Gilbert Faccarello (French) Marco Guidi (Italian)

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Alon Kadish (Hebrew) Béla Kapossy (Switzerland) Aladar Madarasz (Hungary) Lars Magnusson (Scandinavia) Pratap Mehta (Indian languages) Siavash Moridi (Persian) Hiroshi Mizuta (Japan) James Otteson (United States) Eyup Ozveren (Turkey) Michalis Psalidopolous (Greek and Serbo Croat) John Reeder (Spanish) Kari Saastamoinen (Finnish) So Jinsu (Korean) Richard Sher (English) Philippe Steiner (French) Steve Takahashi (Canada) Keith Tribe (Great Britain and Ireland, Germany) Mike White (Australia) Stefan Zabieglik (Poland) Zhu Shaowen (China)

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General Introduction Keith Tribe

In 1939 the Kress Library of Business and Economics, a part of the Baker Library of the Harvard Business School, published a catalogue of their by then extensive collection of Adam Smith editions.1 Listing each edition by title and country of publication, one can trace in its pages the way in which the international diffusion of Adam Smith’s ideas was carried forward both by translation, and also by the readiness with which British and American publishers continued to reprint Smith’s two original books – The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This new bibliography of Smith’s writings takes the Vanderblue Catalogue as its starting point; and during its preparation it quickly became evident that, since the bicentenary of the Wealth of Nations in 1976, the rate of international publication had accelerated significantly. If we start with the decade after Smith’s death, when both works were selling well, and compare it with the that of the 1890s one hundred years later, it is apparent that the rate of publication roughly doubled. One hundred years later, during the 1990s, the number of new editions had doubled again. Quite evidently, this quickening of pace in publication as the work itself becomes older has significantly extended the scope of this bibliography beyond that of 1939, which provided our original benchmark. Its scope has been further enlarged by including essays on aspects of the diffusion process, and, importantly, the bibliography has been systematically annotated and chronologically organised. The notes appended to the entries provide a running commentary to the gathering pace of publication; while the inclusion of all works in the chronological main bibliography gives a ready overview of the scope of the diffusion process. One effect of this has been to emphasise the somewhat neglected standpoint of publishing history. Typically, scholarly discussion of the meaning and content of Adam Smith’s books has failed to consider the physical form in which this content was carried over time and around the world, and thereby lent meaning. Use of the publishing record renders important aspects of Smith’s 1

The Vanderblue Memorial Collection of Smithiana, introduced by Charles J. Bullock, Publication No. 2 of the Kress Library of Business and Economics, Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, Boston (Mass.) 1939.

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impact upon generations of readers quite obvious – that Germain Garnier was during the first half of the nineteenth century the most accessible introduction for English readers of Wealth of Nations, as well as for French; that while Theory of Moral Sentiments went through a period of relative neglect, this was greatest in the mid-twentieth, and not the later nineteenth, centuries; that several condensed versions of Wealth of Nations were published in later nineteenth-century Oxford, and that Ashley continued this Oxford tradition in a popular 1895 edition which appears to have sold well in North America; and, more generally, that publishers keen to add Adam Smith to their backlist repeatedly commissioned new translations of the work.1 Quite apart from anything else, the extent of this new bibliography provides a renewed basis for an appreciation of the manner in which Smith’s writing, which teaches us how we might understand economy and society, has itself been altered in successive readings and rereadings. This in turn directs renewed attention to the importance of the Vanderblue Collection.

1. The Vanderblue Memorial Collection of Smithiana2 The Vanderblue Memorial Collection of Smithiana at Baker Library, Harvard Business School was initiated by a chance encounter and has subsequently developed thanks to the scholarly commitment of its founder and that of curators and librarians of the Kress Collection. In the mid-1920s Harvard University’s rapidly growing programme in business administration, established in 1908, was just moving to its new campus on the Boston side of the Charles River. The focal point of the new campus was Baker Library, named after George Fisher Baker, president of the First National Bank of New York and donor of the funds to build the business school campus. Around this time Homer Bews Vanderblue, then a professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, visited a well-established Washington bookstore looking for prints to add to the business school’s library collections. What he acquired instead were the first and second editions of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. This was the beginning of more than a decade of acquisition by Vanderblue that would form the core of the incomparable collection of the works of Adam Smith added to the Baker Library. Vanderblue earned his PhD at Harvard University in 1915. After several years teaching at Northwestern University, he became Professor of Business Economics at Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration (now known as Harvard Business School), a position that he held from 1922 1 There is sufficient material here for at least one doctoral thesis directed to the inter-relation of the book market and the production of new translations. 2 This account of the genesis of the Vanderblue Memorial Collection was generously written for this introduction by Karen Bailey, Rare Book Librarian, Baker Library.

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until 1929. Some years later, Vanderblue would also serve as Honorary Curator of Early Economic Literature at Baker Library. The business school administration was committed to establishing Baker Library as a leading international research collection. When the rare book collection of H. S. Foxwell came on the market in the 1930s,1 the school was anxious to acquire it. Purchased in 1936 with a generous gift from Claude Washington Kress, president of S. H. Kress & Co. department stores, the collection became known as the Kress Library of Business and Economics. These materials formed the foundation of an exceptional rare book collection focussed on the history of business and economics.2 Meanwhile, Homer Vanderblue’s Adam Smith collection had grown significantly, particularly in regard to editions and translations of the Wealth of Nations, numbering nearly 150 imprints in about a dozen languages by 1936. Vanderblue summarised his collecting adventures that year in a pamphlet;3 and one year later he announced several new acquisitions in a short article called ‘Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations: a Report of Progress,’ which appeared in the November 1937 issue of the Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin. Homer Vanderblue generously presented his Adam Smith collection to Baker Library in 1939 in memory of his father, Frank J. Vanderblue. The Vanderblue Memorial Collection of Smithiana became part of the Kress Collection of Business and Economics and was housed in a special alcove of the Kress Room, where it has remained until this day. Included in the gift were books, manuscript letters of Smith, and several volumes from Smith’s own library. In addition to the gift of his rare book collection, Vanderblue also provided a financial gift, the income from which could be used to purchase additional Adam Smith items and books of the period when Smith was a leading figure. While Vanderblue’s collecting efforts had remained fairly tightly focussed on editions of the Wealth of Nations, the arrival of the collection at Baker Library brought with it several new directions for the collection. A particular emphasis was put on developing the breadth as well as the depth of the collection by acquiring commentaries on and excerpts from the Wealth of Nations, editions of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and historical criticisms of the works of Adam Smith. Relevant imprints from the original purchase of the Foxwell collection as well as from other Harvard University libraries were transferred into the Vanderblue Collection. By the time Baker Library published a catalogue of the new collection in 1939, there were 171 editions (or issues) of the Wealth of 1

The second time this had happened: Foxwell’s first collection was acquired in 1901 by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths’ and donated in 1903 to the University of London, forming the core of the present Goldsmiths’ Library in the University of London Library, Senate House. 2 Unlike the Goldsmiths’ Library, which broadly reflects the English-language bias of Foxwell’s original collection and which has not been systematically extended, the Kress has always had a more international focus, and funds sufficient to support an active purchasing policy. 3 Homer B. Vanderblue, ‘Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations: an Adventure in Book Collecting and a Bibliography’, Baker Library 1936.

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Nations in twelve languages; fifteen editions of the Theory of Moral Sentiments in three languages; plus 160 other related titles included. The Vanderblue Memorial Collection of Smithiana, publication No. 2 of the Kress Library of Business and Economics, subsequently became the standard by which booksellers and scholars alike cited the imprints of Adam Smith. Baker Library has built on this remarkable foundation over the years, bringing together one of the most comprehensive collections of the works of Adam Smith in the world. There has been only one printed update on the growth of the collection, however: a 1948 article by professor and librarian Arthur Cole titled ‘Hewing to the Line: the Vanderblue Memorial Collection of Smithiana.’ This essay reports, among other items, eleven new editions and six new summaries of and excerpts from the Wealth of Nations, ten new editions of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and eleven new volumes of criticism of Adam Smith. The work of several curators, assisted by a remarkable network of scholars and booksellers, is evident in the growth of the collection during the intervening half-century since Cole’s update. Among the highlights of the collection today are nearly 250 editions and fifty eight summaries of and excerpts from the Wealth of Nations; approximately forty five editions of the Theory of Moral Sentiments; and twelve books from Adam Smith’s personal library. Recent new additions include an early, unrecorded German reaction to Adam Smith, published in 1788, and the famed 1798 French translation of the Theory of Moral Sentiments by Sophie de Grouchy, wife of the Marquis de Condorcet. Microfilm of unique items from other collections complement the rare books, forming a particularly comprehensive resource for scholars visiting Baker Library. A significant portion of the Vanderblue Collection may be found on the Goldsmiths’–Kress microfilm series, which combines resources from the Goldsmiths’ Library at the University of London and the Kress Collection of Business and Economics at Baker Library.1 In the later 1980s the Kress Library of Business and Economics and the Baker Library Manuscripts and Archives Division merged to form the Historical Collections Department of Baker Library, which is now responsible for developing, preserving, and providing access to the Kress Collection of Business and Economics, including the Vanderblue Collection, and continues to actively acquire relevant materials and to assist scholars using the collections. 2. The Catalogue The 1939 catalogue is organised by work, beginning with Wealth of Nations (pp. 3–37); Theory of Moral Sentiments (pp. 38–42); Essays on Philosophical Subjects (pp. 43–4); Collected Works (p. 45); Miscellaneous Writings pp. 46–7; Lectures (p. 48); Manuscript Letters (p. 49); Criticism of the Work of Smith (pp. 50–8); 1

The microfilm does not include accessions after 1980.

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Biographies and other Personal Material (pp. 59–63); the Library of Adam Smith (pp. 64–6); and finally Prints and Similar Items (pp. 67–8).1 Although the items are listed chronologically, these sections are subdivided, so that works published in England are separated from those in Scotland and Ireland, as well as from France, Russia or China. It is consequently difficult to form a clear overview of the progress and sequence of publication from the catalogue. More important, no commentary other than that of a bibliographic nature was provided on the individual editions – it is primarily the instrument of book collectors and librarians, rather than historians of whatever kind. This bibliography is by contrast historical in structure and substance. The main bibliography includes all items ordered chronologically by year, sequenced then by work and country of origin. Selections and condensations are treated as equivalent versions of the text from which they select or which they abbreviate. Commentary, other than that which is mainly biographical, is excluded; also, with some exceptions, we have excluded general readers that reproduce among a number of other authors one or two extracts from Smith’s writings. Finally, it is directed to texts, so that prints and other memorabilia are likewise excluded. This is a historical, rather than a purely bibliographical work,2 and a substantial amount of commentary has been included. Ten essays in the first half of the book discuss various aspects of Smith’s publishing history, in Britain and overseas; while comments are appended to many of the bibliographic entries, highlighting notable features of this or that edition. As far as has been practical, items listed below have been physically examined and reported upon by scholars familiar with the language in which the work has been published. This might seem an elementary point, but it is an important one when seeking to distinguish condensed versions of an original text from the text itself, or even commentary from condensation. Two examples from Homer Vanderblue’s 1936 interim report highlight the importance of a proper understanding of the content of some of the more obscure translations of Smith’s writing.3 The first example concerns the Sommarin 1909–11 Swedish translation of the Wealth of Nations, which in 1936 Vanderblue thought to be complete. He later realised his error; the mistake was rectified and the item appears in the 1939 Catalogue in the section ‘Summaries and Excerpts from Wealth of Nations.’4 Lars Magnusson was able to confirm that this work is indeed an abbreviation of the first three books of Wealth of Nations – hence a condensation of a selection. A second discrepancy must have 1

It includes some items that are not in the Vanderblue Memorial Collection, but where reliable bibliographical evidence has been provided – these items are marked with a double dagger. 2 Although as McKenzie suggests, all bibliography has in recent years become historical bibliography – D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999) p. 12. 3 H. Vanderblue, ‘Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations’ p. 4. 4 H. Vanderblue Catalogue, p. 34.

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been more difficult to resolve. An 1881 Turkish translation of Wealth of Nations by Sakisli Ohanes is recorded by Vanderblue in 1936 as having been published in Constantinople, printed in ‘old Turkish characters’, the modified ArabicPersian script in use until about 1928.1 There is indeed a work by Sakizli Ohannes Pasha published in 1881 whose title translates as ‘the science of the wealth of nations’, but it is not a translation of Wealth of Nations.2 The book is a discussion of political economy in five parts – production, exchange, distribution, consumption and a conclusion; it is therefore recognisable as a work written more under the influence of Jean-Baptiste Say than Adam Smith, but given a title reminiscent of Smith all the same. However, to reach this conclusion one requires access to Turkish literature and, if a copy were available, the services of someone who could read the script. The book would in any case have had very few readers when originally published, since print runs were small and the Turkish literacy rate was low. In the 1939 catalogue this text is still listed (with the date modified to 1880), but under ‘Criticism of the Work of Adam Smith’.3 What happened here is plain: unable to read the ‘old Turkish script’ of the work, or perhaps not having even seen the work, Vanderblue was in 1936 under the impression that this was a translation of Wealth of Nations. But it was not – it was instead a synthesis of political economy based on the work of Jean-Baptiste Say, which accounts both for it being taken to be a translation of Wealth of Nations, as well as its later reassignment as a work of criticism. A bibliography such as the one published here must necessarily be a cooperative undertaking – in fact it embodies the utterly Smithian principle of the division of labour, applied along linguistic lines and greatly facilitated by the internet. Given the sheer number of editions recorded below, a considerable amount of collective time and effort has been needed to complete a project that looks increasingly like the foundation for something else – more detailed, more comprehensive. Why then should this be thought a worthwhile enterprise? In part it has to do with the corpus of writing that Smith left. Historians routinely seek in an author’s life a way of making sense of that author’s work; but we know relatively little about Smith’s life. Dugald Stewart’s account of 1793 remains the core of all biographical sketches, and it was not until Rae’s 1895 biography that a reliable account drawing extensively on letters and other sources was available, and there have been no discoveries relating to Smith’s life since then that might prompt a major re-evaluation of Smith’s project and writings. The major third party correspondence sources were all identified by the late nineteenth century – Emanuel Leser for example drew attention to the value in this connection of John Hill Burton’s Life and Correspondence of David 1

H. Vanderblue, ‘Adam Smith and the ‘Wealth of Nations’ pp. 4, 13. Mebadi-I Ilm-i Servet-i Milel, 441 pages; no copy has been traced in Turkey, but this appears to be the work referred to in the 1939 catalogue. Eyup Ozveren kindly supplied all details concerning this work. 3 Vanderblue Catalogue, p. 54. 2

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Hume (1846), even though some of the conclusions that he reached were misguided.1 And so the reconstruction of Smith’s project has depended, to a greater degree than usual, on the books that he wrote and those that he possessed (or used, in the case of the Advocates’ Library).2 James Bonar worked for many years reconstituting the history of Smith’s library3 and Hiroshi Mizuta has now completed this enterprise some one hundred years after it was begun.4 From this and the existing catalogue of the Advocates’ Library as it existed in 1776 we can draw conclusions about sources that Smith could have read, those of which he could possibly have been aware and, importantly, those that he is unlikely to have studied or even heard of. These sources have been of special importance in arguments over the degree to which Smith drew upon the writings of the Physiocrats, for example, or the manner in which he continued arguments taken over from his teacher Frances Hutcheson. Combined with study of Smith’s own revisions to Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, and also more recently the Lectures, this enables scholars to reconstruct rather more exactly Smith’s reading and intentions, what Smith “meant” in writing what he did. But Smith’s writings have been read and argued about for over two centuries now, and so there is another axis of meaning that we need to consider: what Smith has “meant” to succeeding generations of readers, and our understanding of this must start from a clear conception of the publishing history. As this bibliography shows, there have been a bewildering number of editions and translations of both Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations; and by studying these we can gain some insight into the way Smith has been read over the years. Out of the initial, limited task of updating the Vanderblue bibliography has grown a study of the diffusion of economic knowledge, in which recent studies of literary reception play their part, but which, importantly, is also informed by modern historical understanding of the development of political economy and the moral sciences, and the place that Smith occupies within this. 1 He lent support to Burton’s notorious idea that the ‘Smith’ referred to in Hume’s letter of 4 March 1740 is Adam Smith. Initially sceptical, Leser goes on to examine the timing of Smith’s departure for Oxford on the basis of Dugald Stewart, but gets it wrong, and concludes that this could well be Adam (Hume is not in Glasgow and so Adam Smith has to be somewhere else if he is to meet Hume) – see E. Leser, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Nationalökonomie, Gustav Fischer, Jena 1881 p. 5–7. But Thorold Rogers had already sorted the Oxford dates out on the basis of the Balliol Buttery books (Preface to his edition of Wealth of Nations, Vol. I 1869 p. vi) showing that Smith arrived in Oxford in early July 1740 and left in August 1746. Leser proceeds from his initial mistake to a well-meaning, but misguided, reconstruction of the relation of Hume and Smith. 2 A Catalogue of the Library of the Faculty of Advocates, Edinburgh, Part the Second, (Balfour and Smellie Edinburgh 1776) identifies, together with Part the First (printed in 1742), those works available to Smith up to the date of publication of Wealth of Nations. 3 J. Bonar (ed.) A Catalogue of the Library of Adam Smith, (Macmillan & Co., London 1894). 4 Hiroshi Mizuta, Adam Smith’s Library. A Catalogue, (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000).

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3. The Construction of a Reputation The ‘Wealth of Nations’ being one of those books which much talked of and little read, it is natural that some strange misconceptions should be current regarding the doctrines it contains and, above all, the tone and spirit in which it is written. The author of the ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments,’ the keystone of which is sympathy, the man who at his death left a much smaller fortune than was anticipated owing to his constant expenditure in deeds of unostentatious charity, the man who was especially distinguished amongst his contemporaries by his geniality and kindness, is popularly supposed to be the father of dismal dogmas which amongst the vulgar (if the term may still be used in its older signification) pass current for Political Economy.1

Shield Nicholson’s point concerning the supposed ‘egoism’ at the heart of Wealth of Nations remained true for a hundred years or more after he had written this comment. In his own lifetime Smith was taken for an ‘oeconomist’, and he was keen to distance himself from this. But it is apparent that this effort proved quite vain. The reception of Adam Smith’s writing has been dominated by the Wealth of Nations, and Smith has consistently been read as an economist (whatever the contemporary definition of an ‘economist’ might happen to be) – a reading then periodically countered by the re-assertion of a position closer to the eighteenth-century Smith, rather than some present-day construct. The comments of Bagehot,2 Bastable,3 Morrow,4 and Schneider5 testify to the cycli1 J. Shield Nicholson, ‘Introductory Essay’, to his edition of A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (T. Nelson and Sons, London 1886) p. 13. 2 ‘And it is precisely this singular position of Adam Smith which has given him his peculiar usefulness. He fulfilled two functions. On the one hand, he prepared the way for, though he did not found, the abstract science of Political Economy. The conception of human nature which underlies The Wealth of Nations is near enough to the fictitious man of recent economic science to make its reasonings often approximate to, and sometimes coincide with, those which the stoutest of modern economists might use.’ W. Bagehot, ‘Adam Smith and our Modern Economy’, in his Economic Studies, (Longmans, Green and Co., London 1880) p. 127. 3 See the citation from Bastable in my essay ‘Adam Smith in English: From Playfair to Cannan’ below p. 46. 4 Morrow wrote of Smith: ‘Like his predecessors he states the truism that an isolated individual can never develop a moral consciousness; but instead of regarding this moral consciousness as already implicit in the individual (a method which results in well-known contradictions and difficulties), he starts at the other end. The moral world is something independent of the individual thinker; his standards of right and wrong come to his consciousness from an order beyond it.’ G. Morrow, ‘The Significance of the Doctrine of Sympathy in Hume and Adam Smith’, Philosophical Review Vol. 32 (1923) pp. 70–1. 5 ‘…the Wealth of Nations is not based, as some have maintained, on a psychology of selfinterest, but on a theory of natural laws of prudence (dictates of right reason) or social art of self-command, which is not a theory of motivation at all, but a theory of moral judgement. For the psychology of propriety, benevolence, justice, and prudence we must turn to the Theory of Moral Sentiments; for the “natural law” or objective embodiment of these same virtues we must turn to jurisprudence and political economy. The two approaches complement each other.’ Herbert W. Schneider (ed.), Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy, (Harper and

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cal character of this process. These names are seldom to be found in presentday writings on Smith, an extensive literature which, however, typically draws upon a recent, attenuated, body of commentary. And so the complaint that Smith has been read in economistic terms, and hence unhistorically, is repeated without awareness that this complaint simply echoes similar charges made by writers of previous generations. Commentary upon the writings of Smith has certainly altered the manner in which his work has come to be read, but one result of this bibliography is to restore a ‘long view’ to this process. As a result, this new perspective has also revealed that much historical criticism of contemporary commentary is itself “unhistorical”, unwittingly reiterating positions already elaborated in an older literature.1 The bibliography provides a template against which the cyclical nature of Smith commentary becomes more obvious. A feature that also emerges clearly from the essays is that the history of the diffusion of Adam Smith’s reputation does not coincide with, nor can be read out of, the rate of translation of his work or its re-editions in the original English. This is the ‘old story’ that we find for example in Palyi and Hasek2 – essentially that a book by Smith is first read in translation and then discussed, or read and subsequently taught to someone. One cannot however draw direct conclusions from the presence, or absence, of a book in circulation in a particular country. German scholars invented an ‘Adam Smith Problem’ in the later nineteenth century concerning the relationship between Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations even though the last German edition of the former had appeared in 1791. Stefan Zabieglik’s account of the Polish Smithian reception goes further in undermining this simplistic account of the diffusion process. He confirms the ‘new story’ – that the reception process works not directly, but indirectly and in phases. So Adam Smith in Polish turns out to be derivative of the French and the German receptions, and early in the nineteenth century it was thought that Say and Sartorius had improved upon Smith, with the result that their work was read, and translated, and not that of Smith himself. Geographically and culturally Poland was remote from Britain; Smith had a canonical reputation but how that reputation was understood was influenced by prevailing conceptions of economic order and interpretations Row, New York 1970 (reprint of the 1948 edition)) p. xxii. Schneider presents Smith’s arguments in Lectures and Wealth of Nations as extensions of those found in Theory of Moral Sentiments, rather than the more usual practice of using Theory of Moral Sentiments to illuminate Wealth of Nations. 1 This line of argument is borrowed from the introduction to Istvan Hont’s Jealousy of Trade: Nationalism, Global Competition and the ‘Wealth of Nations’, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 2003). 2 Melchior Palyi, ‘The Introduction of Adam Smith on the Continent’ in J. M. Clark et. al., Adam Smith, 1776–1926. Lectures to Commemorate the Sesquicentennial of the Publication of ‘The Wealth of Nations’, (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1928) pp. 180–233; C. W. Hasek, The Introduction of Adam Smith’s Doctrines into Germany, (Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University, New York 1925).

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and commentaries that happened to be accessible, linguistically and physically. We could say for the first half of the nineteenth century that, in central and northern Europe, French was the most widespread second language, so knowledge of ‘international’ intellectual trends came with a strong Parisian accent. In the second half of the century the German university system, and also of course German social democracy,1 became the more powerful force, although as Tatiana Artemieva shows, the 1866 Bibikov translation of Wealth of Nations was based on the 1843 Blanqui French translation, while the 1895 Soldatenkov version was based on Courcelle Seneuil’s 1888 abbreviated version of the book. Likewise in Spain – Adam Smith was comparatively little read in the nineteenth century because Jean-Baptiste Say was more popular and accessible. But while Smith’s reputation might be propagated courtesy of Say, or Germain Garnier, there was nevertheless a steady consolidation of his canonical status as the founder of modern political economy. The international diffusion of Smith’s writing has greatly relied upon translations of his work; and while there is no great mystery about the nature and limitations of translation, what is very striking is the sheer number of separate translations made into French, German, Japanese or Korean. Translators will routinely justify the production of a new version of a work by suggesting that linguistic deficiencies of earlier versions were such as to compromise a proper understanding of the text. This argument has been most popular among German commentators on the two initial German editions of the Wealth of Nations, the first by J. F. Schiller, the second by Garve and Dörrien.2 But Smith’s written style is straightforward; his choice of terminology and sentence construction idiomatic.3 Smith’s English goes very easily into French, as any comparison of sections from the original and the Garnier translation show. The difficulty with Smith’s language is primarily a conceptual one – the prose might be plain enough, but at times its exact meaning is obscure. One can for example read Smith’s account of exchange transactions and price formation several times and still be quite unsure of what it is exactly that he means. Moreover, many readers complained that deviations and the overuse of illustration and example obstructed appreciation of the main line argument; and this was for instance why Garnier composed his ‘method’, a reading guide which outlined and reordered the text. This feature also helps account for the appeal of condensed versions of Wealth of Nations. But none of this really gives us a clear idea why there are just so many French, German, Japanese and Korean translations, repeated translation and revision being in these languages the rule, rather than the exception. 1

Russian social democrats acknowledged the political and intellectual leadership of the SPD well into the twentieth century. 2 The merits of the arguments advanced in this particular case are discussed below in the German essay. 3 There has been recurring complaint about his love of deviation, and the manner in which this obscured his overall argument, but that is a different issue.

