deliberate system in the academic mind, or the instinctive presumptions back of the catch-ascatch-can practice of the man on the street, is a reckoning with these primary facts in the human lot. Considered as activity alone, without introducing valuations of any sort, human life is at last the evolution of types of interest, and types of individuals, and types of interrelation between individuals. Each term in this analysis is an indefinitely inconstant variant of each of the other terms. That is, interests and individuals and associations are reciprocating terms in a widening and ascending series of causes and effects. The evolution of interests and individuals and associations is thus a more or less coherent process; and it is unsafe to assume that we have found the meaning of any greater or lesser part of the process until we have made out the whole story of its connections with all the rest of the process. Every moral philosophy is presumptively a science of this whole process of moral evolution. Sociology, in its largest scope, and on its methodological side, is merely a moral philosophy conscious of its task, and systematically pursuing knowledge of cause and effect within this process of moral evolution. The inevitable a priori with which every attempt at knowledge must begin is, in this case, a judgment of the question: On the whole, is it better to have faith in this process of moral evolution and to enlist in it for all we are worth, or to distrust it and desert it or resist it? Assuming that our moral philosophy or sociology has chosen the former alternative, then our task of interpretation is to explain every human motion or collection of motions by all that we can find out of its functional meaning within the whole cosmos of movements which make up the process of moral evolution. Valuations enter into this supreme attempt to understand, as into all the lesser attempts to understand, from the beginnings of infant reflection. The form of the valuation always is: What is the worth of the part of the process in question, as related to all the rest of the process which can be brought into calculation? Applying these generalities to the case in hand, the question which the sociologist is always implicitly asking of the economist is: To what extent are you making your analyses and passing your valuations of economic activities as though they were bounded by the wealth interest alone, and to what extent do your analyses and valuations take account of the whole process of moral evolution within which the wealth interest is an incident? Economic theory, in England and America, throughout the nineteenth century, made the wealth interest unduly prominent in the process of moral evolution, and thereby introduced confusion into the whole scale of moral valuation. The present essay makes a beginning of showing this in detail. The principal methodological thesis which the exhibit is to support is that a sufficient interpretation of life to be a reliable basis for social programs must express economic relations at last in terms of the whole moral process. This is true of political economy in so far as it purports to be more than a technology of things. To the degree in which political economy proposes to establish norms for evaluating the activities of persons, it must answer to the whole moral process in which all the activities of persons derive their meaning. II THE SOURCES Having thus sketched the argument of this book, I proceed to develop it somewhat in detail. As a further preliminary, I take the precaution to state specifically that I am not trying to do over again either of various things that have already been done by students of Adam Smith. This disclaimer may be expanded in the form of a brief account of the sources of our knowledge of Adam Smith. I. THIS BOOK IS NOT A BIOGRAPHY Of Adam SMITH. Until 1895 the chief source of information, accessible to the general reader, about Adam Smith, outside of his published works, was the brief and rather dilettantish account written by Dugald Stewart. This paper was read by Stewart before the Royal Society of Edinburgh on two evenings of 1793. It was published under the title, Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, with additional notes, in 1810. It is now to be found in Hamilton's edition of the Complete Works of Dugald Stewart, Vol. X; also in the same volume of the "Bohn Library" which contains Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. In 1895 Mr. John Rae published a biography which appeared to have exhausted the visible supply of information about Adam Smith the man.1 3 If the additions of fact were not extensive, there were certainly corrections of interpretation, partly by the help of Cannan's "find" 2 in the briefer biography by Hirst which appeared nine years later. If we may characterize the attitude of Hirst, it is that of a confessed admirer of Smith, with a desire to represent him sympathetically and fairly, not merely as the author of two or three books, nor as a philosopher, but as a man among men. The two closing pages draw a vivid and rather effective pen-picture. The argument of the book is compressed into the final paragraph: Of his contemporaries, the nearest perhaps in spirit are Turgot and the younger Burke, the Burke of the American Revolution, and of Free Trade and of Economical Reform. But Burke and even Turgot were in a certain sense men of the past. Though their radiance can never fade, their influence wanes. But Smith has issued from the seclusion of a professorship of morals, from the 1 John Rae, Life of Adam Smith (London, 449 pages). 3 Francis W. Hirst, Adam Smith (London, 1904; 240 pages). |