Adam Smith’s stages of history
Anthony Brewer
1
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine Smith’s four stages theory of history as an account of
economic and social development, with an emphasis on the arguments and evidence he used
to support it. In his biographical account of Smith’s life, his friend Dugald Stewart described
Smith’s method as ‘conjectural history’, initiating a debate which has continued ever since.
Stewart meant that Smith used (informed) conjecture to fill the unavoidable gaps in the
historical evidence, though hostile commentators have interpreted it as saying that Smith
simply ignored the facts. This paper sets Smith’s account alongside the evidence available to
him to try to establish how much of it is pure speculation, unconstrained by historical
evidence, and how much is rather a matter of interpreting evidence which can never be
complete, as any historian is bound to do. It emerges that Smith did not (usually) neglect or
ride roughshod over the evidence as it was available to him, but rather that evidence about
some aspects and periods of history simply did not then exist, leaving much in his account
that is indeed pure conjecture. The focus of the paper is on Smith, not on contemporaries or
predecessors who argued a similar case. It deals with the substance of Smith’s case, not with
priority.
JEL: B12
Keywords: Adam Smith, history, four stages, conjectural history
1
Dept of Economics, University of Bristol, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN, UK. A.Brewer@bristol.ac.uk.
2
Introduction
According to Adam Smith, history is divided into four stages: ‘1st, the Age of Hunters; 2dly,
the Age of Shepherds; 3dly, the Age of Agriculture; and 4thly, the Age of Commerce’ (LJ(A)
i.27).
2
This theory, shared with other Scottish and French writers of the mid-to- late eighteenth
century,
is familiar enough, but there has been relatively little detailed discussion of Smith’s
use of the four stages theory and of the arguments he used to justify it.
Discussion of Smith’s treatment of history has often focused on the issue of economic
determinism. Pascal (1938) and Meek (1971, 1976) saw the four stages as a form of
economic determinism ancestral to Marx’s theory of history. This has provoked a continuing
discussion which has focused mainly on the emergence of commercial societies (or, in
Marxist terms, the transition from feudalism to capitalism) in western Europe. Recent
contributions to this debate have mainly rejected the charge that Smith was an economic
determinist (e.g. Haakonssen 1981 181–9, Winch 1983, Salter 1992). Andrew Skinner (1975,
1982) is sometimes included with Pascal and Meek among those interpreting Smith as an
economic determinist (e.g. Salter 1992), but this seems to me to be unfair. Skinner’s 1975
paper in particular gives a balanced reading and is still perhaps the best overall treatment of
the subject. Alvey’s important contribution (2003a, b) presents a wider view, but with the
focus still mainly on the rise of commercial society. The debate over economic determinism
in Smith has raised important issues. One aim of this paper is to widen the focus beyond
medieval and post- medieval Europe.
A second relevant literature deals with the ancestry and development of the four stages theory
in writings of the eighteenth century and before. Smith was, of course, not the only or the first
to propose a four stage theory. Meek (1976) speculated that although Smith was not first to
publish, he may well have used the four stages in his lectures sometime around 1750, giving
him priority in the statement of the fully developed form of the theory. More recently,
however, discussion has moved away from this kind of claim to priority. For example,
Pocock’s massive early- modern historiography, Barbarism and Religion (1999, see also
2006), does not emphasize the four stages theory as such but stresses the development of
what Pocock calls the ‘enlightened narrative’, which aimed to account for the emergence of
the system of independent secular states in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
The purpose of this paper is to examine Smith’s four stages theory of history as an account of
economic and social development, with an emphasis on the arguments and evidence he used
to support it. The focus of the paper, therefore, is on Smith. It is important to stress that by
discussing Smith’s theory in isolation from his predecessors I make no claim of originality
for Smith, nor do I deny any such claim. The origins of the theory are simply not on the
2
Re ferences to Smith’s works are in the standard Glasgow format.