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Part of the answer surely lies in the commercial prospects of publishing an edition of Adam Smith – the sheer number of editions recorded in the bibliography clearly attests to that. Having one or even two of Smith’s books on your list was indicative of academic seriousness, and did no harm to the cash flow either. The risk is low, the cost of a new translation moderate,1 and in any case no royalties are due, and copyright has long expired.2 But this economic line of argument, although suggestive, cannot account for the scale of the phenomenon, since there are so many other works of this kind that have not been translated so frequently. Some consideration has also to be given to problems in translating Smith’s writing, and to changing standards of translation. Although there is at present no clearcut solution to this puzzle, the scale of the problem has only become evident in the compilation of this bibliography. Nonetheless, it has been possible to terminate the careers of some longstanding myths concerning Adam Smith and his writing. On the occasion of the centenary of the publication of Wealth of Nations the Economist published a commemorative editorial, suggesting that Smith was no man of business, ‘He was a bookish student who never made a sixpence, who was unfit for all sorts of affairs, and whose absence of mind is hardly credible.’3 As Richard Sher demonstrates, not only did Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations earn Smith lucrative appointments – the first as tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch with a substantial continuing pension, the second appointment as Commissioner for Customs – Smith also made a great deal of money from the books themselves. By contemporary standards, Smith was a wealthy man; but he lived modestly, and so the real question is what he did with the sums of money that steadily flowed his way. But, two hundred years and more after his death, it is unlikely that we will ever know. Which directs our attention back to the books themselves – not simply as disembodied ‘texts’, but real books, printed, bound, sold and read (or not). Adam Smith has turned into a publishing phenomenon, and the history of this phenomenon can provide us with new insights – not into the intentions of Smith, but into changing perceptions of these intentions and their significance. And as such, this bibliography is one contribution to this ‘rehistoricisation’ of the work of Adam Smith. 1 Given that many of them are surely light revisions of previous versions, deviating just enough to be published as a ‘new work’. 2 This was one argument used by Oxford University Press in correspondence with Edwin Cannan concerning any payment due for the rights over the student notes that became Lectures on Justice, Revenue, Police and Arms. The owner of the notes had no copyright in them and there, the Press suggested, he had no right to demand any payment in return for their publication – their commercial value was nil, they suggested, comparing it to the Stock Exchange price list in Rogers’s Bank of England, and Ricardo’s ‘dull’ Letters to Malthus. Copy of Cannan to Philip Lyttelton Gell (Secretary to the Delegates), 24 St. Giles, Oxford, 6 June 1895; Cannan Papers File 1020 f. 41, British Library for Political and Economics Sciences. 3 Editorial, The Economist Vol. XXXIV (3 June 1876) p. 649.

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Early Editions of Adam Smith’s Books in Britain and Ireland, 1759–1804 Richard B. Sher1

Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith’s first book was published in London at the end of April 1759 with the simple title The Theory of Moral Sentiments.2 It is a one-volume octavo of 550 pages, with thirty narrow lines (about 200 words) to the page. The title page identifies the author as ‘ADAM SMITH, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow’, and the co-publishers as A. Millar, in the Strand, and the Edinburgh firm of A. Kincaid and J. Bell. The book was printed in April 1759 by William Strahan, whose ledgers record a print run of 1,000 copies.3 In a letter of 26 April, Andrew Millar told the author that the printing required thirty-four sheets, on the basis of which he planned to sell the book for six shillings bound.4 Sales were brisk. Shortly before publication, David Hume told Smith that ‘Millar exalts and brags that two thirds of the Edition are already sold, and that he is now sure of Success’.5 Two weeks later, Millar himself told Smith that he had ‘no Sort of doubt of this Impression being Soon gone tho’ it will not be 1 I would like to thank Ian Simpson Ross and Keith Tribe for their help with this chapter, and Vivienne Brown, editor of The Adam Smith Review, for allowing me to include information on the publication history and reception of Wealth of Nations that will be discussed more fully in a forthcoming article. 2 The Public Advertiser for Saturday 21 April 1759 carried an advertisement for The Theory of Moral Sentiments beginning ‘In a few Days will be published,’ and on Monday, 30 April, an advertisement in the same newspaper announced the publication ‘This Day’. 3 B[ritish] L[ibrary], Add. MS 48,800, f. 122. References to the Strahan ledgers are drawn from examination of the manuscripts in the British Library and in the multi-reel microfilm edition of ‘The Strahan Archive from the British Library’, produced by Research Publications of Reading and Woodbridge, Conn., 1990. As recorded in the Strahan ledgers, printing dates indicate when a work was completed or billed, though the printing process may actually have occurred over a longer period of time. 4 The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1987), p. 39. 5 Ibid., p. 35, Hume to Smith, 12 April 1759.

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published till next Week’.1 Under these circumstances, Millar gave Smith ten presentation copies as a gift, and for the remaining eight presentation copies he charged him the same low rate given to booksellers who ordered at least a certain number. It is clear from Millar’s letter that Smith had sold the copyright before publication, two-thirds to Millar and one-third to Kincaid & Bell. We do not know how much copy money Smith received for Theory of Moral Sentiments, but it almost certainly was not very much, given the format and price of the book. After Smith made revisions and corrections, Strahan printed 750 copies of the second edition in September 1760.2 Responding to criticism by Hume and Gilbert Elliot, Smith had revised his central concepts of sympathy and the impartial spectator. When he received a pre-publication copy in December 1760, he noted further errors in his text and supplied Strahan with errata, the most serious of which (‘sins against the holy Ghost’) were corrected in the third edition; others were handled piecemeal up to the sixth edition of 1790, and ten were never dealt with at all.3 The second edition bore a 1761 imprint and was published on 23 January. The title page shows the same publishers and identifies the author in the same way as the first edition. When the third edition was being printed early in 1767, however, Smith told Strahan to ‘call me simply Adam Smith without any addition either before or behind’.4 Strahan finished printing 750 copies of the third edition in February 1767, and the book was published on 5 May.5 In accordance with Smith’s instructions, the phrase identifying the author as a Glasgow University professor was dropped from the title page; yet the author’s name was now followed by ‘L.L.D.’, signifying the honorary doctor of laws degree that Smith had received from the University of Glasgow on 21 October 1762,6 and he continued to be identified that way until the sixth edition. The imprint of the third edition also adds the phrase ‘and sold by T. Cadell in the Strand’ after identifying Millar as the London publisher, because by this time Andrew Millar had retired and Thomas Cadell was running his London bookshop. But the most significant change in the third edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments was the appending of ‘Considerations concerning the first formation of Languages, and the different genius of original and compounded Languages’, which is referred to somewhat differently in the book’s title: ‘To which is added A Dissertation on the Origin of Languages’. This essay had previously been published in The Philological Miscellany in 1761, but from 1

Ibid., p. 40, Millar to Smith, 26 April 1759. BL, Add. MS 48,800, f. 122. 3 Smith to Elliot, 10 October 1759, and Smith to Strahan, 30 December 1760, Corespondence, pp. 48–50, 73, and note 1. 4 Smith to Strahan, [early 1767], Correspondence, pp. 122. 5 BL, Add. MS 48,800, f. 152; Edinburgh Evening Courant, 27 May 1767. 6 Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1995), p. 151. 2

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1767 onward it was a fixture in the various editions of Theory of Moral Sentiments.1 Andrew Millar died in June 1768, and the following year his copyrights were sold to the London trade at an auction at the Queen’s Arms Tavern. His twothirds ownership of the copyright of Theory of Moral Sentiments was divided into four shares, each worth one-sixth of the entire copyright. According to marginal annotations in a surviving copy of the sale catalogue, Strahan purchased the first one-sixth share for £5. 5s., and Cadell bought the remaining three onesixth shares, amounting to half the copyright, for a total of £17.2 In October 1774 Strahan printed 500 copies of the fourth edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments,3 the first edition to appear after Millar’s death, and the first to have a much longer title: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, or, An Essay towards an Analysis of the Principles by which Men naturally judge concerning the Conduct and Character, first of their Neighbours, and afterwards of themselves. To which is added, A Dissertation on the Origin of Languages. The imprint now identified the publishers as ‘W. Strahan, J. and F. Rivington, W. Johnston, T. Longman; and T. Cadell’ in London, as well as W. Creech in Edinburgh. The naming of William Johnston, Thomas Longman, and John and Francis Rivington suggests that these booksellers had purchased fractional shares of the copyright from Strahan and Cadell, and this assumption is consistent with the ‘List of Copies taken June 4, 1778’ in the Strahan ledgers, which records Strahan owning only a one-fifteenth share of Theory of Moral Sentiments at that time.4 In Edinburgh, meanwhile, William Creech had replaced John Bell as the junior partner of Alexander Kincaid in 1771, and had taken over the business upon Kincaid’s retirement in 1773. Although the small size of the print run of the fourth edition would seem to signify that the market for Theory of Moral Sentiments was starting to decline, the fact that Strahan once again printed 750 copies of the fifth edition in September 1781 is an indication that this was not necessarily the case.5 The imprint of the fifth edition of 1781 looks much like the fourth, except that it no longer contains the name of William Johnston, who had retired as a bookseller in 1773.6 1 In the Glasgow Edition, however, it is appended to Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1983), rather than to Theory of Moral Sentiments. See Bryce’s Introduction, pp. 23–9. 2 A Catalogue of the Copies and Shares of Copies of The Late Mr. Andrew Millar; Which will be Sold by Auction, To a select Number of Booksellers of London and Westminster, At the Queen’s-Arms Tavern, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, On Tuesday the 13th of June, 1769 [London, 1769], p. 14. The catalogue is in the Murray Archive in London, and is cited by permission of John Murray. I am also grateful to Warren McDougall and Hugh Amory for providing me with copies of this catalogue. 3 BL, Add. MS 48,801, f. 72. 4 BL, Add. MS 48,804. Strahan also recorded that he had paid £3.8s. for his 1/15 share. 5 BL, Add. MS 48,815, f. 63. 6 Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades 1775–1800 (Dawson, Folkestone (Kent) 1977), pp. 123–4.

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On 14 March 1786 Smith commented to Cadell on the copyright of Theory of Moral Sentiments: ‘I should be glad to know in what degree of demand the theory of Moral Sentiments still continues to be. The eight and twenty years property are now near expired. But I hope to be able to secure you in the property for at least fourteen years more’.1 It is unfortunate that no more of this letter has survived, and that there is no record of Cadell’s reply. Nevertheless, on the basis of this passage, it is clear that Smith clearly understood that publishers commonly used major textual revisions and additions as a device for extending the copyright beyond the maximum period of twenty-eight years allowed by the Copyright Act of 1709–10. In light of this convention, it is significant that on 9 April 1790 Strahan and Cadell registered the sixth edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments at Stationers’ Hall in London, noting in the registration file that the work contained ‘considerable additions and corrections’ – the same phrase that appears on the title page of the published work.2 This was a way of giving notice that even though earlier editions could legally be reprinted by others after April 1787, all the revisions in the latest edition were protected by copyright for a period of fourteen years from the time of publication of the sixth edition in late April 1790,3 that is, until April 1804. The revisions to the sixth edition were so extensive that Smith might well have been entitled to additional compensation from his publishers. However, in a letter to Cadell of 18 November 1789, Smith writes: ‘I intended the additions [to the sixth edition] as a present to Strahan and you’,4 suggesting that he did not expect any further pecuniary rewards for the new material he had written for the sixth edition. The sixth edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments was the last to appear in Smith’s lifetime, and it assumed a different form from earlier editions.5 Whereas every previous edition had been published in one thick octavo volume and priced at six shillings bound, the sixth edition was expanded to 950 pages of text in two octavo volumes, each approximately the same number of pages as past editions had been in one volume, and the price was accordingly raised to twelve shillings in boards or fourteen shillings bound. The book was printed 1

Smith to [Cadell], 14 March 1786, Correspondence, pp. 293. Records of the Stationers’ Company 1554–1920, ed. Robin Myers, 115 microfilm reels (Chadwyck-Healey, Cambridge 1987), reel 7. I have discovered no evidence of any other book or edition by Smith being registered at Stationers’ Hall during the eighteenth century. 3 The publication of the sixth edition is announced in an advertisement in the London Chronicle for 27–9 April 1790. 4 This letter appears in Heiner Klemme, ‘Adam Smith an Thomas Cadell: Zwei neue Briefe’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Bd. 73 (1991), pp. 277–80, as quoted in Ross, Life of Adam Smith, p. 395. 5 For the extensive textual revisions, not discussed here, see the Introduction to the Glasgow Edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1976), pp. 42–5. The present discussion draws upon the Glasgow Edition but adds new material on pricing, printing and other matters. 2

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with eight fewer lines (twenty-six instead of thirty-four) and almost 25% fewer words (about 200 instead of about 260) to the page than the cramped fifth edition. The representation of the author on the title page moved to the opposite extreme from the wish to be identified as ‘simply Adam Smith’, for it now read ‘ADAM SMITH, LL.D. Fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh; One of the Commissioners of his Majesty’s Customs in Scotland; and formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow’, a form of designation modelled, as we shall see, on the third edition of Wealth of Nations. This was the first edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments to be printed by Andrew Strahan, who had taken over the family firm after his father’s death in 1785. The fact that he printed 1000 copies may be taken as an indication that the publishers sensed a renewal of interest in the book.1 The publishers’ names in the imprint of the sixth edition also changed: Longman and the Rivingtons were omitted, leaving only Andrew Strahan and Thomas Cadell among the London publishers. Creech was still listed as an Edinburgh co-publisher, but he was joined for the first time by ‘J. Bell & Co. at Edinburgh’. As Kincaid’s partner at the time of the first edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments, John Bell may have claimed a right to be included in the imprints of later editions. There is another possible explanation for Bell’s inclusion, however. In the letter to Cadell of 18 November 1789 that is cited above, Smith takes issue with Cadell for offering a share in the sixth edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments to William Creech, even though Creech’s name had appeared in the imprints of the fourth and fifth editions. This is the context for Smith’s remark about intending the additions to the sixth edition as a ‘present’ to Strahan and Cadell, and, he adds significantly, ‘to nobody else’. Smith then discusses his aversion to printing the book in Edinburgh on account of ‘the present state of Literary faction here’. His meaning is far from clear, and it is possible that he has in mind religious faction, as Ian Simpson Ross has suggested.2 But it is also possible that Smith is talking about politics, and that the literary faction to which he refers was associated with Creech, whose politics were conservative. In that case, the appearance in the imprint of the sixth edition of Creech’s Edinburgh rival John Bell, who had more radical political associations, may have represented an attempt to undo the harmful effects that Smith feared might result from Cadell’s invitation to Creech. In the absence of additional evidence, however, these ideas remain highly speculative. The combination of a thoroughly revised, greatly expanded text and a new publishing format appears to have given Theory of Moral Sentiments a new lease on life. Since the second edition in 1761, the gaps between editions had been steadily increasing – from six years between the second and third editions, to seven years between the third and fourth and between the fourth and fifth editions, and finally to nine years between the fifth and sixth editions. At the same 1 2

BL, Add. MS 48,817, f. 15, contains the printing account, dated April 1790. Ross, Life of Adam Smith, pp. 395–6.

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time, the number of copies printed in editions two to five had never exceeded 750 and in one case had dropped to 500. But the sixth edition of 1790 sold out quickly, in spite of its much higher price and its larger print run.1 Another 1000 copies of the seventh edition were printed a little more than two and half years later, in December 1792.2 There was an eighth edition of 1000 copies in 1797 (printed in January 1797) and a ninth of the same size in 1801 (printed in December 1801)3 – the last edition to be covered by statutory copyright. These editions retained the two-volume octavo format pioneered by the sixth edition. Meanwhile, minor changes were occurring on the title pages. The title page of the seventh edition is like the sixth except that the phrase ‘With Considerable Additions and Corrections’ has been omitted. By the time of the eighth edition in 1797, Cadell’s son Thomas, Jr., partnered with William Davies, has replaced Thomas, Sr., in the imprint, as ‘T. Cadell jun. and W. Davies (successors to Mr Cadell)’. In the ninth edition of 1801, Andrew Strahan’s name appears only as the printer, and the words ‘(successors to Mr Cadell)’ are omitted after the reference to Cadell and Davies. This does not mean that Cadell and Davies owned the entire copyright, however. The Strahan ledgers reveal that Andrew Strahan still owned a 68/1000 share of Theory of Moral Sentiments in September 1807, and a 1/10 share in July 1822 and in 1831.4 In addition, surviving Longman ledgers reveal that the firms of Longman (now led by Thomas Norton Longman) and Rivington (now led by Francis Rivington and Charles Rivington III) remained silent partners in the eighth edition, with 1/30 shares that entitled each firm to 34 copies out of the total print run of 1000, at a charge of just 4s.4d. per two-volume set. A similar arrangement was in effect for the ninth edition, when Thomas Norton Longman was partnered with Owen Rees.5 Finally, according to the impression account of the eleventh edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments in the Longman ledgers, dated 10 January 1812, William Creech had a one-sixth share of this edition, and the firm of the late John Bell, also of Edinburgh, still owned approximately one-twelfth.6 It is likely that 1 Some owners of earlier editions traded them in for credit toward the purchase of the sixth edition. For example, on 23 November 1790 Hugh Blair traded in an ‘old edition’ and received a four-shilling credit toward the purchase of the new one. See the ledger book of Bell & Bradfute spanning the period 1788–93, National Library of Scotland, Dep. 193, p. 175. 2 BL, Add. MS 48,817, f. 18. 3 BL, Add. MS 48,817, ff. 95 and 97. 4 BL, Add. MS 48,901, ff. 81–2, 96–7, 108–9. 5 I. Maxted, London Book Trades, 141, 190. Archives of the House of Longman, 1794–1914, 73reel microfilm series (Chadwyck-Healey, Cambridge 1978), reel 37, H4, f. 12, and H5, f. 7 (reproducing manuscripts in Reading University Library). An oddity here is that the date of the eighth edition is recorded in the Longman impression account as March 1797, two months after Strahan recorded the printing in his ledger, while the Longman account dates the ninth edition to 14 May 1801, some seven months before the printing is recorded in the Strahan ledgers. 6 Longman Archives, reel 38, H7, f. 158.

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these were the same shares owned by Creech and Bell at the time of the sixth edition of 1790.1 All told, the Strahans printed 4,750 octavo copies of Theory of Moral Sentiments in six editions during Smith’s lifetime, the first 3,750 in one volume, and the remaining 1,000 in two volumes. They also printed 3,000 two-volume octavo sets in three editions in the decade or so following Smith’s death, bringing the total number of copies printed under the protection of statutory copyright to 7,750. A steady seller from the outset, Theory of Moral Sentiments was, by the time of Smith’s death in 1790, a more imposing book and a more popular one as well. The Wealth of Nations Unlike Theory of Moral Sentiments, which started out as a modestly priced, onevolume octavo, Wealth of Nations was originally published in London in early March 1776 as a two-volume quarto, priced at £1. 16s. in boards or £2. 2s. bound. The publishers were once again William Strahan and Thomas Cadell. No printing record of the first edition has survived, but it is probable that the press run was either 500 or 750 copies. Despite the high price and difficult subject matter, the book sold surprisingly well, and a second edition of 500 copies, also in two quarto volumes, was printed by Strahan in November 1777 and published by Strahan and Cadell in London in late February 1778.2 The author is identified on the title page of the quarto editions as ‘ADAM SMITH, LL.D. and F.R.S. Formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow’. The third edition of Wealth of Nations was printed by Strahan in October 1784 and published in the third week of November. This was the first and only major textual revision of the work, with ‘additions and corrections’ so substantial that they were also published separately in quarto for the benefit of purchasers of the first two editions. In addition to Smith’s own revisions, the third edition included an index that was prepared in London and mailed to 1 It is certain that Bell owned a one-twelfth share of the seventh edition, as recorded in the ledger book of Bell & Bradfute spanning the period 1788–93, Cadell account, 23 January 1793, National Library of Scotland, Dep. 193, p. 299. In addition, the Bell & Bradfute ledgers in the Edinburgh City Chambers, SL 138/3, vol. 3, contain impression accounts of the ninth edition of 1801 and the tenth edition of 1804 that also show Bell with a one-twelfth share. 2 Printing information from the Strahan ledgers for the second through the sixth editions of Wealth of Nations is presented fully in the note on ‘The Text and Apparatus’ by W. B. Todd in the Glasgow Edition of Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1976), pp. 61–4. However, the old folio numbers in BL, Add. MS 48,815, as given on 61, n. 2, should be updated to 22 (second edition), 79 (third edition), 98 (fourth edition), and 126 (fifth edition), and the reference to the account of the sixth edition should be corrected to read Add. MS 48,817, f. 17.

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Smith shortly before publication.1 This was also the first edition to be published in a more affordable three-volume octavo format, though the price of 18 shillings in boards or a guinea (21 shillings) bound was still substantial. Both the format and the price remained constant for several editions to come. The publishers printed 1,000 copies of the third edition and were not disappointed. Just two years later, in October 1786, Andrew Strahan printed 1,250 copies of the fourth edition, which was published in early November, with an imprint that reflected the change at the head of the Strahan firm (i.e., ‘A. Strahan’ instead of ‘W. Strahan’). As sales continued to soar, the publishers kept increasing the size of the print runs. The fifth edition, the last to appear in the author’s lifetime, was printed by Strahan in February 1789 in a quantity of 1,500 copies. In December 1791 Strahan printed 2,000 copies of the sixth edition, and he printed 2,500 copies of the seventh edition in December 1793 and the same number of the eighth edition in September 1796. Then the press run fell back down to 2,000 for the ninth edition, printed in May 1799, as well as the tenth edition, printed in March 1802 – the last edition to be covered by statutory copyright.2 Thus, in addition to the 1,000 or 1,250 two-volume quarto sets that appeared in the late 1770s, Strahan printed almost 4,000 three-volume octavo sets of Wealth of Nations during Smith’s lifetime and a total of nearly 15,000 three-volume octavo sets in the period from October 1784 to March 1802. As a large and unexpectedly popular book, Wealth of Nations was also very profitable, and the author himself made a great deal of money from it: £1,100 in confirmed payments, and a grand total of perhaps £1,500–1,800.3 Another indication of the book’s popularity is the appearance in 1797 of a textbook abridgement of just under 300 octavo pages by Jeremiah Joyce, entitled A Complete Analysis or Abridgement of Dr. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Printed at Cambridge by Benjamin Flower for ‘J. Deighton, and J. Nicholson; also for G. G. and J. Robinson, W. H. Lunn, and T. Conder, London; and J. March, Norwich’, with an advertisement by Joyce dated 20 June 1797, the Complete Analysis went to a second Cambridge edition in 1804 (also issued with a London imprint in 1818) and would go to a third London edition in 1821. In the revised and expanded third edition of Wealth of Nations of 1784, Smith’s name appears on the title page with extensive description, as ‘ADAM SMITH, LL.D. and F.R.S. of London and Edinburgh: One of the Commissioners of His Majesty’s Customs in Scotland; and Formerly Professor of 1 Smith to [Cadell], 18 November 1784, Correspondence, pp. 279–80. Hugh Blair had pointed out the need for extensive indexing in his letter to Smith of 3 April 1776, Correspondence, p. 189. 2 BL, Add. MS 48,815, ff. 22, 79, 98, 126; Add. MS 48,817, ff. 17, 18, 95, 96, 97. 3 A more detailed discussion of this topic will appear in my forthcoming article in the Adam Smith Review.

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Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow.’ We do not know why Smith changed his mind on this matter so completely in the seventeen years since he had asked William Strahan to ‘call me simply Adam Smith without any addition either before or behind’ on the title page of the third edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments. Whatever the reasons for it, the change had a lasting effect. Not only did the title pages of subsequent editions of Wealth of Nations continue to refer to the author in this manner but, as we have seen, in the last year of his life Smith (or his publishers) altered the title page of the sixth edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments to conform to this longer style of biographical identification, and the same mode of description subsequently became standard on the title pages of later editions of that work, as well. From the fourth edition in 1786 to the seventh edition in 1793, the imprints of Wealth of Nations contain only the names of Andrew Strahan and Thomas Cadell as publishers. After the retirement of Thomas Cadell, Sr., in 1793, however, the title page of the eighth edition of 1796 was altered to read ‘Printed for A. Strahan; and T. Cadell jun. and W. Davies (successors to Mr. Cadell) in the Strand’. The ninth edition of 1799 has the same imprint without the parenthetical reference to the senior Cadell, but in the tenth edition of 1802, as in the ninth edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1801, Andrew Strahan appears only as the printer, with Cadell and Davies as the sole publishers, even though it is clear from the Strahan ledgers that at this time Andrew Strahan still owned one-half of the copyright.1 On the basis of evidence that I shall present more fully elsewhere, it also appears that William Creech of Edinburgh was involved with the publication from the beginning, though the precise nature of his role as a co-publisher cannot currently be ascertained. Essays on Philosophical Subjects After Smith died in July 1790, his literary executors, Joseph Black and James Hutton, set out to edit a number of his unpublished papers for a posthumous volume. As the principal publishers of both Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, Andrew Strahan and Thomas Cadell were the most likely publishers to approach for this purpose. Not knowing these men personally, the executors employed as their intermediary the eminent Edinburgh literary man and lawyer Henry Mackenzie, who had been publishing his works with the firms of Strahan and Cadell for two decades. In a letter to Cadell of 2 August 1792 that was also intended for Strahan, Mackenzie first promotes a work by Hutton himself, which Strahan and Cadell would publish later that year as Dissertations on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy. He then turns to ‘our Friend Dr Smith’s posthumous Works’, consisting of his history of 1

BL, Add. MS 48,901, ff. 81–2.

