Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
In the jurisprudence lectures that he delivered at Glasgow in the 1760s, Adam Smith set forth a theory of history that presents a puzzle to later interpreters of his thought. The theory's deep pessimism about the typical fate of human societies confounds much of what is commonly believed about Smith. Yet it is only by making sense of this puzzle, I will argue in what follows, that we can fully grasp the intellectual foundations of Smith's thought. 1
Like many of his contemporaries, Smith was an adherent of the "four stages" theory of historical development, in which changes in the prevalent mode of subsistence (from hunting to pastoral to agricultural to commercial societies) correspond to changes in sociopolitical organization. 2 In the Lectures on Jurisprudence, however, Smith suggests that this progression will naturally tend toward the establishment of ever more repressive slave societies. While the hunter-gatherer stage is marked by relative equality and the lack of legal structures, property and inequality arise for the first time in the shepherd stage, bringing with them widespread dependence of poor upon rich. The weakness of central rulers forces them to entrust judicial power to local masters, making slavery "universall in the beginnings of society" ( LJ(A)iii.117). Smith thus attributes the original institution of slavery to the legal strengthening of preexisting relations of dependence, which will prove important because he treats the persistence of slavery as closely linked to the existence of de facto dependence.
While Smith's claim that slavery becomes "universal" in the shepherd stage is striking, what gives his theory of history its distinctively pessimistic slant is his further suggestion that subsequent political and economic development will only perpetuate and even exacerbate it. Slavery will naturally persist in monarchies, and become still harsher in republics ( LJ(A) iii.102-3, 114-15); it will persist in "poor and barbarous" societies, and become even worse in "rich and polished" ones (LJ(A) iii.105). The growth of political liberty and economic opulence for the masters only worsens the plight of the slaves, forcing Smith to call into question the value of historical progress itself:
Opulence and freedom, the two greatest blessings men can possess, tend greatly to the misery of this...