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astronomy ‘& some smaller Essays on the Imitative Arts, & other moral & literary subjects’. Mackenzie thinks these essays might make up a fairly large octavo volume, comparable in length to the first edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments, or perhaps a single quarto volume along the lines of William Robertson’s Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients Had of India (1791). ‘Of the merit of these Essays (if my opinion were worth any thing)’, he writes, ‘I need only say that I think them worthy of their Author. His nephew [Smith’s heir David Douglas] whose property they are, is not so independent as Dr Hutton, & therefore the Copy Money for this work is a matter of some consideration’. Finally, Mackenzie mentions the possibility that a biography of Smith by Dugald Stewart, not yet complete, will be prefixed to the book.1 Breaking with their standard policy of responding to authors’ proposals regarding the terms of publication, rather than proposing terms themselves, Strahan and Cadell decide, in light of their ‘respect for the memory of Mr Smith’ and their confidence in Mackenzie himself, to offer the following terms: £300 pounds for the first edition, to consist of 1000 copies of a quarto volume, plus another £200 if the book should reach a second edition. In support of this proposal, the publishers review the publication terms for Wealth of Nations and point out that in the case of the posthumous essays there will be no chance to renew the copyright for a second period of fourteen years (because that could only be done when the author was still alive), thus lowering the value of the property. After they conclude by requesting that the printing be done in London, Cadell adds a postscript which asks: ‘Cannot we have a Portrait of Dr Smith.’2 The fact that no portrait of Smith had ever been painted may have determined the negative response to Cadell’s question, though a medallion by James Tassie was later used for frontispiece engravings of Smith in the French edition of Essays on Philosophical Subjects of 1797 as well as in the first volume of the London edition of Smith’s Works in 1811. Dugald Stewart read his life of Smith to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 21 January and 18 March 1793. Five days before the latter meeting, he informs Cadell that his biography is complete and ready for publication, though he expresses some uncertainty about its possible publication venues.3 Stewart’s Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D. was first published in 1794 in the third volume of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, but it also appeared in the following year, with slight revisions, at the beginning of Essays on Philosophical Subjects. On 16 March 1795 Stewart, in an attempt to sort out 1

Mackenzie to Cadell, 2 August 1792, National Library of Scotland, Acc 9546. Cadell [and Andrew Strahan] to Mackenzie, 21 December 1792, in Literature and Literati: The Literary Correspondence and Notebooks of Henry Mackenzie. Volume 1/Letters 1766–1827, ed. Horst W. Drescher (Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1989), p. 177. 3 Stewart to Cadell, 13 March 1793, National Library of Scotland, MS 5319, ff. 35–6, quoted in Ian Simpson Ross’s Introduction to Stewart’s biography of Smith in the Glasgow Edition of Smith’s Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P .D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1980), pp. 265–8. 2

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the details of the title page, submitted final corrections to William Preston, who was handling the printing of Smith’s book for the Strahan firm that he served as foreman (and later partner).1 In addition to changing the designation following his own name from ‘F.R.S. Edinburgh’ to ‘F.R.S.E.’, Stewart tends to the presentation of Smith’s name, which would appear on the title page as ‘The late Adam Smith, LL.D. Fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh, etc. etc.’ The Strahan ledgers reveal that 1000 copies of Essays on Philosophical Subjects were printed in April 1795, and publication occurred by early June.2 Essays on Philosophical Subjects was officially edited by Black and Hutton, who explained their editorial policy in an advertisement prefixed to the work, but it is likely that Stewart was also involved in the editing process, and John Playfair may also have been involved. Besides Stewart’s biography, which is paginated in roman numerals running to xcv, the book consists of seven previously unpublished essays that come to a total of 244 pages: on the history of astronomy, the history of ancient physics, the history of ancient logics and metaphysics, the imitative arts, the affinity between music, dancing and poetry, the affinity between certain English and Italian verses, and the external senses. The imprint reads ‘London: Printed for T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies (Successors to Mr. Cadell) in the Strand; and W. Creech, Edinburgh’ (Creech’s name having been added as a result of a postscript in Stewart’s letter to Preston). The price was fifteen shillings in boards.3 Sales were unimpressive. Andrew Strahan’s account of the book in his ledgers, titled ‘Dr. Smith’s Posthumous Essays’, records on the verso that on 23 December 1794 Strahan paid the executors £150 as his one-half of the copy money for the first edition (the other half would be paid by Cadell and Davies). There were no further payments to Smith’s estate, because a second British edition was never required during this period, though the work was reprinted quickly in Dublin, and four years later in Basil (Basel),4 and would appear as a volume in Cadell and Davies’s edition of Smith’s Works (1811–12). The recto, showing income from Essays on Philosophical Subjects alone, records a total of 1

115. 2

Stewart to Preston, 16 March [1795], Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Montagu d.10, f.

BL, Add. MS 48,817, f. 20; Edinburgh Evening Courant, 6 June 1795. Cadell & Davies’s advertisement in the General Evening Post for 4–6 August 1795 lists it at that price, as do various Cadell & Davies catalogues and advertisements, including one at the end of the eighth edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments. The Post advertisement states that ‘the following valuable Books were, during the last Winter, printed for T. Cadell, jun. and W. Davies (successors to Mr. Cadell), in the Strand’. However, since we know that Essays on Philosophical Subjects was printed in the spring of 1795, it cannot literally have been published during the preceding winter. 4 A list of editions appears in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1980), 28–9. The National Library of Scotland and the online English Short-Title Catalogue also record a copy with a 1799 Strasburgh (Strasbourg) imprint, sold by F. G. Levrault (ESTC T219379), which is probably a reissue, with a cancel title page, of the 1799 Basil edition that appears to have the same pagination (ESTC T33500). 3

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just £122. 15s.1d. as ‘Profit on Books sold’ to 1818.1 Thus, Essays on Philosophical Subjects was the only one of Smith’s three books on which the publishers lost money.

Irish Reprints of Smith’s Books Despite its popularity and steady sales, Theory of Moral Sentiments was not immediately reprinted in Dublin. Wealth of Nations, however, was promptly reprinted by a group of twenty Dublin booksellers affiliated with a body that sometimes called itself the Company of Booksellers.2 The first Dublin edition of Wealth of Nations was printed on ‘fine paper’ and published by mid-June 1776 in three octavo volumes that cost just under a pound (19s. 6d. bound) at a time when the book was available in Britain only in a two-volume quarto edition priced more than twice as high.3 On at least one occasion, customs officials in Scotland confiscated the unbound sheets of this Dublin edition as they were being smuggled into Britain.4 A second Dublin edition is said to have been advertised by William McKenzie in the Dublin Evening Post on 15 October 1782, as being ‘published this day’,5 but no copy has been traced. After Strahan and Cadell published the third edition of Wealth of Nations in three octavo volumes in 1784, at a price not much different from that of the Dublin threevolume octavo edition of 1776, ten Dublin booksellers responded in 1785 with a cheaper ‘fourth edition’ in just two octavo volumes.6 They achieved their goal 1

BL, Add. MS 48,814A, f. 35. On the Company of Booksellers and Dublin reprinting of British (especially Scottish) books, see Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America, forthcoming, as well as M. Pollard, A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550–1800, (Bibliographic Society, London 2000), esp. 114. The twenty booksellers listed in the imprint are: [Henry or William] Whitestone, [Dillon] Chamberlaine, W[illiam] Watson, [James] Potts, S[amuel] Watson, [James II or Peter] Hoey, [James] Williams, W[illiam] Colles, [William] Wilson, [Thomas] Armitage, [Thomas] Walker, [Richard] Moncrieffe, [Caleb] Jenkin, [William] Gilbert, [Edward] Cross, [Michael] Mills, [William] Hallhead, [Thomas Todd] Faulkner, [John] Hillary, and [Isaac or John] Colles. 3 See the separate advertisements by Edward Cross and William Wilson in the Hibernian Journal for 14–17 June 1776. Wilson’s advertisement comments on the paper, as does an advertisement by Michael Mills in the 16–18 October number of the same newspaper. Cross’s and Mills’s advertisements state that the book is also available for 16s. 3d. sewed. 4 Warren McDougall, ‘Smugglers, Reprinters and Hot Pursuers: The Irish-Scottish Book Trade and Copyright Prosecutions in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in The Stationers’ Company and the Book Trade 1550–1990, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Oak Knoll Press, Winchester and New Castle, Del. 1997), p. 161. 5 Cited in M. Pollard, Dictionary, p. 386. 6 The ten Dublin booksellers were W[illiam] Colles, R[ichard] Moncrieffe, G[eorge] Burnet, W[illiam] Wilson, C[aleb] Jenkin, L[uke] White, H[enry] Whitestone, P[atrick] Byrne, J[ohn] Cash, and W[illiam] M’Kenzie. 2

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by placing more than forty lines and well over four hundred words on each page, while closely copying the third London edition in content (including the style of designating the author on the title page). This was followed in 1793 by a similarly formatted ‘fifth edition’, so-called even though a fifth and a sixth edition had appeared in London since the last Irish edition. Though the publishers of the 1785 and 1793 Irish editions were not identical, the seven names listed in the imprint of the 1793 edition included five men who had been among the publishers of the 1785 edition.1 Theory of Moral Sentiments was not reprinted in Dublin until the spring of 1777. Although four editions had appeared in Britain by that time, the Dublin publishers, John Beatty and Christopher Jackson, called theirs the ‘sixth’ edition. Like the existing British editions, it was a one-volume octavo. The timing of the Dublin edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments suggests that its publishers were attempting to capitalise on the enormous popularity of Wealth of Nations. An advertisement for the book in the Hibernian Journal for 21–3 April 1777 seems to confirm this interpretation, for its begins: ‘To the Admirers of the Writings of Dr. SMITH, the celebrated Author of ‘An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the WEALTH of NATIONS,’ This Day is published…The Theory of Moral Sentiments…by Adam Smith LLD. FRS Formerly Professor of Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, and Author of ‘An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’.’ The price is given as 5s. 5d. bound. Slightly tighter printing reduced the size of the volume by a few pages compared to the British editions, no doubt for the sake of a lower price, but the British octavo was already so cheap that the differential of 6d. was not significant. It was probably for this reason that no other editions of Theory of Moral Sentiments were published in Dublin. Beatty and Jackson’s advertisement also contains the following long passage, addressed ‘To the LOVERS of LITERATURE’, and written in a bombastic style that may well have driven away more readers than it attracted: Though the great Degree of Reputation in which the THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS is deservedly held, may render unnecessary all Attempts to recommend it; and though it is generally observed, that Works of great & acknowledged Excellence are but degraded by Panegyric – characters however, the Productions of impartial and elegant Pens, which, whilst they display in a brief, yet comprehensive Manner, the Plans of Compositions of Merit and Utility, and by their ingenious and disinterested Strictures thereon, direct the Opinions of Taste in their Judgment on and choice of, Literary Works, as they are rarely met with, so they must prove acceptable.

To this is added the following sentence, which is made all the more intriguing by the fact that I have yet to locate a copy of the Dublin edition which actually 1 The five whose names appear in both editions are Burnet, White, Wilson, Byrne, and M’Kenzie. The two new names in the 1793 imprint are J[ames] Moore and W[illiam] Jones.

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contains the advertisement it mentions: ‘The Editors have, in an Advertisement which is given with the above Book, inserted Extracts from two of our most celebrated English Writers, whose Recommendations may be considered as the Standards of Truth and Taste.’ Finally, in early December 1795 a group of eight Dublin booksellers, three of whom had also been involved with reprinting the 1793 Irish edition of Wealth of Nations, published an Irish edition of Smith’s posthumous Essays on Philosophical Subjects.1 Like Wealth of Nations, the London edition of Essays on Philosophical Subjects appeared to be a vulnerable target for an Irish reprint because it was a relatively expensive quarto that the Dublin booksellers could reduce to a smaller and cheaper octavo format. They did so, but given the poor sales of the London edition, it is unlikely that there was much demand for the Dublin edition either. Conclusion In spite of the commercial failure of the posthumous Essays on Philosophical Subjects, Adam Smith was a best-selling author on the strength of the only two books to appear in his lifetime: Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations. We have seen that these works followed very different paths to best-seller status. Theory of Moral Sentiments began in 1759 as an inexpensive one-volume octavo, and it sold steadily, if not spectacularly, for three decades, before being expanded, in the sixth edition of 1790, into a two-volume octavo that sold better than earlier editions even though it cost more than twice as much. Wealth of Nations began in 1776 as an expensive two-volume quarto that far exceeded its publishers’ modest expectations, but it was the publication of the revised third edition in 1784, in three octavo volumes that cost half as much as the quarto editions, which carried the book to the next level of commercial success. In each case, then, Smith carried out one major textual revision, with large additions, which occurred in conjunction with a significant change in format and price – though one book became bulkier and considerably more expensive, while the other was reduced in format and price. In both cases, this critical moment – 1790 for Theory of Moral Sentiments and 1784 for Wealth of Nations – demonstrated the ability of the author and the publishers to coordinate their efforts effectively in order to sustain and rejuvenate Smith’s major books, for readers in their day as well as in ours.

1 The publishers were [Patrick] Wogan, [Patrick] Byrne, J[ames] Moore, [Harriet] Colbert, [John] Rice, W[illiam] Jones, [James or William] Porter, and [George] Folingsby. M. Pollard, Dictionary, p. 110, cites a ‘published this day’ advertisement for the Irish edition in the Dublin Evening Post by one of its publishers (Harriet Colbert) on 5 December 1795.

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Adam Smith in English: From Playfair to Cannan Keith Tribe

In 1804 copyright both in Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations expired.1 Although the former had sold well during the 1790s, its central theses had been criticised by Thomas Reid and also by his student, Dugald Stewart;2 and Smith’s ‘sympathetic’ account of human conduct became increasingly peripheral to the development of moral philosophy during the first third of the nineteenth century. Theory of Moral Sentiments did remain in print, editions appearing regularly every decade (apart from the 1830s) until the end of the century. But as James Bonar observed, although Smith’s first book made his reputation and provided the opportunities for travel and reflection that enabled him to write the second, it ‘has needed all the fame of the second to keep alive the memory of the first.’3 Scholarly discussion of Theory of Moral Sentiments has indeed been at best patchy until very recently – only the sustained revival since the 1970s of interest in the Scottish Enlightenment has brought the work back into prominence, three separate editions of the book being currently available in Britain.4 Essays on Philosophical Subjects never found a strong following, and so until Cannan published his edition of the Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms in 1896, ‘the writings of Adam Smith’ were equivalent to these three books only, only one of which, the Wealth of Nations, enjoyed wide circulation and recognition. And this circumstance persisted well into the twentieth century, for although the importance of the Lectures was immediately acknowledged, the book sold poorly until the 1920s, a period in which there 1 Copyright under the Act of 1709–10 lasted 28 years from the publication of a work, so the copyright in Wealth of Nations naturally expired in 1804; while as Richard Sher demonstrates, the revisions to the 1790 edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments were sufficiently extensive to justify refreshment of the copyright for a further fourteen years. 2 See the extracts printed in J. Reeder (ed.) On Moral Sentiments. Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith (Thoemmes Press, Bristol 1997), pp. 65–8, 121–35. 3 J. Bonar, ‘’The Theory of Moral Sentiments,’ by Adam Smith, 1759’, Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 1 (1926) p. 333. 4 The Glasgow Edition; the Liberty Press paperback version of the Glasgow edition; and the recent Cambridge University Press edition edited by Knud Haakonssen.

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was a general, international revival of interest in the work of Smith, cut short in mid-century by the Second World War. Throughout the nineteenth century, therefore, the reputation of Adam Smith was associated almost exclusively with his Wealth of Nations. While the work remained in copyright the text was published as it stood, with the addition of advertisements to the third and fourth editions, and an index. Once copyright lapsed it typically appeared in editions with various kinds of introductory matter, and in some cases with extensive editorial notes.1 First in 1805 came William Playfair’s three-volume edition from Cadell and Davies, the former holders of the copyright; then in 1814 the four-volume edition from David Buchanan, the fourth volume being entirely made up of Buchanan’s own notes; then in 1828 McCulloch’s four-volume edition, reset in one volume in 1838 and then reprinted several times through to the 1870s. Other notable editions were published by Gibbon Wakefield (1835–9), Thorold Rogers (1869) and Shield Nicholson (1884), all of which went into second editions, and in Shield Nicholson’s case was reprinted at least twice. This sequence was concluded in 1904 with the publication of Edwin Cannan’s twovolume edition, which formed the textual and editorial basis for all serious editions and translations during the twentieth century until it was in turn replaced by the Glasgow edition in 1976. Besides these recognised editions of Smith there were also a large number of versions not attributed to any particular editor. At least two significant editions never saw the light of day – both Malthus and later Jevons planned their own editions of Wealth of Nations, but never completed the task. And as the bibliography makes plain, new editions of Wealth of Nations appeared almost annually in Britain during the last third of the nineteenth century. Cannan however, having completed editing the Lectures in 1896, was clearly unimpressed with the quality of available editions of Wealth of Nations, and he appears to have formed the intention of remedying this deficiency by producing his own scholarly edition. By the end of July 1897 he had agreed terms with Methuen,2 committing himself to delivering a manuscript by October 1899, although as it turned out Cannan did not submit the manuscript until February 1903, the new edition being published in 1904 in two volumes.3 This was indeed a significant advance in Smith scholarship, a running summary in the margin assisted the reader in perceiving the flow of Smith’s writing, identifying 1 The same thing happened to Theory of Moral Sentiments, although without the degree of elaboration that came to characterise editions of Wealth of Nations – nineteenth-century editions of the former typically included, by way of an introduction, a version of Dugald Stewart’s account of Smith’s life. 2 A. M. M. Studman to Cannan, Methuen & Co., The Strand, 27 July 1897; Publishers’ Agreements, British Library of Political and Economic Science (BLPES), Cannan Papers, File 1015 f. 35. 3 Cannan to Methuen & Co., 28 February 1903 (handwritten draft); Publishers’ Agreements, BLPES, Cannan Papers, File 1015 f. 45.

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unattributed allusions made by Smith to other literature, and noting where additions or changes had been made in the early editions. It was a model of restrained and careful scholarship, Cannan having first broached such an approach to the literature of economics in his Theories of Production and Distribution, where he had criticised the careless manner in which historical works were usually cited and discussed in the literature, emphasising that he would identify the source of all quotation with an exact reference.1 Looking at the many editions of Wealth of Nations turned out in the nineteenth century it is not difficult to see where Cannan found them lacking. The Shield Nicholson one-volume edition was not in itself unscholarly, but as with many one-volume editions it was presented in a typeface so small as to make the reading of extended passages an effort of will. The earlier Rogers edition was presented in a more readable format, but the editorial comments added by Rogers were directed primarily to the substance of Smith’s argument, rather than to his sources and allusions. And as we go back through the preceding editions, this tendency becomes even more marked. As already noted, ‘edited’ texts were a product of the post-copyright period when publishers sought to differentiate their own edition of Wealth of Nations from actual and potential competitors. But generally speaking, the more notable the editor, the worse the result. The more accessible nineteenth century editions were those unencumbered with extended notes and additional chapters composed by editors more concerned with advertising their own opinions than elucidating an increasingly historical text. It is likely that the throughout the nineteenth century the most widely read versions were the anonymous editions published with a short prefatory ‘life’ or, very often, a translation of Germain Garnier’s commentary upon Smith. Playfair, Buchanan, McCulloch and Wakefield all presumed that the task of the editor was to demonstrate to the reader where Smith had ‘gone wrong’, appending lengthy commentaries upon Smith’s arguments, especially in Books One and Two. Hence the fourth volume of Buchanan’s edition, composed of Buchanan’s own dreary views on political economy; hence also McCulloch’s extensive apparatus of notes which in 1872 was still setting forth opinions (recycled, as so often with McCulloch, from his other writings) on colonies and the American War (of Independence) and the use of impressments for naval recruitment (which had not been practised since the end of the Napoleonic Wars). Quite obviously in such cases not even the publishers looked at what they were printing, but the fact that they kept turning out such editions indicates that they must have thought there was a steady market for the work. 1 E. Cannan, A History of the Theories of Production and Distribution in English Political Economy from 1776 to 1848, (Rivington, Percival & Co, London 1894), p. vii. (The book was actually published in May 1893). Cannan’s generally robust, combative and argumentative approach to classical economics in this book has rather distracted attention from the careful reading of the literature of political economy that he provides, which remains the principal source of the work’s originality.

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However, this did not mean that any and every edition would sell: mistakes could be made, as Cadell and Davies found to their cost with their choice of William Playfair as editor of their ‘new’ edition. The Early Post-1804 Editions of the Wealth of Nations Within a year of expiry of their copyright in Wealth of Nations Cadell and Davies published an ‘Eleventh Edition’ edited by William Playfair,1 establishing a continuity with the ten editions produced in copyright while also extending the edition in a manner intended to confirm its status as the standard text. No correspondence with Playfair appears to have survived, but supposition that the publishers actively sought to defend their rights in Smith in this way is confirmed by contemporary correspondence from Malthus concerning drafts of Playfair’s notes sent to him by Cadell and Davies. Malthus, writing from Bath (in the dark, while his wife was in labour) responded to this material as follows: I have looked over the packet that you sent, though from being at present very particularly engaged I have not been able to give it the attention I could have wished. Some of the notes appear to have merit, others not, and some of the most important points are not discussed at all. It is difficult however to pass any fair judgement upon the work as a whole; because the supplementary chapters evidently contain the discussion of those subjects which the writer thinks of the greatest consequence, and none of these supplementary chapters are sent. With regard to myself I can have no manner of objection to your publishing this edition before mine, as it would give me more time, which the more I think on the subject the more I feel is necessary, in order to produce an edition that would have any thing like the effect of giving you a new copyright. I had much rather that you would rely on the advice of any other friend respecting the eligibility of publishing the edition now offered, than on mine, particularly as I have not had the leisure to read the manuscript very attentively, and this you will not be surprised at when I tell you that in addition to the engagements, I have been in a state of considerable anxiety about Mrs. Malthus, who was brought to bed this morning before her time, but is now happily pretty well. Should the present offer that you have received or any other, make you wish to alter your plans, I beg that you will not consider yourself as tied by anything that has passed between us. I am Dear Sir etc. In the advertisement, the last paragraph and the manner in which the French economists are spoken of do not give a very favourable impression. The style is not very correct, and is written without punctuation; but such little errors may be easily mended. The Author of the original work is always called Mr. Smith; but Adam Smith, Dr. Smith, or Smith are all preferable. 1

See below, p. 33, n. 1.

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I am writing in the dark – Excuse great haste.1

From this and later correspondence it is clear that, much as Smith himself had facilitated the renewal of copyright in Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1790 by the extensive additions he made to the sixth edition, Malthus had been involved in discussions with Cadell and Davies concerning his editing Wealth of Nations to similar effect. Malthus implies above that Playfair had ‘offered’ an edition to Smith’s publishers, but it seems altogether too much of a coincidence that the Playfair edition originated in a purely unsolicited approach, given that the complete work, with supplementary chapters, appeared within the year. Malthus’s one substantive criticism, concerning Playfair’s treatment of the Physiocrats, is a fair and significant one, for this relates to one of the more bizarre features of Playfair’s colourful ‘Life of Dr. Adam Smith’; so it seems likely that Malthus had been sent this item and some of the draft notes at least. In July 1805 Malthus was appointed Professor of Political Economy at East India College, and although the teaching burden was not high – later records state that he taught on average five hours per week2 – the course that he devised was entirely new, since political economy had never been systematically taught before in England. His chief textbook was Wealth of Nations, as the questions from a surviving 1808 examination paper show.3 Later student notes demonstrate that this work remained the core of his teaching some twenty years later, well after he had published his own Principles of Political Economy in 1820. Malthus never did publish ‘his’ edition of Wealth of Nations, but he seems to have kept such a project in mind,4 and when in 1812 he was approached by an Edinburgh bookseller concerning a new edition he seems to have been very receptive to the idea. Thinking that Cadell and Davies had no further interest in a new edition, Malthus accepted an offer made through Jeffrey of £1,5005 to supply footnotes to Wealth of Nations plus an additional volume of ‘larger notes and dissertations’, to be completed ‘in about two years.’6 This last suggests that the publisher concerned was Oliphant, Waugh and Innes, who did publish an 1 Letter from Malthus to Cadell and Davies, Bath, 16 December 1804, cited in P. James, Population Malthus, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1979) pp. 165–6; source for the letter given on p. 477 as ‘MS Letter in the City of Bath Municipal Library.’ 2 India Office Records, J/1/38, ff. 224–5. 3 Three questions in this paper explicitly refer to Physiocratic doctrine – Examination Paper in Political Economy 1808, East India College Papers, Bodleian Library. 4 Perhaps he had formed it much earlier than 1804, since James records that he bought a copy of the Garnier translation during his visit to Paris in 1802 – P. James, Population Malthus, p. 245. 5 Which was three times Malthus’s generous East India College salary. 6 T. R. Malthus to Cadell & Davies, East India College 3 September 1812, reprinted in T. Besterman, (ed.) The Publishing Firm of Cadell & Davies. Select Correspondence and Accounts 1793–1836, (Oxford University Press, London 1938) p. 163. James reproduces a similar letter from Malthus to Cadell and Davies dated 28 August 1812, Population Malthus, pp. 245–6, giving the source on p. 483 as Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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edition of this kind – three volumes with an additional volume of notes – in November 1814, the ‘Introduction’ to the fourth volume being dated 14 September 1814.1 From Malthus’s testy responses to enquiries from Cadell and Davies regarding his plans it seems that the latter did still entertain hopes of his producing an edition for them, although Malthus obviously had a quite contrary impression. Over a year later, when Malthus saw the forthcoming Buchanan edition advertised, he wrote to Francis Horner that it was ‘precisely upon the same plan as that which I had projected.’2 Consequent upon the appearance of the Buchanan edition at the end of 1814 Malthus gave up the idea of producing his own edition of Smith and planned instead to publish his notes as essays, and Ricardo at least was under the impression that the work was well in hand.3 And so nothing ever came of Malthus’s plan to produce an edition of Wealth of Nations, which is regrettable since he did at least understand something of Smith and political economy – not something one could with confidence say of William Playfair, or later of David Buchanan. Playfair had more than a little of the seventeenth-century projector about him. Born near Dundee in 1759, the fourth son of a Scottish minister, he gravitated to Paris during the 1780s after an unsuccessful London business venture, became involved in a dubious land development company and allegedly participated in the storming of the Bastille, but then quickly left France following the failure of the land company. Back in London he set up a security bank making small loans against subdivided securities, an enterprise which likewise promptly failed. By 1795 he had turned to criticism of the French revolution, and for the next twenty years he lived as a jobbing writer, coming in this way to edit Wealth of Nations for Cadell and Davies.4 His experience of Paris on the eve of the Revolution helps explain both the interesting linkage that he makes in his ‘Life’ between Adam Smith and the French revolution, and also the very curious account that he gives of this link. Playfair’s three-volume edition opens with an ‘Advertisement’, a ‘Preface’, and ‘The Life of Dr Adam Smith’, all written by Playfair. From the beginning 1 D. Buchanan, Observations on the Subjects Treated of in Dr Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (Oliphant, Waugh & Innes, Edinburgh 1814) p. xvi. 2 Malthus to Francis Horner, 10 November 1813, cited in James Mill to David Ricardo, 24 November 1814, in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. P. Sraffa, M. H. Dobb, Vol. VI Letters 1810–1815, No. 68, p. 159 fn. 1; Mill noted that the Buchanan edition had just appeared and had asked Ricardo what Malthus was doing with his notes on Adam Smith. 3 Ricardo to Malthus, 13 January 1815, Works and Correspondence Vol. VI, No. 73, p. 169. ‘I expect that they will not only be very useful in giving correct notions to the public, but also in calling attention of those, who are well informed in the science of political economy, to many points which have hitherto escaped their attention.’’ No manuscript relating to these notes has ever been traced. 4 Dictionary of National Biography Vol. 45 pp. 414–15.

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he sought to contrast French politics and economics with those of Britain. Smith’s Wealth of Nations was, he stated, ‘founded on facts’, following lines established by Newton. French writers, by contrast … more numerous and less attentive to facts, have established ingenious theories, and attempted to reduce everything to a system, on which they reasoned until they became enthusiasts, incapable of appreciating any thing that did not conform to the theories they had laid down.1

This foreshadows a life of Smith in which the ‘oeconomists’ play a significant role both for Smith and for the course of the French Revolution. ‘Philosophers’, suggested Playfair, were abroad in Europe: The philosopher aimed at overturning religion, in order to destroy an order of society that hurt their pride; they had formed a most absurd theory that all distinction among mankind should consist in genius and talents; they considered themselves then as entitled to the first rank, and looked down from their philosophic thrones with contempt on kings and princes.2

Assuming the guise of oeconomists, these Philosophers entered into a conspiracy that resulted in the turmoil of the Revolution, an event for which oeconomists were not to blame, but which corresponded with much of their reasoning. Once into Smith’s text, Playfair’s editorial interventions take the form of thoughts prompted by the text; in Book I there are substantial footnotes of this kind every third page on average. Volume I of this edition contains Book I and Book II, Chapters 1 and 2, resuming with Chapter 3 in Volume II, where Playfair begins to insert chapters which comment upon, correct, or ‘complete’ Smith, as with the new chapters ‘On the Commerce of Grain, Monopolies, and Forestalling’ and ‘On Treaties of Commerce’. In Volume III Playfair includes a financial history since 1790, as Smith’s treatment of the Bank of England was very brief, and a chapter ‘On the French Oeconomists’, noting that The real fact is, that Dr Smith (as well as many of the oeconomists themselves) was ignorant of the secret belonging to the sect, which became evident to all the thinking and reflecting part of mankind, when the revolution began in 1789. … The leaders of the revolution were all oeconomists, the Abbé Sieyes, the Abbé Morelet, the marquis of Condorcet, Mirabeau’s eldest son, with the whole host of inferior disciples were all oeconomists. M. Necker was an oeconomist, though his pride and vanity hindered him from subscribing implicitly to their faith.3

Frederick the Great, argues Playfair, was also long fascinated by the oeconomists, but when he discerned that ‘by simply pretending to reduce to practice 1 ‘Preface’, to A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 3 vols, ed. William Playfair, 11th edition, (T. Cadell and W. Davies, London 1805) p. vii. 2 W. Playfair, ‘The Life of Dr. Adam Smith’, in Smith, 1805 (Playfair) pp. xviii–xix. 3 Smith, 1805 (Playfair) Vol. III pp. 514–15.

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the oeconomical table they were silently labouring to overturn all the thrones of Europe’1 he withdrew his support. Nonetheless: If a monarch of such eminent abilities and penetration, and an active member of the association, who pensioned and protected several of the leaders, was so long ignorant of the real intentions of his associates, the author of the inquiry could not be expected to see into it; and his not doing so can neither merit blame, nor excite surprise.2

Playfair’s excessive anxiety to absolve Smith of any suggestion of radicalism is suggestive of the contemporary political climate in which he worked, even though his strenuous efforts to distance Smith from any intellectual association with the French Revolution appears slightly comical today. Aside from this altogether eccentric aspect of Playfair’s editorialising, his real lack of competence did not go unremarked; we have already seen that Malthus found the drafts wanting in balance, and Francis Horner opened his own review of the work as follows: In the whole course of our literary inquisition, we have not met with an instance so discreditable to the English press, as this edition of the Wealth of Nations. It may be given as a specimen of the most presumptuous book-making. The editor proves himself quite ignorant of his author, and of the science on which that author wrote: He does not scruple, however, sometimes to correct, and sometimes to confirm, what he generally misunderstands in both cases.3

While expressing his surprise that such a defective work should be published by an otherwise respectable bookseller, Horner goes on to state that ‘since the expiration of the original right of property several editions have been published in different parts of the country’, noting the recent publication in London of an edition directed to ‘artisans and tradesmen.’4 Although it is not entirely clear to which edition Horner was referring, he was perfectly correct to note that the expiry of copyright had prompted a flurry of new editions, and these were far better received than that of Playfair. There never was a ‘twelfth edition’ of Wealth of Nations from Cadell and Davies, instead they published a ‘new’ edition in 1812 from the same sheets as their ‘Works’ edition of Wealth of Nations,5 prefacing it with an outline of Smith’s life 1

Smith, 1805 (Playfair) Vol. III p. 518. Loc. cit. 3 F. Horner, Review of William Playfair, ‘The Wealth of Nations, with Notes, Supplementary Chapters, and a Life of Dr Smith,’ Edinburgh Review Vol. VII No. 14 (January 1806) p. 470. 4 F. Horner, p. 471. 5 The Works of Adam Smith, LL.D., 5 vols, (T. Cadell and W. Davies, London 1812): Vol. I was Theory of Moral Sentiments; Vols II–IV were Wealth of Nations; Vol. V (dated 1811) was fronted by the essay on the first formation of languages, followed by the Essays title page and contents, but with Stewart’s ‘Account’ following Smith’s essays, rather than prefacing them as in the 1795 edition. This running order had been suggested by Stewart, who noted that 2

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and Garnier’s introduction in exactly the same way as had become standard practice since 1805.1 These Works represented a renewed attempt to defend their claim to Smith’s writing, suggesting that this alternative strategy was adopted once the failure of the Playfair edition had been recognised. Four separate editions of Wealth of Nations appeared in 1805: the Playfair, a two volume London edition from Greenland and Norris, a four volume Glasgow edition from R. Chapman, and a three-volume Glasgow edition printed for J. & J. Scrymgeour at the University Press. This last was the most significant, since it contained a translation of Garnier’s ‘Comparative View’ and ‘Method’ from his 1802 French edition, together with a ‘Life of the Author’.2 This set the overall pattern for subsequent editions – three volumes, without editorial notes, prefaced by a life of Smith and including Garnier’s two essays. Adopted by the Edinburgh 1806 edition from Creech, this pattern was hardened into a model reproduced until 1819.3 The advertisement to the Creech edition announced that the ‘Account of the Life of the Author’ drawn up for this edition was a more satisfactory account of his doctrines that was to be found in ‘any other edition’ of Wealth of Nations, a claim that appeared unchanged in all the succeeding editions, lending emphasis to the manner in which new editions were simply copied from the old without much attention being paid to any frontmatter. The Creech edition included in the ‘Life’ strong criticisms of Playfair, but these were moderated in the subsequent versions by the deletion of footnotes containing extracts from contemporary reviews.4 Smith had always thought that the essay on the first formation of languages sat awkwardly in Theory of Moral Sentiments, while Stewart wished to make some additions to his ‘Account’ – Dugald Stewart to William Davies, Kinneil House, Boness, 26 July 1810, in Besterman, Cadell & Davies, pp. 161–2. In agreeing to this Davies noted that production of the Works would have begun, except they could not find the relevant editions to print from, and asked if Stewart might supply them – William Davies to Dugald Stewart, London August 24 1810, in Besterman, Cadell & Davies pp. 162–3. 750 copies of the Works were produced, but 1,500 copies of the Theory of Moral Sentiments sheets were printed, the extra 750 making up the 11th edition; and 2,000 copies of the sheets for Wealth of Nations were printed, the excess sheets being bound with the 1,250 copies of the separately produced ‘Sketch of the Life of Smith’ and published as the ‘new edition’ of Wealth of Nations. See Strahan Papers, British Library Add. MS 48819 f. 134 which dates the edition as December 1811. 1 An American version of the Playfair edition was published in 1811 by Oliver D. Cooke, Hartford, Conn., reprinted in 1818; and a facsimile edition by Pickering & Chatto in 1995. 2 All later versions of this Garnier translation are identical apart from some later modernisation of spelling and punctuation, so it can be assumed that compositors simply set new versions from existing printed copies. 3 Reappearing in the Edinburgh 1809, Edinburgh 1811, London 1811, London 1812, Edinburgh and London 1817, London 1819 and Edinburgh 1819 editions. These share some curious common features, but close examination shows that they are all new settings produced by different printers. 4 ‘Leaving, therefore, the supplementary chapters and elucidations of Mr Playfair, it must be observed, that Dr Smith has, at the same time, been equally unfortunate in a biographer.

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The 1806 Creech edition extended to seven subsequent reprintings, bracketing the two editions, in 1814 and 1817, of Buchanan’s Wealth of Nations which, presumably, it also quantitatively eclipsed.1 David Buchanan, an Edinburgh journalist, appears to have been more conversant with contemporary political economy than William Playfair, although this familiarity seems to have induced overconfidence bordering on conceit and his editorialising largely took the form of ‘putting Smith right.’ Even a brief consideration of his commentary in the opening chapters, including remarks on some of Smith’s most well-known formulations, is sufficient to grasp this point. In the ‘Introduction and Plan of the Work’ Buchanan starts as he means to go on by questioning Smith’s distinction of productive from unproductive labour, referring the reader to his discussion of this point in Volume IV. Likewise he disputes Smith’s argument concerning the favour shown to trade over agriculture – implicitly rejecting Smith’s entire argument concerning European economic development – and refers the reader to his note on ‘The Natural Progress of Opulence’ in Volume IV.2 On p. 11 Smith is said to be mistaken with respect to the principle regulating the price of corn, and here Buchanan proceeds to make a distinction between production and market prices irrelevant to the point at issue. He questions the need to show a motive for division of labour in the propensity to truck and barter on p. 25. At p. 44 he appends a footnote suggesting that Smith’s labour-commanded conception of value is self-evident; on p. 48 a footnote disputes Smith’s account of the value of gold and silver. Buchanan finds Smith’s argument concerning the constancy of the portion of ease and happiness that has to be laid down in exchange ‘quite metaphysical’ (p. 49 fn. 1). A better measure of value would be corn: … From century to century, corn, from the steadiness of its own value, is the best measure for other commodities; but labour varying in its own value, cannot, on that account, measure the value of other things.3

Pages 65 and 66 are mostly taken up with a long footnote by Buchanan in which he complains of Smith’s ‘capital mistakes’ in respect of the value of silver. Fn. c) on p. 74 notes (for a change) that Smith is correct in his account of The detail of his peaceful life is almost lost among dissertations on the wickedness of atheism, and the horrors of revolution.’ Likewise Playfair’s laboured efforts to distance Smith from the Physiocrats are rejected, instead emphasis is placed on the purity of their views and Smith’s admiration for them. ‘Life of Dr. Adam Smith’ in A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 3 vols, (William Creech, Edinburgh 1806) p. xxiii. 1 Indeed, there is nothing that superficially distinguishes the text of the two Buchanan editions, and so, unlike those editions which followed the Creech model, there is a distinct possibility that the second Buchanan edition of 1817 simply recycled sheets from the first. 2 A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 3 vols, with notes, and an additional volume, by David Buchanan (Oliphant, Waugh & Innes, Edinburgh, and John Murray, London 1814), Vol. I pp. 2, 4. 3 Smith (1814 Buchanan) Vol. I p. 50 note m).

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the market price of bullion, but states this in such a way as to imply that this is an exception. And so it goes on. Whatever the substantive merit of Buchanan’s arguments, the notion that the work of an editor should be chiefly directed to a detailed running commentary expressing his personal opinions is a curious one, but one that Buchanan shares with Playfair. This approach does point to the function of Wealth of Nations at this time in the development of political economy – the Principles of both Ricardo and of Malthus, published respectively in 1817 and 1820, were themselves an analysis and critique of Smithian principles. But they published their comments and criticisms in their own books; and contemporaries turned to their arguments, not to those of Buchanan. The Transition to a Classical Author The most well-known nineteenth century edition of Wealth of Nations is that of J. R. McCulloch, first published in 1828 in four volumes, then in 1838 in a one-volume two-column version reprinted several times over the following forty years. But here again, the McCulloch edition was not the most common edition of its time, just the most noticeable. In 1827 a one volume, two-column edition of Wealth of Nations was published in Edinburgh1 which included ‘A Short Account of the Life and Writings of Dr. Adam Smith’2 and Garnier’s ‘View’ and ‘Method’. This printing was stereotyped, a procedure only adopted at this time for works where substantial sales were anticipated.3 Twenty-one further editions were printed from these plates over the following forty years.4 When the McCulloch edition was reset in one volume, that too was stereotyped, which accounts for the way that later editions reiterated notes and commentary that had become for the time quite outmoded. As the 1827 Edinburgh edition contained Garnier’s commentary on Smith and the structure of Wealth of Nations, a faithful copy of the original 1805 translation, it can be said with some justification that during the first half of the nineteenth century the most consistently accessible guide to Wealth of Nations in English was that of Germain Garnier.5 1 A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (Thomas Nelson and Peter Brown, Edinburgh 1827). 2 As had originally been printed in the 1812 Baynes, London edition. 3 Plaster of Paris impressions would have been made of the pages, and a master set of plates made – see P. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oak Knoll Press, New Castle, Delaware 1995), pp. 200–5. Printers would have only kept pages set up for small books; the pages for large texts like Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations would have been set up, printed and then broken down several times in succession during printing. 4 In 1828, 1829, 1831, 1834, 1836, 1837, 1838, 1839, 1840, 1846, 1847 and 1848, 1852, 1854, 1860, 1863, 1864, 1865, 1867 and 1869. 5 The third edition of Jeremiah Joyce, A Complete Analysis; or, Abridgment of Dr. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (G. & W. B. Whittaker, London 1821) pp. 362ff. also included for the first time Garnier’s ‘View’ and ‘Method’.

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Hence McCulloch’s edition first gained a wide readership in the 1840s and 1850s, but already in the first edition his commentary is suggestive of a shift in the status of Smith’s political economy. His ‘Editor’s Preface’ emphasises the progress made by the science of political economy since 1784, the date of the last revisions made by Smith to the Wealth of Nations, while the French Revolution and the growth of manufacturing in Britain had likewise altered the issues to which political economy had been addressed. What, then, could one learn from Smith? Still, however, the great and leading merits of Dr Smith’s work continue unimpaired. Nothing of importance has hitherto been added to his full and masterly exposition of the benefits arising from the freedom of industry: And even those parts where he is least sound as to principle, uniformly abound in the most sagacious remarks and disquisitions, and are illustrated with unrivalled skill and felicity.1

This new edition would therefore provide brief annotations and supplementary notes which would alert the reader to the fallacy of some of Smith’s principles, and indicate the progress of political economy, together with that of commercial and financial legislation. Most of the fourth volume was devoted to McCulloch’s supplementary notes, while the first volume was fronted with a ‘Sketch of the Life of Dr. Smith’, followed by an ‘Introductory Discourse’ on the development of political economy which extended to over ninety pages – all told the prefatory matter occupies some 120 pages, as against the 420 pages given over to Adam Smith’s text (which pagination in turn includes McCulloch’s substantial footnotes). McCulloch therefore conceived his editorial task along the same lines as had Playfair and Buchanan before him, the difference being that McCulloch’s views were at least representative of the current understanding of political economy. But of course this understanding was even by 1838 no longer quite the same, and by the 1850s, as the one-volume edition was reprinted with a very light reworking of the 1828 apparatus, McCulloch’s edition would have already become the sort of text to which his earlier comments on Smith now equally applied. The ‘Introductory Discourse’ presents a history of political economy from the Greeks onward, arriving at the Physiocrats just over half way through, whose principles are outlined in some detail before moving on to an assessment of Wealth of Nations. Contrasted with the Physiocrats, Smith’s demonstration that labour was the only source of wealth was a ‘merit’; but elsewhere McCulloch thought him to be close to other aspects of Physiocratic argument. His leaning to the system of the Economists – a leaning perceptible in every part of his work – made him so far swerve from the principles of his own system, as to 1 A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. J. R. McCulloch (Adam Black & William Tait, Edinburgh 1828), Vol. I p. VIII.

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admit that individual advantage is not always a true test of the public advantage of different employments. He considered agriculture, though not the only productive employment, as the most productive of any; and he considered the home trade as more productive than a direct foreign trade, and the latter than the carrying trade. It is clear, however, that these distinctions are all fundamentally erroneous. A state being nothing more than a collection of individuals, it necessarily follows, that whatever is most advantageous to them individually must be most advantageous to the state; and it is obvious, that the self-interest of those concerned will always prevent them from engaging in manufactures and commerce, unless when they yield as large profits, and are, consequently, as publicly beneficial as agriculture.1

This deviation of Smith had led him to consider agriculture as the most important of any sector, and leads on to his conception that productive labour is confined to that which is fixed and realised in a vendible commodity. Instead, McCulloch maintains all labour to be productive that ‘yields a revenue to the labourer without lessening the revenue of society in which it is exerted’.2 This discussion leads into a general evaluation of Smith’s treatment of value and rent, concluding that Smith’s over-fondness of digression had made the work less clear than it otherwise appeared: The real scope and tendency of the doctrines it unfolds is not to be learned from particular sentences or even chapters; and can only be properly understood and appreciated by those who have carefully studied and compared the whole work.3

Once into the text proper McCulloch remains at the reader’s elbow, noting omission and error in abundance. One example can stand for the many: the title to Book I Ch. VI, ‘Of the component Parts of the Prices of Commodities’ is footnoted and McCulloch comments: I have already shown – (Introductory Discourse, p. lxxi) – that the doctrine laid down in this chapter, that the value of commodities in the advanced stages of society varies according to the variations of rent, profit, and wages, is fundamentally erroneous. The variations alluded to merely affect the distribution of commodities, or the proportions in which they are divided among the three great classes of landlord, capitalists, and labour; and have nothing to do with their value, or with their power to exchange for, or buy each other, or labour.

By half way through the second volume the number of remarks has diminished, Smith’s account of the mercantile and agricultural schools in Book IV attracting remarkably little editorial attention. Overall, the editorial style is no different to that of Buchanan or Playfair, although McCulloch does have the advantage of a detailed understanding of the material, and none of the passages cited here are in themselves especially objectionable. Except that they properly 1 2 3

Smith (1828 McCulloch) Vol. I pp. lxx–lxxi. Op. cit. p. lxxi. Op. cit. p. lxxxi.

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belong in a separate work – and with McCulloch’s penchant for recycling his material much of the apparatus found here was either drawn from, or later found its way into, his other publications. The notes in the fourth volume range widely, including ‘Note V Consequences resulting from the use of the potato as a principal article of food’ pp. 163–72; ‘Note IX Money’ pp. 201–318; a nine page discussion in ‘Note XII Impressment – Plan for its Abolition’ which mentions Decker but not Smith; and a discussion of entailment in ‘Note XIX Disposal of Property by Will’ pp. 441–92. As in all these editions, the weight of commentary diminishes as the work progresses. In the last example, that of Wakefield, his comments, although still lengthy, are consigned to endnotes appended to each chapter, and cease altogether after Book II, implying perhaps that Wakefield did not consider the following books demanded as careful a reading as the first two.1 Smith’s work has by this time been divided between the principles outlined in the first two books, seen as directly relevant to an understanding of political economy, and that which can be found in the remaining three Books, whose contents do not lend themselves to evaluation as ‘principles’ in the same manner. And with the publication of John Stuart Mill’s new Principles of Political Economy in 1848 the Wealth of Nations was displaced from its existing role as an accessible introduction to modern political economy. But editions continued to appear with remarkable consistency, seemingly in the face of a general decline in the perceived relevance or applicability of Smith’s doctrines. This apparent paradox deserves some attention.

‘… A very amusing book about old times’2 It is generally supposed that, by the time of the centenary of the publication of Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith was celebrated as a canonical figure whose arguments were no longer considered in any great detail. Bagehot’s comment is sometimes invoked to register this shift, failing to note the complete context: Of The Wealth of Nations as an economic treatise, I have nothing to say now; but it is not useless to say that it is a very amusing book about old times. As it is dropping out of immediate use from change of times, it is well to observe that this very change brings it a new sort of interest of its own. There are few books from which there may be gathered more curious particulars of the old world. 1 A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, with a Commentary by the author of ‘England and America’, 4 vols (Charles Knight, London 1835–9). The first volume, including all of Book One bar the final chapter, obviously sold out before the others and Vol. I was reprinted in 1840, and bundled with the remaining stock of the first edition. 2 Walter Bagehot, ‘Adam Smith as a Person’, Fortnightly Review Vol. XX New Series (1876) p. 37. See also Donald Winch’s interesting discussion of this period in his essay under this title in A. E. Murphy, R. Prendergast (eds) Contributions to the History of Economic Thought. Essays in Honour of R. D. C. Black (Routledge, London 2000) pp. 73–95.

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So Bagehot was dismissive of the work strictly as an economic treatise, which seems a reasonable enough position; political economy would really have been in some trouble if such a book were still a source for economic analysis, narrowly conceived. Reviewing Smith’s biography and his other writings, Bagehot dismisses Theory of Moral Sentiments as a once well-regarded book which was now of little philosophical value, a judgement symmetrical with his verdict on Wealth of Nations. But it was the first work which, as Bonar later noted, gave Smith the opportunity for developing his ideas concerning the second: It was of cardinal importance to him to be delivered from the production of incessant words and to be brought into contact with facts and the world. And as it turned out, the caprice of Charles Townshend had a single further felicity. It not only brought him into contact with facts and the world; but with the most suitable sort of facts, and, for his purposes, the best part of the world. … And as a preparation for writing The Wealth of Nations he could nowhere else have been placed so well. Macauley says that ‘ancient abuses and new theories’ flourished together in France just before the meeting of the States-General in greater vigour than they had been seen to be combined before or since. And the description is quite as true economically as politically, on all economical matters the France of that time was a sort of museum stocked with the most important errors.1

France, Bagehot emphasises, was naturally suited to be an agricultural country, but its rulers had for generations sought to suppress this in favour of a manufacturing and mercantile development. The reference to France as a museum, then, refers not merely to the oeconomists and the mercantile school, but to the entire argument of Wealth of Nations Book III, which is further linked by Bagehot to the political limitations of the Physiocratic project. And so the reading that Bagehot here presents draws attention to aspects of Smith’s ideas that had, hitherto, gone largely unremarked, given the fixation of commentators on Books I and II of Wealth of Nations who reading the work in terms of principles and doctrine, rather than economic analysis and argument. Another common reference point relating to this centenary has been the dinner that the Political Economy Club held to mark the centenary. The afterdinner speaker was Robert Lowe, the Chancellor who responded to a question put to him by Gladstone: ‘What are the more important results which have followed from the publication of the ‘Wealth of Nations’, just one hundred years ago, and in what principal directions do the doctrines of that book still remain to be applied?’2 Here again, Lowe has been interpreted as suggesting that Smith’s work was simply a historical curiosity:

1

Op. cit. pp. 29–30. Political Economy Club, Revised Report of the Proceedings at the Dinner of 31st May, 1876, held in celebration of the hundredth year of the publication of the ‘Wealth of Nations’, (Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, London 1876) p. 5. 2

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Of course the questions that Adam Smith argued in his day are not the questions of our day; they have become obsolete, and they have become obsolete mainly through the labours of Adam Smith himself, because, by the cogency of his arguments and the force of his demonstrations, he has done away with many of the questions which then agitated the public mind. That, therefore, is nothing against Adam Smith. It is said, also, that he is always imperfect; and in one sense that also may be said to be true. It is true that Adam Smith was not what is called a systematic writer. I do not think his arrangement is at all a model of clearness or perspicuity.1

But Lowe did not permit these reservations to obstruct his view of the larger point: that in his view Smith had founded a ‘… deductive and demonstrative science of human actions and conduct’, in this respect the science of political economy having succeeded where a science of politics, in the hands of Bentham and Mill, had failed. … I apprehend nothing is more certain than that the main truths of Political Economy do not rest upon à posteriori arguments, but that they rest upon assumptions with regard to what mankind will do in particular circumstances, which assumptions experience has verified and shown to be true.

Here again the interest in Wealth of Nations turns no longer upon its doctrinal principles, but on its method, providing a basis for the elaboration of economic argument while at the same time its individual arguments were shown to be faulty. Far from falling into a state of neglect, Smith’s work begins to be rediscovered in the last third of the nineteenth century as a larger project that brought Theory of Moral Sentiments back into consideration. And when Thorold Rogers in his response to Lowe’s speech disputed this account of Smith’s method, arguing that Smith was an inductive, not a deductive, thinker, ‘… the practical Bacon of Economical science,’2 this simply confirms the manner in which Smith’s legacy had shifted into a new domain. 1

Op. cit. p. 8. Op. cit. p. 33. Thorold Rogers had staked his claim to Smith as an inductivist in his edition of Wealth of Nations: ‘His work not only displays a wealth of varied reading, but is full of facts. But, in fact, to be scientific, Political Economy must be constantly inductive. Half, and more than half, of the fallacies into which persons who have handled this subject have fallen, are the direct outcome of purely abstract speculation. In consequence, though he was the progenitor of the science, and necessarily left it incomplete, Smith is far more frequently in the right than his critics are. Almost every blemish in his work (some few inaccuracies of expression excepted, which arise from a somewhat loose use of terms,) is due to his exaggerated sympathy with the economical theories of his French friends and teachers. It is to this influence that we can trace his errors as to the nature and causes of value, and whatever is defective in his exposition of rent. Even here, however, he seems to me to be much more in the right than Ricardo, who accounts for the origin of rent on grounds which have absolutely no warrant in fact. His most adverse critics have, however, united with his warmest admirers in his vindication of private liberty against the interference of Government; that is, in his advocacy of what are called Free Trade principles.’ ‘Editor’s Preface’ to A. Smith, An Inquiry 2

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The fact that even W. S. Jevons, a very different economist from Thorold Rogers, planned his own edition of Wealth of Nations gives the lie to the idea that the work was regarded as superseded in the later nineteenth century. Jevons’s surviving drafts date from 1878–9, but he got little further than annotating some of Book I and sketching an outline ‘Life’;1 perhaps he was put off by the fact that three separate editions of the book were published in England in 1880, including a second edition of the Rogers edition.2 But it was a chance encounter in Oxford in 1895 that set in train events that would lead to the publication of a reliable edition of Wealth of Nations, and in turn prompt the production, in German, of a scholarly edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edwin Cannan as an Editor of Adam Smith Cannan was an ‘Oxford economist’ when Oxford was at the centre of English political economy. A frail youth, but of independent means, he took a Pass Degree in 1884, continuing to live with his aunt in St Giles while studying political economy through the 1880s, succeeding William Ashley as Secretary of the Oxford Economic Society in 1888. Towards the end of 1889 he began work on what would later be published in 1893 as A History of the Theories of Production and Distribution, a work which, as noted above, set new scholarly standards in the history of economic analysis. In late April 1895, quite by chance, he fell into conversation with a Scottish advocate who turned out to own a set of student notes of Adam Smith’s lectures.3 By early May the manuscript was in Cannan’s hands, he had formed a plan for publication and gained Maconochie’s agreement to his being their editor;4 and by the end of the into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. James E. Thorold Rogers (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1869), Vol. I pp. xli–xlii. 1 ‘Political Economy. A. Smith – Wealth of Nations’, Jevons Papers, John Rylands Library, Manchester JA6/6/7. Jevons drafted his edition by pasting pages from a late eighteenth century octavo edition of Wealth of Nations on to plain foolscap leaves, upon which he made his annotations. Presumably he selected this edition as a way of establishing a reliable text, since there were any number of new and secondhand editions available at the time. He worked through to p. 182, not completing Book I. He would have had to dismantle two copies of the work from the same edition, suggesting that, despite the availability of several new printings of Wealth of Nations, older copyright editions were relatively easy to come by. 2 Foxwell also planned an ‘historical edition’ in the mid 1880s, although since his working copy was an 1863 McCulloch edition, Jevons would seem to have been the better historian. Foxwell’s annotated copy is in the Kress Collection, and I am grateful to Karen Bailey for drawing my attention to it. 3 The encounter and the manuscript are described in E. Cannan, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Adam Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1896), pp. xv–xix. 4 Charles Cornelius Maconochie (1852–1930) to Cannan, 9 May 1895, ‘Correspondence 1889–99’, BLPES, Cannan Papers File 1020, f. 30. Maconochie had sent the lecture notes to Cannan on 2 May from Scotland, and here responds to Cannan’s proposals on first having had sight of them.

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month there had been preliminary discussions with Oxford University Press, who unfortunately became fixed on the idea that Maconochie simply owned the manuscript but had no copyright in it. There could be, the Press conjectured, other such lecture notes as yet undiscovered, and so while they were interested in publishing the work they saw no good reason to make anything but a token payment to Maconochie.1 This very nearly derailed negotiations; Cannan intervened, first agreeing a minimum payment with Maconochie of £25 for the rights, then writing to the Secretary of the Delegates, pointing out that if Maconochie were to give away his manuscript for nothing, there were far more deserving causes than Oxford University Press, especially if one took into account Adam Smith’s low estimation of the University. He went on: A.S. has always been a popular writer. Of the Wealth of Nations there are 5 editions at least in print in this country alone. The exhausted editions are numbered by the score. I should think at least 20 or 30 copies are sold for every one of Ricardo’s Principles. Since I wrote last I have done some work with the MS & I find it will not be difficult with the aid of several recent works especially the Catalogue of AS Library to produce an edition which will be absolutely necessary to any serious student of the Wealth of Nations at any rate till some moderately respectable edition of that work itself appears.2

He further demanded for his editorial work £25 plus 10% of the royalty after 500 copies had been sold, and by early July the contract had been signed,3 Maconochie was paid the £20 that he had requested, and Cannan had begun work. Cannan worked through the text using numbered slips for queries and annotations, exchanging these with Raleigh. So for example in December Raleigh returned slips 53 to 90, together with some comments on Montesquieu: It is as you say clear that A.S. had the Esprit des Lois before him: he takes from it the elementary matter (especially in the account of money) and some illustrations.

1 Sir Thomas Raleigh to Cannan, All Souls 26 May 1895, Cannan Papers File 1020, f. 34. See also Lyttleton Gell to Cannan, 29 May 1895, Oxford, Cannan Papers File 1018 f. 17–18. Raleigh (1850–1920) became a Fellow of All Souls in 1876, was Reader in English Law in the University of Oxford 1884–96, and in 1895 also a Delegate of the University Press. He was of great assistance to Cannan in preparing the Lectures over the autumn and winter of 1895–6, and his help is duly acknowledged in the ‘Preface’ to the Lectures. 2 Copy of Cannan to Philip Lyttelton Gell (Secretary to the Delegates), 24 St Giles, Oxford, 6 June 1895, Cannan Papers, File 1020 f. 41. 3 The agreement was signed on 6 July 1895, on the terms that Cannan demanded – £25 plus 10% on UK sales over 500 – the £25 to be paid by Cannan to Maconochie – ‘Publishers’ Agreements’, Cannan Papers File 1015 f. 15. In fact Maconochie had earlier insisted that he only wanted £20, so presumably Cannan retained £5 – see Maconochie to Cannan, 4 June 1895, Cannan Papers File 1015, f. 38.

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He knows more business that the Frenchman, but M anticipated the substance of the free trade doctrine. I recollect that Ld. Chesterfield (a friend of Montesquieu) expounds free trade very clearly in his Letters to his son, but have not time just now to look the passage out.1

Raleigh appears to have made a significant contribution to the annotations. So for example when Smith refers to ‘Dutch recruiting’ we find a note directing Cannan to Lecky’s History of England Volume III p. 458, and material from Lecky duly turns up in footnote 1 page 32.2 It might be assumed that Cannan worked with a transcription of the lecture notes, since Raleigh makes the correction ‘Waff goods (not waste) are ownerless goods (waif and stray)’ which then becomes footnote 5 page 41.3 By December 1895 both Cannan and Raleigh were working on a set of proofs, Raleigh’s being distinguished by annotations relating to legal terminology.4 The revised second set of proofs are dated from mid-April to late July 1896 and the ‘Editor’s Introduction’ is dated 15 August 1896.5 The book was published in the early autumn, some sixteen months after Cannan had first received the manuscript, and the first review appeared in the Glasgow Herald for 6 October 1896. The book made an immediate impact upon understanding of Adam Smith.6 Although as August Oncken pointed out,7 a careful reading of Theory of Moral Sentiments, and especially of the revised 1790 edition, should have left a reader in no doubt that Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations were part of a larger project, and that the general lines of this project were established by the early 1760s. The publication of a set of lecture notes dating from the period immediately preceding Smith’s visit to France and first-hand encounter with philosophes and ‘oeconomists’, definitively undermined argument to the effect that Smith owed the plan and general argument of Wealth of Nations to this 1 Sir Thomas Raleigh to Cannan, All Souls, Oxford 28 December 1895, Cannan Papers, File 1020, f. 63. 2 Notes for Edition of Adam Smith and Lectures, Cannan Papers File 920 f. 4; see W. E. H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Second edition, (Longmans, Green, and Co., London 1883) p. 458. 3 Notes for Edition of Adam Smith and Lectures, Cannan Papers File 920, f. 5ff. 4 A. Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms. First proof copy, Cannan Papers File 922; this set is stamped with dates from early November 1895 to early January 1896. Cannan’s own set of first proofs are in Cannan Papers File 921. 5 A. Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms, ed. Edwin Cannan (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1896). First revised proof copy, Cannan Papers File 923. 6 Although, rather curiously, it did not sell very well – by June 1897 the Press reported sales in Britain of 90, in the USA of 40 and for export of 72, which with 78 presented left 754 on hand. Sales then slowed to a trickle: by 31 March 1909 there were still 618 copies on hand, with total sales to 31 March 1920 of 455. Sales then picked up, especially for export, 40 to 50 copies being sold overseas each year through the 1920s; see Publishers’ Statements of Sales, Cannan Papers File 1016, f. 6–34. 7 See the discussion on this point below p. 136–7.

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encounter. Moreover, the fact that the lecture notes also covered hitherto unrecorded arguments on justice also supported the move away from an exclusive focus upon Smith as a political economist foreshadowed in Bagehot’s comments and, it should be noted, the publication of Farrar’s extensive summary of Theory of Moral Sentiments.1 Reviewers immediately saw the point.2 Moreover, on this foundation it became possible to reverse the question concerning the impact of Smith’s French connection. Instead of arguing from Physiocratic doctrine to the text of Wealth of Nations, it was possible to pose the opposite question: what is there in the book that cannot be found in the Lectures? This question was raised by Bastable in an extended review of the Lectures, prompted by his knowledge of Continental theory to note the omission from the book of the first two sections of part II Division II, ‘Cheapness or Plenty’, dealing with the question of human need:3 The study of Society as an economic machine presupposes the existence of objects for which that machine is to work. Had there been no disturbing influence, it is at least possible that the opening chapters of the Wealth of Nations would have described the growth of wants in civilized societies, and shown how their increasing subdivision and differentiation insensibly produced a corresponding division of employments, and permitted more effective, because more specialized, kinds of labour. But the aspect of society as working to produce, overshadowed, in the minds of the French economists, the parallel view of society as using its products. ‘Accumulation’ became more important than ‘satisfaction’; and Adam Smith was persuaded to abandon this section of his system, contenting himself with laying down, at an advanced part of his treatise, that ‘consumption is the end and purpose of all production’ (Book IV chap. 8), and introducing scattered notices of the effect of changes in the modes of expenditure. If his connexion with France enabled him to gain a more scientific position in respect to the partition of produce, may it not have induced him to abandon quite as valuable a conception, viz. the dependence of the economic system on the nature and variation of human wants?4

This insight is not simply forced upon Smith as a ‘novel insight’ prompted by a different perspective; for Bastable continues this thought onward into the common origin of Smithian and Continental political economy, an origin which the Lectures render more accessible:

1 J. A. Farrer, Adam Smith (1723–1790), (Sampson, Lowe, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, London 1881). 2 Henry Higgs, Economic Journal Vol. 6 (1896) pp. 608–12; August Oncken, ‘The Consistency of Adam Smith’, Economic Journal Vol. 7 (1897) pp. 443–50; W. Hasbach, ‘Adam Smith’s Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms’, Political Science Quarterly Vol. 12 (1897) pp. 684–98. 3 A. Smith, Lectures, 1896, pp. 157–61. 4 C. F. Bastable, ‘Adam Smith Lectures on ‘Jurisprudence’’, Hermathena Vol. X (1899) pp. 207–8.

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A final impression that the study of the Lectures leaves on the mind is the descent of the whole body of modern political and economic speculation from the 17thcentury system of natural law (or jus gentium), itself the product of reflections on the Roman law, in the shape that it was presented by its latest commentators. It is a commonplace since the publication of Maine’s Ancient Law, that the Grotian system was connected by an irregular filiation with Roman law. Hobbes, Locke, Smith, and even Hume were profoundly affected by this form of thought. We can see how much the classification and exposition of the Lectures owes to the terminology and arrangement of the Civil Law. The conditions of modern society have indeed helped to shape, and have supplied the materials for, both Politics and Economics; but both sciences owe their existence to the earlier and less definite system of Jus gentium, or natural law.1

This was all to unravel of course, and it would take almost another century before Adam Smith began once more to be recognised in these terms. This was no fault of Cannan; it is clear that in working on the Lectures he found himself hampered by the lack of a reliable edition of Wealth of Nations, and he quickly sought to remedy this deficiency. Details of the publication were agreed with Methuen by May 1900, but Cannan then appears to have neglected to keep them informed of progress, since a curt letter in January 1902 asks after the projected edition. In response, Cannan reported that by the end of May 1900 he had collated the editions, drafted half of the headlines and marginal summary, completed one-sixth of the notes, and roughed out an index. When he received the enquiry this work was more or less complete, and he had been drafting the introduction.2 Cannan delivered the manuscript one year later, in February 1903, and the work was published on 12 September 1904. As Cannan outlines in his ‘Preface’, the text for his edition is based on the fifth (the last in Smith’s lifetime), collated with the first, recording any material variations in the footnotes. As already noted, when Cadell and Davies came to set the two books for the Works, they did not actually have copies to hand, and asked Dugald Stewart for the relevant editions – it had been nearly ten years since the last copyright version, in 1802. This is strongly suggestive of the manner in which a new edition was simply set up from the previous version, new errors and omissions being added to the old with each fresh setting. W. B. Todd suggests in his comments on the variations in the early edition of Wealth of Nations that it was illogical of Cannan to select the fifth edition as his base text, since with one or two small exceptions any changes in this edition over the fourth and the fourth over the third originate with the compositor, not with Smith. The third edition was the only one heavily revised by Smith and this 1

Op. cit. p. 211. A. M. S. Methuen to Cannan, 2 January 1902, Correspondence with Publishers I 1890– 1916, Cannan Papers File 1018, f. 38. Cannan made the notes of his progress on the reverse of this letter. 2

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was also proofed several times, so that the Glasgow edition rightly takes this 1784 edition as the printers’ copy.1 However, Cannan did collate the fifth edition with the first which, despite it being less closely proofed than the third edition, would have had the effect of removing cumulative errors from the text, while revealing the changes of the third.2 Since he also indicated in footnotes where the variations occurred, it was for the first time possible to see clearly how the text had been altered by revisions, without need for resort to the supplementary ‘Additions and Corrections’ of November 1784. This then is the main reason that Cannan’s text became the standard edition – for all previous editions, without exception, had simply reprinted an unexamined text. As with the Lectures, Cannan also added a substantial number of explanatory notes, clarifying the text, noting statutes referred to by Smith, and where necessary referring the reader to further sources. This added a further layer of significance to the text; Cannan did not seek (like Shield Nicholson) to contrast Smith’s principles with those of modern political economy; and for the most part refrained from adding notes which questioned or criticised Smith’s argument (the style of editorialising practised from Playfair to Gibbon Wakefield). Thirdly, Cannan devised a running set of marginal notes which summarised the argument; indeed, it would be an interesting exercise to separate them from the text and read them independently, since they represent Cannan’s running commentary on the work. This was linked to his provision of header lines so that a reader opening the book ‘may discover where he is immediately’.3 Smith’s original index, reproduced in so many editions, was in addition systematically supplemented to form the new standard index for the work – and which can also be found in the 1976 Glasgow edition. And finally Cannan provided a substantial introduction of some thirty five pages in which he provides an account of the publishing history, an account of the genesis of the text through comparison with the relevant section of the Lectures, a summary of the book, a review of Smith’s relation to the Physiocrats, and a sketch of the connection between Smith’s ideas and those of Hutcheson and Mandeville. Altogether one of the most useful introductions to the text, it was included in many of the subsequent translations.

1 W. B. Todd, ‘The Text and Apparatus’, Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. I (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1976) p. 63. The exact procedure used in establishing the Glasgow text is described in the first paragraph, p. 65. 2 Cannan’s summary outline of the accidental and intentional variations between editions can be found in his ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, (Methuen, London 1904) pp. xv–xviii. 3 Edwin Cannan, ‘Preface’, to Smith, Inquiry, p. vi.

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Conclusion Cannan’s edition was more or less continuously in print until the 1970s, either under the Methuen imprint, the Modern Library edition, or as one of a number of reprints. Fresh ‘editions’ of Wealth of Nations appeared, but none of these added to the Cannan edition until the Glasgow edition displaced it. The Lectures, having sold so slowly, were neither republished nor reprinted in Britain until the Glasgow edition, augmented by a newly-discovered set of notes. More editions of Theory of Moral Sentiments have been published since 1976 than from 1876 to 1976. Neither the catalogue of the British Library, nor that of the Bodleian Library, record a British edition from the mid-nineteenth century until 1976, while of the four English-language editions published during the 1960s and early 1970s one was published in Kyoto and three in the United States. The Essays were likewise not republished after the 1880s. The Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres were of course only discovered in 1958. The Liberty Press paperback version of the Glasgow edition, under the terms of their agreement an exact reprint of the Glasgow edition, is both very cheap and has sold in very large numbers. Despite the fact that one cannot buy a better, or a cheaper, edition of Smith’s works than this, new editions of Wealth of Nations have appeared at an accelerating rate. More new editions of Wealth of Nations appeared in the 1990s than in the 1890s; there had been more in the 1890s than the 1790s, when the work was selling well. The book is now available on the web and an abridged audio-cassette version is available. Indeed, it sells so well that even national libraries have lost interest in the more marginal reprints and editions now available.

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The Glasgow Edition of the Collected Works of Adam Smith D. D. Raphael1

At the University of Glasgow in 1961, a committee of senior members of the academic staff in economics and allied social sciences began thinking of a suitable way to celebrate the bicentenary in 1976 of the first publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Their plans did not at first include any project for a new edition of Collected Works. The initial impulse for that came from Professor G. J. Stigler of the University of Chicago in October 1961. Sir Laurence Hunter, now Emeritus Professor of Applied Economics at Glasgow, was at that time a newly graduated student of the Department of Political Economy. He went to Chicago for a year’s postgraduate study, and soon after his arrival Professor Stigler asked him whether the University of Glasgow was going to produce a new edition of Adam Smith’s works. Stigler thought this would be a highly appropriate way to celebrate the bicentenary of the Wealth of Nations. Hunter communicated this information in a letter to Professor A. L. Macfie, Emeritus Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at Glasgow. He added that there was a Professor of some seniority at Chicago who might be ready to undertake an edition of the Collected Works. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘I fancy Stigler would not want to intrude on other plans provided the work was done, and he asked me if I knew of anything in that direction.’ Macfie sent a brief interim reply to ensure that Chicago should hold its hand meanwhile. He then drafted a reply for consideration by the committee. Our Committee has authorised me to write to you as follows: There is no doubt Glasgow will do something big for 1976. The Court [i.e. the University Court, the governing body of the institution] has been approached, and has indicated its support in principle. We feel sure we shall get it. The scheme we have in mind is something like this. First, we will produce a volume of critical essays on Smith’s work and its influence. For this we would seek the best people in the world – including Japan. (Professor Stigler would be one we should like to approach). For any such volume we should seek the help of the Scottish Economic Society, and we know we would get it. 1

I wish to thank Andrew Skinner for several items in this article.

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Then, secondly, our committee are agreed that one job that should be done is an annotated edition of the Moral Sentiments (the only modern such edition is in German – by Eckstein. Schneider’s – U.S.A. – is not annotated). I am the victim chosen for this toilsome job, and I have agreed to tackle it if I am assured of D. D. Raphael’s collaboration; Raphael being one of the best people in Britain on 18th century Ethics. Thirdly, other projects are a reissue of W. R. Scott’s book. at present out of print, possibly with additions; a new edition of the Essays; and perhaps a reissue of Rae’s Life with a new introduction. As to a ‘Collected Works’ – while the above proposals would all appear as University publications, and therefore uniform, some of us are in some doubts as to ‘Collected Works.’ They feel Cannan’s editions of the Wealth of Nations and Lectures will not be improved on by anyone now starting from scratch. And they are not sure about merely reproducing Cannan. It may be that Cannan’s editions could be brought up to date in some ways with new introductions, and so included in a collected edition. But Cannan must have lived with the Wealth of Nations for a decade or so. I personally doubt whether anyone will be found, in this more pressed age, at once willing and able to do that again. However, the project of a ‘Collected Works’ along with supporting volumes, as indicated above, will always be before our Committee here, whatever may happen elsewhere before, and/or for, 1976.

Although the draft is written as if the committee had already considered Hunter’s letter, it was simply a draft, subject to revision. I was a member of the committee and I do not recall having attended any meeting to discuss Hunter’s letter before this draft was composed. While the draft sets out the provisional plans of the committee, I think that its view on a Collected Works was predominantly the view of Macfie himself, though no doubt shared to some extent by others. Certainly the initiative for an annotated edition of Smith’s first book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, came from Macfie, who had been especially interested in that book for a number of years. He had published several papers on Smith’s thought, two of them specifically on Theory of Moral Sentiments. When he said in the draft reply to Hunter that he was ‘the victim chosen for this toilsome job’, he was writing with tongue in cheek: he was in fact very keen to do the job, and no other member of the committee had any wish to demur. The members of the Bicentenary Committee, apart from Macfie, were Tom Wilson, Macfie’s successor as Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy, Donald Robertson, Professor of Applied Economics, Sydney Checkland, Professor of Economic History, myself (D. D. Raphael, Professor of Political and Social Philosophy, later Professor of Philosophy in the University of London), and Ronald Meek, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy (later Professor of Economics in the University of Leicester). Meek’s special interest was in the history of economic thought, and he became the moving spirit in the proceedings of the committee.

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Macfie’s draft reply to Hunter was circulated to the rest of the committee for comment. I do not know what comments were made by committee members other than myself, nor do I know what reply was eventually sent by Macfie to Hunter. I think it likely, however, in the light of later developments, that Meek will have come out pretty strongly in favour of undertaking a Collected Works. My own comment on the draft was that the committee should take a more positive attitude to the idea of an edition of Collected Works, and that Oxford University Press should be approached as the favoured publisher. I also confirmed that I was willing to collaborate with Macfie in editing the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Meanwhile Meek, consulting, on behalf of the committee, Lord Robbins of the London School of Economics concerning the plans for 1976, took the opportunity to tell Robbins of Stigler’s message and learned that Stigler had written to Robbins some months earlier asking if he knew of any British project for an edition of Smith’s Collected Works. Stigler had indicated that he and some of his colleagues were trying to persuade Aaron Director, a member of the Chicago Department of Economics, to produce such an edition if there were no British project. Robbins had replied that he knew of no British project, and had heard no more. Robbins was enthusiastic about the provisional Glasgow plan of reprinting Smith’s works and W. R. Scott’s book, Adam Smith as Student and Professor, together with a new book of critical essays. He was in favour of reprinting the Smith works in the form of photographic reproduction of the original texts with added introductions in the front and notes at the back. He did not say whether the photographed texts of the Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments would be those of the first editions; he obviously had not asked himself whether that would be satisfactory. Meek then wrote a lengthy memorandum, dated 31 October 1961, to help towards reaching a decision on producing an edition of Collected Works. He himself was strongly in favour. The main argument, he wrote, ‘is simply that people will be expecting us to do this job, and if we don’t do it someone else almost certainly will’; amid the many local enterprises to celebrate the bicentenary, he said, Glasgow had a special obligation, and the only way to fulfil it was to produce a Collected Works. Secondly, since 1976 was the bicentenary of the Wealth of Nations, not of the Theory of Moral Sentiments or the Essays on Philosophical Subjects, new editions of the latter works without a new edition of the Wealth of Nations would hardly be an appropriate celebration. Thirdly, a Collected Works was needed because anyone who wanted to read the whole of Smith’s works and correspondence had to go to seven different books, most of which were out of print or hard to come by. Meek also considered two arguments that might be posed against the project. First, ‘it is very unlikely that any new manuscript material, etc., will be discovered’; and second, Edwin Cannan’s edition of the Wealth of Nations was readily available. Meek responded to the second argument by noting that Can-

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nan’s editions of the Wealth of Nations and the Lectures on Justice, while excellent in what they did, nevertheless omitted to consider in depth some things that were of interest to present-day scholars, notably the relationship between economics, philosophy, and law in Smith’s thought, and the relevance of his economic thought to the problems of growth and development. Meek then outlined a tentative plan for six volumes: I The Theory of Moral Sentiments II The Glasgow Lectures [meaning the Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms published by Edwin Cannan in 1896], together with the so-called ‘early draft’ of the Wealth of Nations and other fragments discovered by W. R. Scott and published in his book Adam Smith as Student and Professor III and IV The Wealth of Nations V Essays. Miscellaneous Pieces. Correspondence VI Biographical Material. Meek acknowledged some uncertainty about the content of Volumes V and VI, especially the latter, which might be either a miscellany of early biographical pieces or a wholly new Life of Adam Smith. The latter part of Meek’s memorandum makes no further reference to the supposed objection that ‘it is very unlikely that any new manuscript material, etc., will be discovered’. To leave it at that was perfectly sensible when writing on 31 October 1961. Yet, curiously enough, the quoted statement was belied the very next day. Dr John M. Lothian, a Reader in English at the University of Aberdeen, had the good fortune to discover, at the sale of a private library in 1958, several bound volumes of manuscript notes of lectures delivered by Adam Smith in 1762–3, notes apparently written by a student or a small group of students. There were two volumes of lectures on ‘Rhetorick’ and six of lectures on ‘Jurisprudence’. The second set of notes was a fuller, though incomplete, version of lectures (on ‘Juris Prudence.., or Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms’) already known from a manuscript, dated 1766 but probably reporting lectures of 1763–4, that had been edited and published by Cannan in 1896. Lothian did not give any publicity to his discovery at the time; he was working on the Rhetoric lectures and eventually published an edited version of them, as Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, in 1963. He did, however, write two long articles about his discovery of both sets of notes and had them published in the Edinburgh newspaper, The Scotsman, on 1 and 2 November 1961. If Meek had been able to see these before he wrote his memorandum of 31 October, his case for a Collected Works would have been overwhelming. Professor Andrew Skinner has pointed out to me the remarkable role of sheer accident in the discovery of Adam Smith manuscripts: first the Jurisprudence manuscript edited by Cannan in 1896, and then the more detailed Jurisprudence notes together with the Rhetoric notes discovered by Lothian in

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1958. At Skinner’s suggestion, I quote Cannan’s account of how he came to know of the first manuscript: No one could have been more sensible of the historical value of the last two parts of the lectures than I, but I can not claim any credit for having discovered the manuscript which is now published. On April 21, 1895, Mr. Charles C. Maconochie, Advocate, whom I then met for the first time, happened to be present when, in course of conversation with the literary editor of the Oxford Magazine, I had occasion to make some remark about Adam Smith. Mr. Maconochie thereupon immediately said that he possessed a manuscript report of Adam Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence, which he regarded as of considerable interest.1

Cannan also reproduces a letter from Mr Maconochie saying that he obtained the manuscript from the library of a grand-uncle, an advocate and Sheriff (that is, a Scottish judge of first instance), who died in 1845. He added that dates made it impossible for the grand-uncle or either of two other lawyer members of the family to have been a student of Adam Smith, and he thought it likely that the book, a fair copy of notes, had been bought at a sale – which is how Lothian acquired the second manuscript more than a century later. In a forthcoming article2 Andrew Skinner has written of some important consequences of Cannan’s publication of the Lectures on Justice. It clarified John Millar’s brief account of jurisprudence as treated by Smith: a history of the progress of law in the developing stages of society and the relationship of this to ethics and to economics, bringing out especially the significance of Books III and V of the Wealth of Nations. It also changed economists’ perceptions of the role of Hutcheson in the formation of Smith’s thought; there is an illuminating account of this in Cannan’s introduction. Thirdly, Cannan was able to confirm from the Lectures the character and extent of Smith’s economic thought before he visited France and became acquainted with the Physiocrats. As Skinner observes, the Cannan text of the Jurisprudence lectures is more valuable than the one discovered by Lothian. Nevertheless the Lothian text adds quite a lot on details; and of course Lothian’s find was all the more exciting for including notes of the lectures on Rhetoric. It should not be thought that Lothian was entirely secretive about his discovery until November 1961. Ernest Mossner, Professor of English in the University of Texas, reviewing Lothian’s 1963 edition of the Lectures on Rhetoric, began by saying: ‘Some five or six years ago rumors began to circulate that Adam Smith’s lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres ... had at long last been discovered.’ These rumours had not, however, reached the Adam Smith scholars at Glasgow. 1 E. Cannan, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Adam Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1896), p. xv. 2 Andrew S. Skinner, ‘Adam Smith (1723–1790): Theories of Political Economy’, in J. E. Biddle, J. B. Davis, and W. J. Samuels (eds), The Blackwell Companion to the History of Economic Thought (Blackwell, Oxford 2003).

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Despite the Glasgow committee’s initial ignorance of the Lothian discovery, the case made by Meek for a Collected Works was strong enough in any event. It was endorsed by the University Court, and the Bicentenary Committee was reorganised and enlarged to include a member of the Court, Sir William Robieson, the ‘Clerk of Senate’ (virtually the deputy of the University’s Principal and Vice-Chancellor), Professor C. J. Fordyce, and W. G. Maclagan, Professor of Moral Philosophy. A meeting of the new committee was held on 30 November. It elected Sir William Robieson as its chairman and Ronald Meek as secretary. It appointed a Board of Provisional Editors and agreed to open negotiations with the Oxford University Press. Macfie was to edit Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Meek and Checkland were to be joint editors of the Wealth of Nations. The Board of Editors was to consider the appointment of editors for other volumes of the Works. Two members of the committee had been informed of a proposal by the Edinburgh University Press to publish an edition of Smith’s Collected Works; the committee resolved to write to the Edinburgh University Press saying that Glasgow was set to produce a definitive edition and was negotiating with the Oxford University Press as prospective publisher. The Board of Provisional Editors had a preliminary meeting on 12 December with Mr C. H. Morris, the Glasgow representative of the Oxford University Press. Then on 16 January 1962 the larger Bicentenary Committee held a more substantial meeting with Mr J. K. Cordy, a senior member of the Oxford University Press, and Mr Morris. Thereafter Mr Cordy was a tower of strength to the Glasgow committee and the various editors of Smith’s works. At the meeting on 16 January, Cordy told the committee that the Collected Works proposal would be considered by the Delegates (the authoritative body) of the Press later that month, and he thought there was a fair chance of approval. The matter of negotiations with Dr Lothian about use of the newly discovered notes was discussed. Cordy recommended speedy action since there might be problems about copyright. Meek reported that information had just been received from Aberdeen that Lothian had made certain proposals. The negotiations with Lothian proved to be difficult and long drawn out. The University of Glasgow offered in the first instance to purchase the manuscripts at a price 10% higher than the market value estimated by Sotheby’s, the leading dealer in antiques. Lothian was unwilling to accept this, or later offers of a higher figure, and for a while hoped to receive more from possible purchasers overseas. Eventually he turned back to Glasgow University of his own accord in February 1964 and accepted the figure offered to him at that time for the purchase of the manuscripts and any copyright that might exist. It was agreed that the Glasgow edition of the Rhetoric lectures should not be published before 1971 in order to allow Lothian’s edition of 1963 to have a fair run on its own. The acquisition of Lothian’s manuscripts enabled the Bicentenary Committee to include the lectures on Rhetoric and the enlarged version of the lectures on Jurisprudence in the projected edition of Collected Works. There was

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considerable discussion on the form of these two items. How would the new edition of the Rhetoric lectures stand in relation to Lothian’s edition and who should edit it? Should the Jurisprudence volume include only the newly discovered notes, a longer version than that printed in Cannan’s edition; or should it add the latter part of the Cannan version, on economics, since the new version did not contain anything on that topic; or should it include both? So far as the Rhetoric lectures were concerned, the committee considered the possibility of inviting Lothian to be the editor or one of two editors; but it seemed unlikely that he would be willing, since that would make his existing edition obsolete when otherwise his edition would remain a worthy alternative. Furthermore, if Lothian were to edit the lectures a second time, he would probably not wish to change much of what he had written before. That would be unsatisfactory; Lothian had dealt well with the lectures as a work of literary criticism but had not discussed the authenticity of the manuscript or the relation of these lectures to Theory of Moral Sentiments or the Wealth of Nations. So the committee decided instead to invite John C. Bryce, Senior Lecturer in English (later A. C. Bradley Professor of English Literature) to edit the Rhetoric lectures. It should be said that, despite the difficulties of the earlier negotiations with Lothian, Bryce found him altogether friendly and helpful in advice about the lecture notes. For the Jurisprudence lectures two editors were at first appointed: Peter Stein, Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of Aberdeen (later Professor of Civil Law in the University of Cambridge) and Henry Hamilton, Professor of Economics in the University of Aberdeen. Professor Hamilton unfortunately died in 1964 and was replaced by Ronald Meek, who had become deeply interested in Smith’s Jurisprudence lectures as forerunner of the Wealth of Nations. It was also felt, in the light of the content of the longer set of notes, that a third editor was needed: Stein and Meek would deal respectively with Smith’s treatment of law and economics, but the lectures concerned a fair amount of social and political thought as well. I was therefore added to the editors to deal with this aspect. Meek carried the major burden: in addition to comment on the economic thought, he did most of the (often difficult) work of deciphering the manuscript. I gave him some assistance in this and carried out the less onerous task of collating anew the shorter manuscript that had been published by Cannan. It was decided in the end that both versions of the Jurisprudence lectures should be printed, the longer version first. One possibility had been to show the alternative statements of the same material on the same page, but this proved impracticable as Smith had changed the arrangement of his subject-matter in the later version, which reported the lectures in his last year at Glasgow. Meek had by now left Glasgow for Leicester. His place as secretary of the Bicentenary Committee was taken for a short time by R .L. Briant and then by Andrew Skinner, Lecturer in the Department of Political Economy (later Adam Smith Professor). Thereafter Skinner had the key role in the enterprise that Meek had previously exercised.

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Various changes occurred in the appointment of editors. Volume I was originally to be edited by Macfie alone, with some collaborative assistance from me; I was reluctant to be committed to more than that. However, the Oxford University Press, aware of my experience in editing British moralists of the eighteenth century, asked that I should become a full joint editor of Theory of Moral Sentiments, a request that pleased Macfie and persuaded me. The Wealth of Nations, Volume II in the series (though itself consisting of two volumes physically), was originally to be edited by Meek and Checkland. In 1967 William B. Todd, Professor of English in the University of Texas, wrote to the Bicentenary Committee at the suggestion of his colleague, Ernest Mossner, who was already associated with the project. Todd urged the committee not to follow Cannan’s example in his edition of the Wealth of Nations of simply reproducing the text of the last edition published in the author’s lifetime. Editors should instead adopt the bibliographical practice recommended by Sir Walter Greg in 1950 and developed by other scholars; the result, said Todd, would be ‘an eclectic text unlike any in print’. He offered to carry out the operation in Texas, if this would help Glasgow. The offer was accepted for the Wealth of Nations (though not for Theory of Moral Sentiments), and Todd was accordingly appointed Textual Editor of that work, while Meek and Checkland were designated General Editors. Todd’s ideas were followed in his text, but not entirely in the presentation of the variant readings of different editions. His view on this matter was based on his experience with literary texts, and the General Editors considered that it was not altogether suitable for the needs of Adam Smith’s readers. The views and procedure of the editors of the Moral Sentiments are set out in their introduction. As time went on, Meek found himself very heavily involved with the Jurisprudence manuscript and suggested in 1969 that Andrew Skinner, who was engaged on an edition of the Wealth of Nations for Penguin Classics, should join the editors of the Glasgow edition. Meek offered to withdraw from that work himself if it seemed excessive to have three General Editors. The committee accepted both suggestions. But then in 1971 Checkland withdrew, feeling that his other commitments prevented him from giving adequate time to this editorial work. Since he was to have dealt with questions of economic history, his place was taken by Roy Campbell, Professor of Economic History in the University of Stirling. So Skinner and Campbell were the eventual General Editors of the Wealth of Nations, inheriting the association with Todd as Textual Editor. Skinner in fact did a good deal of work on the text as well as on explanatory notes; he collated anew the different editions and was responsible for the system of cross-references within the text of the Wealth of Nations and between it and the other texts. Campbell did all the work relating to matters of economic history and traced many of the references to other works. Volume III of the Glasgow Edition contains Essays on Philosophical Subjects, accompanied by Dugald Stewart’s ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam

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Smith’, two contributions by Smith to the Edinburgh Review, and his preface to a book of poems by William Hamilton. In the original provisional plan for the Collected Works, the Essays were assigned to a volume containing also ‘miscellaneous pieces’ and correspondence, while an additional volume would contain biographical material. On further consideration, however, it was thought that the biographical volume should be a new Life of Smith and that it would be more logical for the correspondence to be joined to the new biography rather than to the Essays and miscellaneous pieces. The Bicentenary Committee decided in 1964 to invite Dr George Davie, Reader in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, to edit the Essays, and he accepted the invitation with pleasure; but unfortunately he felt obliged in 1969 to withdraw owing to ill health. The committee then invited Sir Malcolm Knox, Principal of the University of St Andrews (formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy there). He felt unable to accept because the most substantial group of essays is on the history and philosophy of science, a field in which he lacked expertise. He suggested instead Dr W. P. D. Wightman, a retired Reader in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Aberdeen. Wightman was accordingly invited to edit the essays on the sciences together with two of a more general philosophical character. He agreed, but with a cautionary warning that he had no experience of editing as such. John Bryce, who had taken on the editing of the Rhetoric lectures, was asked to deal with the remaining essay on English and Italian verse, and with the Edinburgh Review pieces and the preface to Hamilton’s poems. Ian Ross, who by this time had been appointed to write a new biography, was asked to edit the short biography written by Dugald Stewart for the original edition of the Essays. A work produced by three separate editors writing independently of each other is likely to lack unity. Moreover, Wightman’s warning about his limitations was borne out by lacunas in his explanatory notes. Andrew Skinner therefore suggested to me that the two of us should act as General Editors of this volume, writing a cohesive introduction and supplying additional notes with the help of specialised scholars. Volumes IV and V of the Glasgow Edition are the Lectures on Jurisprudence and the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. The editors of these volumes have been named above. Volume VI is the Correspondence of Adam Smith, containing letters written to him as well as those written by him. As noted above, the Bicentenary Committee envisaged associating the correspondence with a new biography. Checkland expressed interest in writing the biography. For gathering and editing the correspondence, the Editorial Board thought first of Ernest Mossner, who had recently edited, with Raymond Klibansky, New Letters of David Hume, prior to writing a splendid Life of Hume. In informal discussion with me, Mossner said that his interest in editing letters was as a preliminary to a biography; if the committee were to invite him to write the proposed biography of Smith, he would be very happy to do that and would in consequence be ready to search for and edit the correspondence. He added that, for the latter task, he

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would wish to have the cooperation of Ian Ross, Assistant Professor (later full Professor) of English at the University of British Columbia; Ross had been a postgraduate pupil of Mossner and had published a biography of Lord Kames, a prominent member of the Scottish Enlightenment along with Hume and Adam Smith. In view of Mossner‘s relevant experience, Checkland readily agreed to give up his own thoughts of writing the Smith biography. A complication then arose. The plans of the committee included a book of critical essays on Smith’s thought, and one of the scholars invited to write an essay was Piero Sraffa, the distinguished editor of Ricardo. Sraffa sent an interim reply and in the course of it mentioned that he had for some years been collecting letters of Adam Smith with a view to possible publication. In these circumstances it seemed right to think of asking Mossner and Sraffa if they would be willing to act together in editing Smith’s correspondence for the Glasgow Collected Works. Mossner was prepared, with some misgiving, to agree. Sraffa decided against, both because collaboration by correspondence presented difficulties and because he had not intended to do any editorial work himself: he had thought of giving his collection of letters to a young scholar to edit and publish. In view of Mossner’s interest and experience, Sraffa said, he was happy to stay out of the project. That enabled the Bicentenary Committee to extend a formal invitation to Mossner to write a biography and to edit the correspondence jointly with Ross. The correspondence was collected under a vigorous search plan divided between the two scholars. Mossner dealt with letters from Smith, and Ross with letters to Smith. Unfortunately Mossner was obliged by serious illness in 1971 to give up his participation. Ross did most of the annotation, and the first edition was published in 1977. A second edition, prepared in 1985, contains eighteen newly discovered letters. Fourteen of them are from a collection of papers in the Archives Office of the Kent County Council, and our finding out about them is another example of accidental discovery. Dr (now Professor) David Raynor, a Canadian scholar with a special interest in David Hume, mentioned in a letter to me that a routine inquiry to Kent County Archives about Hume or his associates had brought a reply that (as he thought) they had ‘a letter’ from Adam Smith ‘to’ Lord Chesterfield. Following this up, I found that what the Kent Archives had was a number of letters about Lord Chesterfield and his erstwhile tutor, Adam Ferguson. The letters from and to Adam Smith do not add to our understanding of his works, but they do reinforce the impression of his character that we get from the Theory of Moral Sentiments. The editorial work for the second edition of Smith’s correspondence was done by Ross but, of course, made known to Mossner, though he did not live to see the new edition in print. He died in 1986 and the second edition was published in 1987. Mossner’s illness meant that he could not proceed with the biography, and the Bicentenary Committee invited Ross to take it over. Ross’s Life of Adam Smith duly appeared in 1995. It is not part of the Glasgow Edition of The Works

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and Correspondence of Adam Smith, but it was originally planned as an ‘associated volume’, like the collection of Essays on Adam Smith, edited by Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson, and published in 1975. A further short volume, published in 2001, can properly be regarded as an addendum to the edition of the Works. It is a comprehensive Index to the Works of Adam Smith, compiled by Knud Haakonssen, Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, and Andrew Skinner. Before concluding this account, two policy decisions of the Bicentenary Committee should be recorded. One concerns the editors’ method of giving references to passages in Smith’s works, especially the two works published in his lifetime. A passage is located by roman and arabic numerals identifying Book or Part, section (if applicable), chapter, and paragraph. This can look cumbersome. There were two reasons for it. First, citation by page number in the Glasgow edition was not possible when referring to a book not yet published in the edition. Secondly, that form of citation would be of no help to readers using earlier editions of Smith’s books. The second policy decision is more substantial, relating to the character of the commentary by editors. It was at first suggested that the introductions should be of a non-controversial nature and relatively brief: personal interpretation could be expressed in one of the critical essays. Macfie was unhappy about this, believing that some element of interpretation was inevitable in editing philosophical work. The final view was a longer statement, referring more to editorial notes than to introductions: notes should, so far as possible, bring out the inter-relation of Smith’s ideas in different works, place them in historical context, and indicate their relevance or irrelevance to modern problems.

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The Diffusion of the Work of Adam Smith in the French Language: An Outline History Gilbert Faccarello, Philippe Steiner

Ken Carpenter’s recent publications on the translation of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations into the French language during the period 1776 to 1843 have shed a great deal of light on Adam Smith’s translation history.1 If we add to this record what we know of Theory of Moral Sentiments, we can summarise the various translations into French as in Table I, supplemented by the listing given in Table II of other writings by Smith.2 Table I – Translations of Smith in France and in French (1764–2002)3 1764 1774 1774–5

TMS T1 Eidous T2(m, i) La Rochefoucauld T3 Blavet

WN

1776 TMS

1

W1 (m) Morellet WN

Kenneth E. Carpenter, The Dissemination of the Wealth of Nations in French and in France 1776–1843 (The Bibliographical Society of America, New York 2002); and his earlier essay, ‘Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations d’Adam Smith et politique culturelle en France’, Économies et Sociétés, no. 10 (1995), pp. 5–30. 2 See also Carpenter’s book for Wealth of Nations in French to 1843. 3 Large caps indicate original translations, small caps reprints, the translation number serving also to indicate the translator. The suffix (a) indicates an abbreviated edition, although the name of the editor concerned is not given here for the sake of clarity; (e) indicates substantial extracts in a periodical, encyclopedia or other serial publication. It is worthwhile distinguishing those extracts published in the eighteenth century from abbreviated editions which, from the late nineteenth century, were conceived for an entirely different purpose. In the former case (and leaving to one side encyclopaedia entries), extracts were designed to make the work of an author better known, preceding publication as a book and a complete reading. In the nineteenth century the publication of ‘select extracts’ related to works already considered to be classics of their kind, and intended as a substitute to a complete reading; (i) indicates an incomplete translation; (m) indicates a manuscript only.

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1782

1798

1830

1860

1981

1999

1778 1778–9 1779–80 1781

W2(e) Reverdil W3 [Anonymous] W4 Blavet w4, w4

1782 1784–88 1786 1788 1789 1790 1790–1 1791–2 1792 1794

W5 (m) Nort w4(e) w4 w4 w3 w6(e) & w4(e) W6 Roucher w6 w6 w6

1800–01 1802 1806 1810 1822

w4 W7 Garnier W6 w7 w7

1843 1859

w7 w7

1881 1888 1908 1950 1966 1976

w7 w7(a) w7(a) w7(a) & w7(i) w7 w7(a)

1991 1995

w7 W8 Taieb

t3

T4 Grouchy

t4

t4

t4

T5 Bizioux et. al. 1999–2003 W9 ed. Jaudel

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Table II – French Translations of Smith’s Philosophical Writings Date of Edition Translator 1796 Considérations sur la première A. M. H. Boulard formation des langues, et le différent génie des langues originales et composées 1797 Essais philosophiques Pierre Prévost

Translated Text Dissertation on the Origin of Languages

Essays on Philosophical Subjects, including Stewart’s ‘Account’ and Smith’s letter to the authors of the Edinburgh Review 1798 Considérations sur l'origine et Sophie de Grouchy Dissertation on the Origin of Lanla formation des langues guages, appendix to Théorie des sentiments moraux (see Table I for subsequent editions) 1809 Essai sur la première forma- Jacques-Louis Manget Dissertation on the Origin of Lantion des langues et sur la différence du guages, followed by the translation génie des langues originales et des of a text by Friedrich Schlegel langues composées [followed by] Book I of Recherches sur la langue et la philosophie des Indiens (reprinted 1971) 1997 Essais esthétiques P.-L. Autin, I. Ellis, Of the Nature of that Imitation M. Garandeau, which takes place in what are called P. Thierry The Imitative Arts; Of the Affinity between Music, Dancing, and Poetry; Of the Affinity between certain English and Italian Verses; A Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review

The following account is divided into three distinct periods: 1764–1802 1802–1888 1888 to the present. This periodisation arises from the ‘material’ aspect of the Smith reception: the translations themselves, whether complete or in part, made accessible to a francophone public. Within each of these periods we have briefly examined this material dimension of the reception, but also taken account of another history, that of the intellectual translation of the work – the province of the history of ideas, whose phasing does not exactly correspond to that of the material publication history.

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1. The First Period: 1764–1802 The translation history of Smith’s work, and importantly, that of its reception, is rich and varied during this period. One has only to look at the figures – taking into account that out of all translations, we are talking of not less than twelve translators working over a period of forty years; and seven of these translators, over a period of twenty years, directed their efforts to Wealth of Nations. By the end of the period canonical translations had been made of Moral Sentiments and of Wealth of Nations, and all later interpretations and editions would be based on these versions. At the close of the ancien régime, this flurry of activity was first directed to Moral Sentiments, two complete translations of this work appearing in succession – that of Marc-Antoine Eidous (1764) and the abbé Jean-Louis Blavet (1774–5), the latter being reprinted in 1782. Besides this, we know that LouisAlexandre de La Rochefoucauld prepared an incomplete manuscript translation in 1774. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, originally published in 1759, reaching its sixth edition in 1790, was also published in a completely new translation during the revolutionary period: Sophie de Grouchy, Condorcet’s widow, published her own version in 1798, based on the seventh English edition. Besides translations of this major text, there are a number of other philosophical writings that can be added, all of which appeared during the revolutionary period. Smith’s ‘Considerations concerning the first formation of Languages, and the different genius of original and compounded Languages’, published in the Philological Miscellany of 1761 and then appended to the 1767 third edition of Moral Sentiments, was translated twice. The first was by A. M. H. Boulard, who published the text under a direct translation of the original title in 1796; the second was by Sophie de Grouchy, who appended the text to her translation of Moral Sentiments, following exactly the English edition upon which she based her translation.1 Finally, the writings that Joseph Black and James Hutton brought together in 1795 under the title Essays in Philosophical Subjects, together with Dugald Stewart’s ‘Account’ and Smith’s 1755 letter to the Edinburgh Review, were translated and published by Pierre Prévost as Essais philosophiques in 1797. Prévost added ten notes in the form of commentary directed to specific points, as well as a more general essay ‘Réflexions sur les œuvres posthumes d’Adam Smith’. But it was the Wealth of Nations that attracted most attention from translators, reflecting in great part the intensity of intellectual activity prevailing in France during the second half of the eighteenth century, turning on the philosophical, economic and political questions raised by the Enlightenment. It also reflected a certain personal rivalry between translators who were themselves reformers by persuasion; and these conflicts have to be considered if we are to reach a 1

In 1809 Jacques-Louis Manget published another new edition.

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more exact understanding of the diffusion and reception of Smith in this period. Up until 1789 there are no less than five separate translations: 1. two translations were never published: the almost complete translation of abbé Morellet – the manuscript that has survived lacks the last two chapters of Book V;1 and that of the comte du Nort, mentioned by Adam Smith in a letter of 1782 to Blavet,2 but for which no manuscript has ever been found; 2. a very partial translation by Élie Salomon François Reverdil was published in 1778 under the title Fragment sur les colonies en général, et sur celles des anglais en particulier. This is a translation, with some modifications,3 of Book IV, Ch. VII ‘Of Colonies’ from Wealth of Nations; 3. two complete translations were printed, the first from 1778–9 being anonymous, republished in 1789; and the second being by Jean-Louis Blavet (1779–80). This was first published as a serial in Journal d’agriculture, du commerce, des arts et des finances, republished in book form in 1781, then reprinted in 1786, 1788 and in 1800–01 (in a revised and corrected edition).4 During the revolutionary period there were two new complete translations of Wealth of Nations: the first in the early days of the Revolution being that of JeanAntoine Roucher (1790–1, republished three times, in 1791–2, in 1792, and in revised form in 1794); and the other, published during Bonaparte’s Consulate in 1802, is that of Germain Garnier. In sum, twelve years after the death of Smith in 1790, the two key editions for the diffusion of his work in the French language had been published: de Grouchy’s Moral Sentiments, and Garnier’s Wealth of Nations. In this way a line was drawn under three decades of polemic over the existing translations.

1 Carpenter, op. cit., p. 1. Morellet also prepared an extract intended for separate publication, but had no more success than with the complete manuscript (see below). 2 E. C. Mossner, I. S. Ross (eds.) Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1987), Letter 218, pp. 259–60. 3 Carpenter, op. cit., p. 18. 4 It might be added here that in referring to a ‘complete edition’ this does not imply what it would today. Although a translation might present itself as ‘complete’, in practice there were often omissions made on religious or political grounds, so that censorship of the entire work might be avoided. For example, the anonymous version of Wealth of Nations lacks the section in Book V that deals with expenditure on educational institutions. On the other hand, when passages that could possibly attract the attention of the authorities were retained, as in the Blavet edition, some ‘explanatory’ note was added, or a comment such as ‘il ne faut pas oublier que c’est un Anglais qui parle’ (Carpenter, ibid., pp. 22–5, 28–31).

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2. The Second Period: 1802–88 This second period is characterised by a process of critical assimilation on the part of economists working in the French language. There are two features of this phase of the reception that need emphasis: 1. The Wealth of Nations was the almost exclusive object of critical attention, Smith’s moral philosophy being almost entirely neglected; it was only philosophers, notably Victor Cousin and Théodore Jouffroy, that paid any attention to this part of Smith’s work. This is quite paradoxical, since French economists had, since the time of the Physiocrats and the creation of the Institute during the Revolution, considered political economy to be a part of the ‘Moral and Political Sciences’. 2. Following Jean-Baptiste Say and Sismondi, French-language economists opted for Smith against Quesnay. But in so doing they did not simply adopt Smith’s ideas; the ideas underwent a profound modification. Say, for example, did not accept Smith’s theory of value, complained of the gaps in the argument of Wealth of Nations, and denounced its confused organisation. The interpretation of Smith offered to the French public was one that had undergone a reconstruction, incorporated into systematic ‘treatises’,1 where the approach had mainly pedagogical concerns; this was also the case with Say, whose scientific claims are well-known. Despite this, liberal French economists during this second period assigned a central place to Smith’s work; it was through this allegiance that they marked themselves off from adversaries, whether theoretical (Ricardo and the Ricardians) or political (protectionists and socialists). As regards translations of Wealth of Nations, this second period is characterised by the supremacy of Germain Garnier’s translation over the three preceding translations published. The new, revised edition presented by Adolphe-Jérôme Blanqui in 1843 consolidated the standing of this translation as the definitive French language version. A rather similar course was followed by Sophie de Grouchy’s translations of Moral Sentiments: it was republished in 1830, and then published in a new edition with an introduction by Henri Baudrillart in 1860. During the period 1860–80 the work emerged from the shadows to which liberal economists had hitherto consigned it. This development is due to the contributions made by Baudrillart at the time that the celebrated ‘Adam Smith Problem’ began to dominate discussion, although Baudrillart differed quite profoundly from the terms of that debate.

1 A form of which Say was a leading exponent – his Traité d’économie politique went through six editions from 1803 to 1841.

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3. The Third Period; 1888–2002 The third phase reaches from the later nineteenth century to the present. Smith no longer plays a role in theoretical debate and his writings become an object of specialised interest. It is noteworthy that from 1888 to 1976 all accessible editions of Wealth of Nations are either abbreviated versions – that of JeanGustave Courcelle-Seneuil in 1888, of Georges-Henri Bousquet in 1950, and of Gérard Mairet in 1976 – or, if not condensed, then truncated, as with the Costes edition of 1950.1 Smith’s work is not only re-worked in economic treatises but, with the development of teaching in economics, this is associated with a professorial view that reading the complete text of Wealth of Nations is unnecessary. Theory of Moral Sentiments endures a lengthy eclipse in this period: it is not republished until 1981, some 120 years after the Baudrillart edition. This third period ends with a re-evaluation of Smith’s work. Following the publication of the bicentennial Glasgow edition, the accessibility of Smith’s work in French is dramatically improved: 1. Garnier’s classic translation of Wealth of Nations is made available once more (in 1991) in its complete form as a handy paperback aimed at a potentially wide market; while two new complete translations are put forward – one by Paulette Taieb (1995)2 and another by a team of translators under the general direction of Philippe Jaudel.3 2. The Grouchy translation of Moral Sentiments is republished in 1981, and then in 1999 an entirely new edition appears translated by Michaël Biziou, Claude Gauthier and Jean-François Pradeau. Hence these new translations made available good quality French-language editions of Smith’s work, besides the ready availability of the original texts in the bicentennial Glasgow edition. But there is no doubt that today’s readership has changed; it is unlikely that many students of economics in contemporary French universities would be inclined to read, in any depth, the work of Smith. The decline in the teaching of the history of economics is as marked in France as elsewhere. Nor is it likely that readers of Smith are academic economists, who are less and less inclined to cultivate a curiosity in the history of their discipline. The work of Smith is instead today the almost exclusive province of historians of ideas. 1 The Garnier translation was, it is true, republished in 1966 in Germany, but this was not really distributed to the French public; it was part of a facsimile edition – the Collections des Principaux économists – published by Guillaumin in the nineteenth century, mainly purchased by libraries. 2 Apart from the high quality of her translation, Paulette Taieb’s edition is noteworthy for its being based on the first edition, with Smith’s later revisions being flagged and translated in notes and in an appendix. The translator also contributes an entire volume composed of tables, glossary and index. 3 Publication of this latter edition is in progress at the time of writing.

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This essays falls into two broad sections. The first probes the later eighteenth century, a period so important for translations. The second covers the period following the appearance of canonical editions of Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations. We seek to provide merely the principal outlines of this history. ‘L’excellent ouvrage de M. Smith est devenu un livre classique’, 1764–1802 We have already seen that the later eighteenth century is rich in translations of Adam Smith’s writings; the final phases of the ancien régime are quite exceptional and mark the French case off from that of other countries. Why such a variety of translation? Does it indicate the speedy adoption of the economic and philosophical ideas of this Scottish writer? If so, what form might this take? Although we have no complete answer to this question, we can sketch the scenery and identify some important and useful details. 1. The Reception of Theory of Moral Sentiments in Translation In France, as everywhere else, Smith was first known and appreciated as a philosopher. Given the publication of Theory of Moral Sentiments it could not have been any different. But the speed with which this reputation spread in the cosmopolitan République des lettres is very striking. In October 1760 the Journal encyclopédique published a laudatory review. Morellet’s retrospective judgement certainly reflects one that was widely held at the time, and which would later open for Smith the doors of the most prestigious Parisian salons: …his Théorie des sentiments moraux … had impressed me with his wisdom and depth. And … I still today regard him to be one of those men … whose analysis of all the questions with which he deals is the most complete. M. Turgot, who was as fond of metaphysics as me, also had a high regard for his talent.1

Nonetheless, favourable reception of the book was not a foregone conclusion; reflection on morals had for a long time in France followed the rationalist track of Malebranche. But things were beginning to change; in 1747 Louis Jean Lévesque de Pouilly published his Théorie des sentiments agréables,2 a work of which Smith thought highly – it had been published in Britain in 1749 as The 1 André Morellet, Mémoires de l'abbé Morellet sur le dix-huitième siècle et sur la Révolution, revised edition, 1822 (Mercure de France, Paris 1988), p. 206. 2 Théorie des sentiments agréables, où, après avoir indiqué les règles que la nature suit dans la distribution du plaisir, on établit les principes de la théologie naturelle et ceux de la philosophie morale. According to D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie in their ‘Introduction’ to the Glasgow edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1976), pp. 14–15 the French title of Pouilly’s book prompted Smith’s own choice of title.

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Theory of Agreeable Sensations, but Smith read the work in the original French1 – and Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie had familiarised French readers to some extent with the ways of thought prevailing in the British isles. Smith welcomed this shift: writing anonymously in 1755 to the first and short-lived Edinburgh Review he expressed his great pleasure that the French seemed at last ‘to be pretty generally disengaged from the enchantment of that illusive [Cartesian] philosophy.’2 The original and inventive genius of the English, has not only discovered itself in natural philosophy, but in morals, metaphysics, and part of the abstract sciences. … This branch of the English Philosophy … has of late been transported into France. I observe some traces of it, not only in the Encyclopedia, but in the Theory of agreeable sentiments by Mr. De Pouilly, a work that is in many respects original; and above all in the late Discourse upon the origin and foundation of the inequality amongst mankind, by M. Rousseau of Geneva.3

During this period, from mid-century to its close, we might also note that the work of all Smith’s French translators met with criticism. In the eighteenth century, translation was not characterised by the rigour customary today. Fidelity to the original text was not the prime concern; sometimes the translator thought more of being true to the author by adapting his work than sticking to the letter of the text. However, things seemed to have begun to change, above all since the authors themselves become increasingly involved. For whatever reason, quality of translation became an important element in French debates. Moreover, Smith knew French,4 even if he spoke it badly.5 Did he take account of the mediocre quality of the translations, or did he just echo the opinions of those with whom he mixed and corresponded? The story begins with the version of Moral Sentiments that Marc-Antoine Eidous published in 1764 under the title Métaphysique de l’âme.6

1

See D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, ‘Introduction’, p. 14. ‘A Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review’, in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects and Miscellaneous Pieces (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1980), p. 244. 3 Ibid., pp. 249–50. 4 ‘I have heard him say, that he employed himself frequently in the practise of translation, (particularly from the French), with a view to the improvement of his own style… . The knowledge he possessed [of languages], both ancient and modern, was uncommonly extensive and accurate’. Dugald Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.’, revised edition in D. Stewart, Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith, William Robertson, and Thomas Reid (1811); Smith, Essays, pp. 271–2. We should not forget that Smith visited France and spent ten months in Paris. 5 According to the account of the Duchesse d’Enville, see the opinion reported to Smith by Adam Ferguson, Correspondence, p. 173; and also Morellet’s own report in his Mémoires, op. cit., p. 206. 6 Eidous is described in the Biographie universelle ancien et moderne, vol. 12 (Paris 1855), p. 324 as ‘… a tireless translator, but often inexact and above all rather lacking in elegance.’ 2

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The circumstances of this translation were propitious, since it came from the circle around Baron d’Holbach. Hume announced the news to Smith: The Baron d’Holbac [sic], whom I saw at Paris, told me, that there was one under his Eye that was translating your Theory of Moral Sentiments; and desird me to inform you of it: Mr. Fitzmaurice, your old Friend, interests himself strongly in this Undertaking: Both of them wish to know, if you propose to make any Alterations on the Work.1

Smith was obviously pleased by this, but suggested to Hume in reply that the translation should be based on the second edition of 1761, even though he considered it imperfect; he had given the matter serious consideration, but had not had sufficient opportunity to revise it.2 When it appeared in 1764, Eidous’ translation was far from satisfactory. Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire attributes the limited circulation the work had in France to the poor quality translation. Smith also raised complaints, if one can believe a letter later published by Blavet: I was greatly mortified to see the manner in which my book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, has been translated into the language of a nation in which I certainly aspire to be esteemed to no greater degree than I merit.3

The poor quality of this translation prompted thought on the need for another. This was undertaken by a member of the circle around Madame de Boufflers, a correspondent of Hume, an important figure among the anglophiles and the mistress of the Prince de Conti. Jean-Louis Blavet was the Prince’s librarian, and he was given the task of preparing a new translation from the third edition of 1767.4 In his letter of February 1772, Smith expressed his thanks to the countess: Your generous kindness has rendered me the greatest assistance that one could to a man of letters. I look forward to the pleasure of reading a translation made because you desired that it be done.5

1

Hume to Smith, 28 October 1763, in Correspondence, pp. 97–8. Smith to Hume, 12 December 1763, in Correspondence, pp. 413–14. See note 4, pp. 413– 14 which reviews doubts concerning the identity of this translator; we believe that the translator cannot be anyone other than Eidous, there being quite plausible reasons for the date of official approval preceding the date of Smith writing to Hume. 3 Smith to Madame de Boufflers, February 1772, in Correspondence, p. 161 [translated from the French, K. T.] 4 The translation is dedicated to the prince. It also includes a lengthy systematic table of contents (vol. I, pp. xiii–lvi.) Blavet declares, somewhat surprisingly, in his preface that he did not know that ‘there already had been one of them’ – J.-L. Blavet, ‘Préface’ to A. Smith, Théorie des sentiments moraux (Valade, Paris 1774), Vol. 1, p. xi. 5 Ibid., [translated from the French, K. T.] 2

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Blavet later confirmed that Madame de Boufflers had checked the translation.1 The book was published in two volumes in 1774 and 1775, then again in 1782. Parallel to the efforts of Blavet another translator set to work:2Louis-Alexandre de la Rochfoucauld, son of the Duchess d’Enville, both of them having made Smith’s acquaintance in Geneva during 1765. But as soon as Blavet’s translation was published he ceased work, as he told Smith in 1778.3 He did not give up on the project entirely, however, for in 1779 he returned to it: I receive with great pleasure the announcement of a new edition that you are preparing … and if the changes that you have made there render a new French edition necessary, and M. l’Abbé Blavet does not provide one, perhaps I might dare to take up my work once more, but your consent would be necessary, as would an assurance that you would look over the translation before it saw the light of day.’4

Would Blavet’s translation have been badly received? For the French text remained faulty and was subsequently considered to be unsatisfactory. According to Dugald Stewart, Smith himself blamed the poor circulation of his book on the translation: The Theory of Moral Sentiments does not seem to have attracted so much notice in France as might have been expected, till after the publication of the Wealth of Nations. Mr. Smith used to ascribe this in part to the Abbé Blavet’s translation, which he thought was but indifferently executed.5

Happily for Smith, some of the lettered public of the time was able to read the work in the original English. For it was only towards the end of the century that Sophie de Grouchy’s version was published. The approach to the text adopted by Sophie de Grouchy, together with the various remarks devoted to Smith in the ‘Letters on Sympathy’ that she appended to her translation of Moral Sentiments, is quite typical of the French 1 ‘Madame de Boufflers, known to be a woman of spirit and of taste, who both understood and spoke good English, compared this translation from beginning to end with the original.’ J.-L. Blavet, ‘Préface du traducteur’, in A. Smith, Richesse des nations (Laran, Paris 1800), Vol. 1, p. xxiv and in Carpenter, op. cit., p. 158. 2 Blavet also tells us that ‘Mr. Turgot had begun a translation of the same work’, ibid., p. xxiv. But it is also true to say that Turgot ‘began’ a great many things without getting beyond the first few pages, or the draft of a project. 3 He wrote to Smith on 3 March 1778: ‘I have had perhaps the temerity to undertake a translation of your Theory; but as I was finishing the first part I saw that M. l’Abbé Blavet’s translation had appeared, and I was forced to abandon the pleasure I would have had of rendering into my language one of the best works in yours.’ Correspondence, p. 233 [translated from the French, K. T.] 4 La Rochefoucauld to Smith, 6 August 1779, Correspondence, p. 238. 5 Dugald Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D.’, revised edition in his Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith, William Robertson, and Thomas Reid (1811); reprinted in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects and Miscellaneous Pieces (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1980), p. 338 – note F added to the original 1794 version in 1811.

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understanding of the text, as well as highlighting the different perspectives on the nature of moral philosophy existing either side of the Channel. This reception would be repeated during the following century, both by French philosophers and economists. Commentators just did not understand a key point of Scottish philosophy: the construction of a moral theory that did not derive from reason. We have already seen that Smith complained of the French rationalist tradition, although he could see that this was at last changing. But he was mistaken about the extent of this change. Although Moral Sentiments was admired in France, it was generally thought to be unfinished: according to the commentators, Smithian sympathy could not in itself provide adequate foundation to his argument, but had to be derived from something else – from reason. This is why the response of Sophie de Grouchy – and there are others, although we lack the space to deal with them – is of interest. There are not many remarks in her ‘Letters on Sympathy’, but they are quite plain. Smith, recognising that reason is incontrovertibly the source of general rules of morality, but finding it impossible to deduce from reason the first ideas of justice and injustice, asserts that these initial impressions are the object and the result of an immediate sentiment, and supposes that our knowledge of justice and injustice, of virtue and of vice, partly derives from their propriety, or impropriety, with a kind of intimate sense, which is assumed but not defined. However, this kind of intimate sense is not one of those primary causes that must be recognised, but whose existence cannot be explained. … We should, my dear C[abanis], beware of this dangerous tendency to suppose the existence of a intimate sense, a faculty, a principle, every time that we encounter a fact whose explanation escapes us.1

Grouchy’s criticism culminates in the sixth letter, and is also expressed quite unambiguously in the ‘Avertissement’ to the works of Smith that was placed – probably by the publisher – at the front of her translation: Some of Smith’s opinions are examined, revised, and even confronted. The letters seemed an appropriate way of tracing the line separating the Scottish from the French school of philosophy.2

A little later Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis returned briefly to the topic in his important work Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme of 1802. In the tenth part, ‘Considérations touchant la vie animale, les premières déterminations de la sensibilité, l’instinct, la sympathie, le sommeil et le délire’, he stated characteristically: …sympathetic tendencies can easily mislead even the most attentive observer … The great difficulty in relating their effects to their true cause can lead to the idea that unspecifiable faculties are needed to be able to conceive of such phenomena. 1 Marie-Louise Sophie de Grouchy, ‘Lettres à C*** [Cabanis] sur la Théorie des sentiments moraux,’ in Adam Smith, Théorie des sentiments moraux (Buisson, Paris 1798), Vol. 2; published separately as Lettres sur la sympathie (L’Étincelle, Montréal and Paris 1994), pp. 151–2. 2 Adam Smith, Théorie des sentiments moraux (Buisson, Paris 1798), Vol. 1, p. viii.

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Such tendencies are what is meant by moral sympathy, a well-known principle in the writings of Scottish philosophers…, for which Smith has put forward an analysis of great wisdom, but nonetheless incomplete, … and which Madame Condorcet, through simple rational deliberation, was able to make much clearer than Smith had achieved in Theory of Moral Sentiments.1

2. The Reception of The Wealth of Nations in Translation In 1776 the ground had been prepared for a very favourable reception of Wealth of Nations. Smith was well known in intellectual circles and appreciated by reformers: his work could be of use to the latter in the propagation of Enlightenment and in support of their policies. The ground had also been prepared for a French translation of the book. But while the reception of the work was on the whole favourable, successive translations provoked serious disagreement and debate. The Wealth of Nations at the end of the ancien régime The publication of Wealth of Nations in Britain was noticed immediately in France. Smith probably had copies of his new book sent to friends and correspondents: Jean-Louis Blavet and André Morellet, among others, were among these, if their reports are to be believed. Reviews followed quickly. The first, in two parts, was published in the Journal encylopédique of the 1st and 15th October 1776. Another followed a few months later in the February 1777 issue of the Journal des savants.2 The first review is anonymous. It consists of a substantial but rather neutral résumé of the book, embellished with some translated paragraphs, but also with some comments, considered below. In many respects this review already lays down the main themes that will be characteristic of the Wealth of Nations’ reception in eighteenth-century France. The second review has been attributed by Ken Carpenter to Blavet.3 By contrast with the first, it amounts to an extended puff for the work. It reproduces the ‘Introduction and Plan of the Work’, prefacing this extract with two general points. One relates to the importance of a ‘great work’ in which one can see ‘that superiority in genius and talent to which we owe the Theory of Moral Sentiments’:

1 Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (Crapart, Caille et Ravier, Paris 1802); reprint of the 1844 edition (Slatkine, Geneva 1980), p. 549. 2 These reviews are reproduced, with many others, in Ken Carpenter’s book. Since access to the original sources is so difficult for French readers as well as English, we cite from the new edition. As everywhere else in this essay we have modernised the spelling. 3 Carpenter, op. cit., p. 13.

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The most important economic questions are dealt with in all possible nicety, order and profundity; and the author … displays everywhere a degree of discernment and wisdom that one cannot but admire, since it is extremely rare.1

The other issue raised – and so soon after the book’s appearance in March – concerned the material problems presented by a future French translation: Some of our men of letters who have read the work have decided that this is not a book to be translated into our language. They say, among other things, that no individual would underwrite the cost of printing, given the uncertainty of sales, and that booksellers would be even more reluctant to do so.2

But as regards translations, things turned out well enough, at least with respect to the quality and competence of the translator. André Morellet immediately set to work. A friend of Turgot, close to the Physiocrats but also to Necker, having met Smith in Paris,3 Morellet was closely acquainted with economic issues. He had already published a great deal on the subject and so seemed made for the job.4 And so, according to his account, he set to work in the autumn of 1776, when he was staying in Champagne with the Archbishop of Sens, Étienne-Charles Loménie de Brienne; we can disregard the date Morellet gave for its completion, since he possibly gave an earlier date on polemical grounds. There I worked very assiduously on a translation of Smith’s very excellent work Wealth of Nations, which one might regard as a truly classical work of its kind. … As soon as the work appeared he sent me a copy through Lord Shelburne; I took it with me to Brienne and threw myself into its translation.5

The translation went well, but remained a manuscript; Morellet found it impossible to raise money for it and find a publisher, even when, much later, Loménie de Brienne became ‘principal minister’.6 The work was too lengthy, printing would have been too costly, and its marketing too risky in the face of 1 J.-L. Blavet, Review of the first English edition of the Wealth of Nations, Journal des savants (February 1777); in Carpenter, op. cit., p. 14. 2 Ibid. 3 Morellet also kept in occasional contact with Smith, sending for example in 1774 a copy of his refutation of Galiani’s Dialogues sur le commerce des grains – see Lettres d’André Morellet (The Voltaire Foundation, Oxford 1991), Vol. 1, p. 227. For his part Smith valued his relationship with the abbé – see for example in Smith, Correspondence, p. 295. 4 It is true that Morellet had ten years earlier sparked controversy with his translation of Cesare Beccaria’s Dei Delitti e delle pene; he suggested that Beccaria expressed his views badly, and he had sought to remedy this defect by altering the order of presentation of the book. 5 Morellet, Mémoires, op. cit., pp. 206–7. 6 ‘Much later, during his ministry, I requested 100 louis from the Archbishop de Sens [Loménie de Brienne] so that I might chance publishing the work at my own cost; he refused me the money, as had the booksellers’ Mémoires, op. cit., p. 207. Brienne was ‘principal minister’ – and Controller-General of Finance, but without the title – from August 1787 to August 1788.

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censorship.1 Moreover, potential competitors quickly appeared in the market. Morellet’s translation did nevertheless circulate as a manuscript.2 There is a curious incident here that has never fully been explained. As Carpenter emphasises,3 Morellet’s correspondence shows that poor fortune also played a part, for he was not able to publish as intended an extract from Smith relating to corporations – this was from Book I, Ch. X, ‘Of Wages and Profit in the different Employments of Labour and Stock’.4 It was impounded by the police. But if the dating of the correspondence is right, then this occurred during February 1776 while Turgot was still minister; hence this event took place before the publication of Wealth of Nations on 9 March 1776. This raises two issues: firstly, that the translation and publication of an extract from Wealth of Nations would have been thought useful in the pursuit of Turgot’s policies;5 and secondly, Turgot (or one of those close to him)6 already had a copy of the work before its publication, most likely sent to him by Smith. The correspondence shows that Turgot pressed Morellet for the translation – ‘I have made haste with everything that you wished to speed the printing of the extract from Smith’ wrote Morellet to Turgot on 22 February 1776;7 and Morellet expressed on the same day, and then again on 30 March, the idea of translating the whole book, ‘which would be good for our present times.’8 Meanwhile, the fall of Turgot probably delayed matters. Morellet made a prophetic statement; writing 1 Carpenter, ‘Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations d’Adam Smith et politique culturelle en France’, Economies et Sociétés, no. 10 (1995), p. 13; Dissemination of the Wealth of Nations in French and in France 1776–1843 (The Bibliographical Society of America, New York 2002), pp. xxx–xxxi. 2 According to C. Salvat, ‘Histoire de la traduction inédite de la Richesse des nations par l’abbé Morellet. Une traduction manuscrite toujours célébrée et toujours obstinément refusée au public’, Storia del pensiero economico, no. 38 (1999), p. 125, Morellet later revised the manuscript to take account of Smith’s changes to the second and third editions. 3 Carpenter, ‘Recherches sur la nature et les causes de las richesse des nations d’Adam Smith et politique culturelle en France’, op, cit., p. 12; see Morellet’s letters to Turgot between 22 February and 20 March 1776. 4 Carpenter, Dissemination, p. 1. This mishap is confirmed by the correspondence of Métra. 5 Salvat’s (‘Histoire de la traduction inédite’, p. 124) hypothesis is quite plausible. Turgot was planning his edict abolishing jurandes together with other commercial and craft associations. 6 Most likely Turgot himself, since Morellet made clear that he received his copy of the book after its publication through the offices of Lord Shelburne. And in any case he wrote to Shelburne on 12 April 1776 that ‘I have been lent a copy of the first volume of Mr. Smith’s new work’ Lettres, p. 339. See also on this Richard van den Berg, Christophe Salvat, ‘Scottish Subtlety: André Morellet’s Comments on the Wealth of Nations’, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Vol. 8 (2001) pp. 146–85. See Richard Sher’s discussion (pp. 19– 20 above) of the printing history of Wealth of Nations – publication records for the first edition do not exist, but roughly three months separated the printing and publication of the second edition, and one for the third. 7 Lettres, p. 309. 8 Lettres, p. 330.

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to ask Turgot for two thousand pounds to facilitate the preparation of a good translation, he added: ‘The work seems to me so useful that it merits such encouragement, without which it will not be translated at all, or if so then by some poor incompetent in Holland.’1 The first French translation was in fact printed outside France, in The Hague, the translator remaining anonymous – he is simply known as M***. It was published quickly, the text appeared in 1778–9. It was poor quality work, but was nonetheless reprinted ten years later, in 1789, on the eve or at the outbreak of the Revolution. According to Carpenter,2 it is the most literal of all French translations, sold mainly outside France, and thus not penetrating the French market. At the same time as this first complete translation began to appear, the fragment on colonies was published in Lausanne and Basel, translated by É. S. F. Reverdil.3 Here we meet up once more with the abbé Blavet. Having already made available a French version of Moral Sentiments, he embarked upon a translation of Smith’s new work. He lived in part from his work as an occasional translator, and he either was, or had been, friendly with prominent Physiocrats such as the abbé Nicolas Badeau, and François Quesnay himself.4 He had discovered that Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon’s Journal de l’agriculture, du commerce, des arts et des finances was short of material and that the serial publication of Smith’s work would allow him to alleviate this shortage. His translation was therefore published serially from January 1779 to December 1780. In the final instalment Blavet included a seemingly unassuming letter to the editor in which he stated that he had only completed the translation ‘to teach myself ’, and that he wished …to occasion the publication of a new version more faithful to the original, or if a bookseller would undertake to reprint my own, that he would ensure that someone more versed in economic matters and the art of writing than myself would revise and correct the whole, for such a person would not be hard to find.5

Subsequent events showed however that Blavet clung tooth and nail to his original translation. This version of Wealth of Nations was reprinted several 1

Lettres, p. 310. Carpenter, op. cit., p. 20, and pp. xxxv, 24. 3 Reverdil prefaced the work with an ‘Advertisement’ that concisely conveyed a sense of the contents of Wealth of Nations, and explained the separate publication of the chapter on colonies by pointing to interest in recent events in America, and as a spur to a complete translation: ‘I hope above all that this sample will render the entire work sufficiently desirable to French readers that a suitable patient and capable translator will be engaged.’ Carpenter, op. cit., p. 20. 4 Together with the abbé Nolin he published in 1755 an Essai sur l’agriculture moderne, although the title could not conceal that the work was really a ‘small essay on gardening’. 5 Letter to the Journal de l’agriculture, du commerce, des arts et des finances, December; in Carpenter, op. cit., pp. 25–6. 2

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times as a complete work, at first in Switzerland and then in Paris1 – not always accurately, even in relation to the rough original – or as extracts,2 until Blavet finally revised his translation for the Paris 1800–1 edition. Despite republication, Blavet did not get off so lightly with Wealth of Nations as he had with Moral Sentiments: his translation was generally thought to be faulty. Morellet – both judge and jury – was unforgiving: The abbé Blavet, a poor translator of the Moral Sentiments, has snatched up3 Smith’s new treatise, and every week sent to the Journal whatever he had put together; which was good for the journal, for it filled its pages, but poor Smith was more traduced than translated. … Blavet’s version, scattered through the journal, was soon reissued by a bookseller, and this became a hindrance to the publication of my own translation. Originally I had proposed to do the work for one hundred louis, and then for nothing; but the competing edition prompted refusal.4

Morellet underlined that in Blavet and Roucher (he is writing after the Revolution) ‘everything that is a little abstract in Smith is unintelligible’, both of the them disregarding the content, that is to say, knowing nothing of political economy. Controversy surrounding Blavet’s translation did not remain confined to aspersions cast in Parisian salons. It burst into the open at the time that it was republished in 1788. Jacques Mallet du Pan, during a somewhat lively exchange in the pages of the Journal de Paris with Constantin François de Volney concerning some points of interpretation with respect to Wealth of Nations, stressed in the issue for 13 October 1788 that he had called for a ‘decent translation’ of Smith’s work. Volney, responding on 24 October, seized on this: I also would wish that we had a good translation of this admirable work; the author of the existing translation not only has a poor understanding of Smith’s ideas, very often he fails to understand them entirely.5

1 It seems that Blavet only acknowledged the Journal version. The other editions – Yverdon 1781, Paris 1786, Paris 1788 – remained unacknowledged, presumably on account of their faults. The 1781 Paris version appeared in an extremely brief printing of 20 copies; it was in fact an offprint of the text published in the Journal. 2 Extracts from the Blavet translation appeared, without naming either author or translator, in the four volumes of Pancoucke’s Encyclopédie méthodique wherever it dealt with ‘political economy and diplomacy’ (see the list in Carpenter, op. cit., pp. 42–53, where he notes (p. 41) that of the total 1, 097 pages of the first English edition of 1776, translations from 524 pages appear in Vols 2–4 of Économie politique et diplomatique). Other extracts from this edition appeared in the Bibliothèque de l’homme publique, t. 4 (1790). 3 Morellet here uses ‘emparé’, implying at once brutality, greed and the illegitimacy of the action. 4 Morellet, Mémoires, op. cit., p. 207. 5 C. F. de Volney, Letter to the Journal de Paris, 24 October 1788, in Carpenter, op. cit., p. 77.

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Volney then gave an example: the beginning of Book I, Ch. V on the real and nominal price of commodities, where he had no trouble in showing that the French text was incomprehensible.1 He concedes that much of this is also probably the result of numerous printing errors, but insists that the translation is itself at fault, ending with a eulogy to Morellet’s manuscript version: I read an excellent translation of this excellent work in manuscript; by abbé M[orellet]. The task of translating M. Smith was a work for this académicien, or our excellent Économistes.

This controversy in the columns of a well-known journal compelled Blavet to respond. In the issue of 5 November he published a letter giving his version of the facts. Blavet began by stating that Smith had been quite satisfied with the translation of Moral Sentiments (although according to Dugald Stewart this was not entirely correct), had sent him a copy of Wealth of Nations and asked him to act as translator; he also claimed once more that Morellet, among others, had sought to dissuade him from taking the task on: Mr. Smith, satisfied with the new translation I made of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, did me the honour of sending a copy of his work On the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and obligingly indicated to me that he wished that I would also act as translator. The abbé M[orellet] and others who move in the best circles with which I am little acquainted told me that the work would not be readily taken up in France, for it required too much effort and study; and so I restricted myself to the project of translating the work, not for the public, but for my own instruction.

He then maintained that he had consented to its publication to help Ameilhon and the Journal de l’agriculture, that the following editions were printed without his knowledge – a statement that does not entirely match the known facts – and added to the numerous faults of the original text. He then implied that Morellet had been avaricious – that the 1788 edition would have been printed from Morellet’s translation, except that the publisher and the author ‘could not come to an agreement on the price’. In conclusion, he announced a corrected translation – in fact it did not appear until twelve years later – which would also incorporate the revisions that Smith had made to the text through its various editions. 1 ‘Ce qu’une chose vaut pour vous qu’il avez acquise, la peine et l’embarras qu’elle vous épargne et qu’elle peut coûter à d’autres. (It is obvious that a verb has been forgotten here, and it should read c’est la peine.) Le travail a été le premier prix de la monnaie originaire qu’on a payé partout. (It cannot be understood how labour can be the first price of money. In the English it reads: Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things). C’est au travail et non pas à l’or et à l’argent que le monde est redevable de toutes les richesses, et sa valeur, pour celui qui en est l’auteur et qui a besoin d’en échanger le produit, est précisément égale à la quantité de travail qui le met en état d’acheter. (It is obvious that it should read qu’il le met en état d’acheter.)

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Ashamed … for my nation, which had nothing but an imperfect translation of a masterpiece of political economy, I obtained permission to provide a new edition of my own translation, revised, corrected and augmented with the considerable amount of material that Mr. Smith had added to the second edition of the original. … I therefore corrected a great number of errors … but I regarded my efforts merely to be a stopgap, for among those far more skilful than myself I did not have the good fortune to know of a single person prepared to take on the work himself; it would be better, and I would like it one hundred times more if the abbé M[orellet] gave us his version.1

But this letter to the Journal did not close the debate, which started up anew with the publication of Roucher’s translation. We might note in conclusion that Blavet returned to the issue once more in 1800, writing in his preface to the revised version of his translation. Here he did something he had not done in 1788: he quoted at length from two of Smith’s letters for which today an original no longer exists. The first, dating probably from 1772, is to Madame de Boufflers concerning the poor quality of Eidous’ translation of Moral Sentiments (discussed above); the other is from 23 July 1782 to Blavet himself and deals with his translations. Smith here thanks Blavet for his ‘excellent translation’ of Wealth of Nations: I am extremely satisfied with your translation of my first work; but I am all the more so with the manner in which you have rendered the second. I can tell you, without flattery, that everywhere that I have cast my eyes … I have found it in every respect equal to the original.2

From this same letter we know of the existence of another translation, that of the Comte de Nort. But Smith was supposedly so satisfied with Blavet’s translation that he had specifically discouraged Nort from publishing his own! ‘I wrote to him by the next post that I was very satisfied with your own, and that I am so much obliged to you, that I am not able to encourage or favour any other.’ We lack reliable and incontrovertible evidence for Smith’s reactions and opinions regarding these translations. It is certain, however, that he was always troubled about the translation of his work. In 1784 he was under the impression that Morellet had published his translation in Holland, and he immediately asked his publisher, Thomas Cadell in London, to obtain a copy for him.3 Cadell did not respond to this request, and Smith repeated the request on 10 August 1784.4 Having heard no more, he took the issue up once more on 18 November – ‘But you say nothing to me of the Abbé Morellet’s translation of my Book, which I am extremely desirous of seeing. I am sorry to 1 2 3 4

Blavet, Letter to the Journal de Paris 5 November 1788, in Carpenter, op. cit., pp. 78–9. Smith, Correspondence, p. 260. [Translated from the French, K. T.] Smith, 19 June 1784, Correspondence, pp. 276–7. Ibid., p. 278.

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give you so much trouble, but I beg you would endeavour to procure me a copy of it for Love or Money’1 – before realising in the spring of 1785 that he had been misinformed in the first place.2 The Wealth of Nations during the Revolution The Wealth of Nations was published in England at a time when in France, following the fall of Turgot, many reformers had lost faith in their ability to influence, in whatever way, the course of events: the reform of France’s political and economic system seemed to be continually put off to the morrow, the urgency of problems remained while a succession of Controllers General of finance pussy-footed around with them. In political economy, innovation and publication marked time, and priority was given to the political debate. This phase ended with the convocation of the Estates General for 1 May 1789, and the publication of Sieyès’ celebrated pamphlet Qu’est-ce-que le Tiers état? Several months later, when the Estates General transformed themselves into the Constituent Assembly, and with the Revolution, matters appeared in a different light. The radical change of political regime in France permitted in principle every citizen to participate in power and influence decision-making. In this context, each should seek to inform himself the better to perform this new role.3 The state of mind during this period is caught by a quotation taken from Rousseau’s Social Contract, and used as an epigraph to the Bibliothèque de l’homme public: ‘Whatever feeble influence my voice might have in public affairs, the right to vote is sufficient to impose upon me the duty to instruct myself.’ In the Introduction to the first volume of the Bibliothèque we find that among the knowledge to be acquired by the citizen the importance of economic matters is acknowledged: the study of political economy ‘is becoming in France the concern of all the best minds’ – something that the Physiocrats had dreamed of many years before. The writings of Smith, and especially his Wealth of Nations, assumed a topicality they had not previously had. And it all begins with a new translation. As the Estates General were convened the two published editions – the first anonymous, the second by Blavet – were republished, in 1789 and 1788 respectively. In 1790 a third, competing, translation appeared by Jean-Antoine Roucher. The new translation had some important advantages: it was well1

Ibid., p. 279. Letter of 21 April 1785, Correspondence, p. 281. 3 See for an account of the evolution of economic thinking during the French Revolution Gilbert Faccarello, ‘L’évolution de l’économie politique pendant la Révolution: Alexandre Vandermonde ou la croisée des chemins’, in Politische Ökonomie und Französische Revolution (Schriften aus dem Karl-Marx-Haus, Trier 1989), pp. 75–121, and Faccarello and Steiner (eds.), La pensée économique pendant la Révolution française (Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, Grenoble 1990). 2

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advertised, it was well presented, and it was given the imprimatur of Condorcet, who was to write a volume of notes to follow Smith’s text. Roucher was a renowned poet – his long philosophical poem Les mois was especially well-known – and close to the reformers. He had known Turgot, who had helped him financially by making him receiver of the salt-tax, and who had also introduced him to the salon of Madame Helvétius; but he was above all close to Charles Dupaty, a magistrate who continued Voltaire’s battles, a defender of the rights of man, and to whom the translation of Wealth of Nations was dedicated. Besides this Dupaty was Elder of the masonic lodge of the Nine Sisters, where many Parisian intellectuals met and of which Roucher was the secretary. It was through Dupaty that Roucher came into contact with Condorcet, and through whom in turn Condorcet met Sophie de Grouchy.1 Roucher and Condorcet followed similar paths of political evolution, at least up until the early years of the Revolution.2 From 1786–7 Roucher contemplated a new translation of Wealth of Nations, probably with the encouragement of reformers with whom he mixed, using as a base for the translation the most recent edition that he could: the fourth of 1786. The revolutionary events seems to have made up his mind for him. The first three volumes were published in 1790, the final volume appearing the following year. This edition was immediately pirated – editions appearing during 1791–2 in Avignon, and in Neuchâtel in 1792. The translation was corrected by Roucher and then republished in Paris in 1794, after his death.3 A few significant details shed some useful light on the history of this translation. First of all, as the reviews of this new translation were appearing, Morellet’s manuscript version became a talking point once more. On 24 August 1790 Le Moniteur marvelled at the sad fate that had befallen a work of supposed quality: ‘A man of letters, whose talent and knowledge made him the one person capable of producing a suitable work, M. the abbé Morellet, took on the task, but – almost unbelievably – he could find no publisher prepared to take the work up. Today there would be no risk in such an undertaking.’4 It also has to be said that substantial extracts from Roucher’s translation also appeared in 1790 in the Bibliothèque de l’homme public. This review, which had 1

Sophie de Grouchy married Condorcet in 1786; Dupaty was her uncle. They for example both became members of the Society of 1789, founded in 1790. Later, in 1791–92, the paths diverged: Condorcet became more radical, while Roucher became more conservative. See on Roucher, A. Guillois, Pendant la Terreur. Le poète Roucher (1745– 1794) (Calmann-Lévy, Paris 1890); and M. Bréguet, ‘Le poète Roucher et les Condorcet: rencontre et réseau d’amitié’, Lekton, Vol. III, No. 1 (1993), pp. 243–57; ‘Un ‘météore éclatant’: le poète Roucher’, in J.-P. de Lagrave (ed.), Madame Helvétius et la Société d’Auteuil (The Voltaire Foundation, Oxford 1999), pp. 87–101. Both Roucher and Condorcet fell victim to the Terror, dying in 1794. Roucher was executed two days before the 9th Thermidor. 3 There is also an 1806 edition, which is a reissue ‘with a new title page, of the sheets of 1794’ – Carpenter, op. cit., p. 219. 4 The passage is echoed in the Journal encyclopédique of the month of November. 2

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begun publication at the beginning of that year from the same publisher as Roucher’s new translation, Buisson, was co-edited by Condorcet. His aim, at a time that every citizen might be introduced into public decisions and encouraged to assume his responsibilities, was to contribute to public instruction by publishing analyses of well-known works, both ancient and modern. These ‘analyses’ were presentations of classic and modern texts followed with extracts linked by commentary. Wealth of Nations was presented in this way in numbers 31 and 42 of 1790. The first extracts printed were taken from Roucher’s translation, later extracts coming from Blavet’s version, as Ken Carpenter notes.3 The volume of notes that Condorcet was meant to place after Roucher’s translation never appeared, nor was any manuscript copy of such notes ever found, and the republished edition of 1794 dropped all mention of them. It would have been extremely interesting to have a detailed account from the pen of someone who had known the main protagonists of the later eighteenth century and who had himself participated in the debates. The volume was anticipated at the time: ‘The assent or opposition of two writers whose thought is marked by such profundity are equally instructive for the public’ wrote the Mercure de France on 31 July 1790.4 The friend of Turgot, d’Alembert’s worthy equal, one of our greatest political writers, was perhaps the one person who could successfully clarify or rebut the author of the Wealth of Nations.5

Condorcet’s commentaries were repeatedly advertised in the press. Taking Le Moniteur as an example of a widely-circulated journal, it announced on 24 August 1790 the publication of the first two volumes of the Roucher translation and talked in flattering terms of the volume of notes to come – which it did again on 25 October on the occasion of the publication of the third volume. In the number of 26 May 1791 it announced the appearance of the fourth volume, adding: One can only await the fifth volume with impatience, where we are informed that notes are to appear by a writer who is a statesman, worthy commentator to a text which he could have written himself.6 1

pp. 108–216; summary of and extracts from Books I, II, and III. pp. 3–115: summary of and extracts from Books IV and V. 3 This substitution was made in all likelihood because Roucher’s translation was not quite finished at the time. In a letter of July 1790 the poet’s daughter, Eulalie Roucher, noted that her father was busy once again with the translation – Guillois, Pendant la Terreur, p. 140. 4 Carpenter, op. cit., p. 95. 5 Chronique de Paris, 9 April 1790, p. 393 (cited in Carpenter, ibid., p. 94). This periodical took up the question again the following year, on 9 May 1791: ‘To name the author of these notes is to inspire among wise men and good citizens fervent hope of seeing them published. It is known that philosophy, healthy reason and consequently the Revolution are obliged to M. Condorcet, who has spent his life fighting error, and preaching the truth.’ P. 513 (Carpenter, ibid., p. 113). 6 Le Moniteur, vol. 8, p. 490. References here to the Gazette Nationale, ou Le Moniteur Universel (May 1789–November 1799) are to the edition later published by Plon, Paris 1847. 2

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Everything points however to the fact that Condorcet lacked the time to write the notes, busy as he was politically; and that his name was, at least in part, used as a means of lending publicity to the launch of the new translation at a time that the market was already burdened with the revised Blavet edition: ‘This advertisement only served to support to the work.’1 Jérôme de Lalande, in the biographical notice that he published shortly afterwards, also reveals that Condorcet ‘spent little time’ on the notes for Smith, and sanctioned the use by others of his name for commercial ends: ‘It was thought that his name would lend more prestige to the enterprise.’2 A final point must be raised: the quality of Roucher’s translation. Did he escape the criticism directed at those of his predecessors? The answer is yes, if the contemporary press is to be believed. Reviews praised the accuracy and style of the poet, and disparaged previous versions – or rather, ‘the’ previous version3 since the first anonymous translation was ignored. Having been published in The Hague, it does not seem to have been widely distributed in France, and the printing of the new 1789 edition, without naming the author and under a curiously revised title, was covert.4 On 30 March 1790, Le Spectateur national declared: We already had a translation of Smith, but it was inexact, obscure and incorrect. This one has the two prime merits of a work of this kind: precision and clarity.5

The Chronique de Paris noted on 9 April 1790 that the previous translation is ‘illformed, full of anglicisms and errors’ while that of Roucher ‘leaves nothing to be desired in respect of style’. The Journal de Paris of 4 June concurred, as did Le Moniteur of 24 August. Nonetheless, we should consider whether, here as elsewhere, reviewers had really thought about the question seriously, or whether they simply echoed widespread, or orchestrated, opinion – for a lengthy unsigned article that appeared in the Journal encyclopédique for November 1790 complained exactly of this: 1 M. B. Desrenaudes, Review of Germain Garnier’s translation of the Wealth of Nations, La Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique, 30 fructidor an X (17 September 1802); in Carpenter, op. cit., p. 213. 2 Jérôme de Lalande, ‘Notice historique sur la vie et les ouvrages de Condorcet’, Mercure français, 20 January 1796, p. 155. On these points, see G. Faccarello, ‘Troisième partie: Économie. Introduction’, in Pierre Crépel and Christian Gilain (eds), Condorcet: mathématicien, économiste, philosophe, homme politique (Minerve, Paris 1989), pp. 121–49. 3 That of Blavet; in his preface to the revised translation of 1800–01, he stated, inexactly, that: ‘I am the author of the first to appear’ (Blavet 1800, p. ix). This error is repeated in a review appearing in La Décade philosophique, 31 December 1801. 4 ‘Whereas the La Haye edition of 1778–1779 identified Smith as the author, this reissue of those sheets did not. Instead, the new title, Recherches très-utiles sur les affaires présentes, et les causes de la richesse des nations, emphasises that this work is very useful in the present circumstances; and the omission of Smith’s name might have enhanced the emphasis on current relevance by giving the impression that the author was French.’ Carpenter, op. cit., p. 79. 5 Carpenter, ibid., p. 93.

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It seems to us that the original text has never been so completely disfigured. Errors, numerous mistranslations … awkward sentences and a whole crowd of obscure expressions in a highly-structured work possessing a language of its own, all these faults place … this translation is of a standard well below that of the first.1

This author cited many examples from Book I, Chapters VIII and XI, and showed quite easily that his claims were well-founded. The criticism is clearly quite blunt, even raising an accusation of plagiarism at one point: ‘the new translator only makes himself understood where he borrows expressions employed by his predecessor.’ The Journal, while publishing the article, partially disassociated itself from its reviewer’s opinions.2 This attack prompted Roucher, during his imprisonment, to attempt a revision of his translation, resulting in a partially corrected new edition in 1794. But Desrenaudes still talked in 1802 of ‘his very faulty translation’,3 and in his Mémoires Morellet placed Roucher on the same level as Blavet.4 Blavet also intervened in the dispute. Writing in the preface to his revised 1800–1 edition, he made a scathing attack on Roucher, suggesting that he was claiming to translate the work of an author whose language was unfamiliar to him. Roucher was supposed to have plagiarised Blavet – ‘It is no more than a travesty of my own translation, which he had constantly in front of him,’5 although, Blavet went on, Roucher’s efforts at placing his own stamp on the work made the text incomprehensible in places. Blavet’s accusations were echoed in the press – in Le Publiciste of 15 December 1800, and then later in La Décade philosophique of 31 December 1801 – and this impelled the publisher Buisson to react in honour of Roucher’s memory (in the issue of Le Publiciste for 21 December 1800). The affair stopped there. A few months later the publication of Germain Garnier’s new translation6 1

Carpenter, ibid., p. 101. ‘If anyone has cause to complain about this article, sent to us from Paris, such complaints should be addressed to us and we will publish them as soon as is possible. We have neither the original, nor any translation of the work of Smith’. (See Carpenter, ibid., p. 105) 3 Desrenaudes, Review, p. 213. 4 Morellet, Mémoires, p. 207. 5 J.-L. Blavet, ‘Préface du traducteur’, in A. Smith’s Richesse des nations (Laran, Paris 1800), Vol. 1, p. xiii, and in Carpenter, op. cit., pp. 153–9. 6 Garnier had at least one point in common with Roucher: the latter had, in the translator’s preface to his 1790 edition written provocatively: ‘…there has long been a demand for a French translation of Mr. Smith’s work’ – an assertion for which he was criticised. Some years later, Garnier took up this judgement in turn, discounting entirely preceding translations. In his preface to Abrégé élémentaire des principes de l’économie politique (1796) he stated that the Wealth of Nations was ‘a work which we still lack in our language’ (p. v). A lawyer, Garnier was made reserve deputy for Paris in the Estates General, but never sat. He was close to the monarchists. After the fall of the monarchy in 1792 he was forced to take refuge in Switzerland and it was during this period of exile that he began translating Wealth of Nations. ‘I wrote this preface and the subsequent translation in 1794. Proscribed and a fugitive of the times, I sought to console myself regarding the misfortunes of my country’ – ‘Préface du traducteur’, 2

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quickly eclipsed all predecessors, as we shall shortly see.1 3. The Theoretical Horizon How was Wealth of Nations perceived in France at the end of the eighteenth century? Some idea can be gained by considering in turn the reaction of authors who wrote in periodicals or more specialist works; and that of journalists, literary figures and politicians who followed debates at some distance without becoming really involved, and whose opinions can be found in the more everyday press titles. The latter will be dealt with first. General Opinion In the periodical literature of the time many articles appeared that were immediately very favourable to Wealth of Nations, but it is striking that such authors were, in one way or another, involved in the business of translation –