BrewerDP. Pdf

 

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whole story and that the historian always has to use judgement (that is, in Stewart’s terms, 

conjecture) to construct a comprehensib le narrative.  

It may be useful to distinguish two different forms of ‘theoretical or conjectural’ history, or at 

least two ends of a scale of possibilities. First, there is what  one might regard as wholly 

‘conjectural’ history, in which evidence of what happened is almost completely  lacking, but 

in which Smith provided a ‘likely story’ to account for the (known) end result. Thus, Smith 

started his discussion of the origins of language by telling a story about ‘two savages who had 

never been taught to speak’ (Languages 1). This is pure conjecture, constrained only by the 

requirement that the story must be consistent with Smith’s general view of human nature and 

must end up with the construction of a language with the known features of human 

languages. How far the four stages theory fits this pattern remains to be established. A second 

pattern appears in  the discussion of relatively well-documented periods, where the facts are 

not in real doubt but where Smith  used more general theories to provide causal explanations, 

which the facts alone can never do. This might be more reasonably be called ‘theoretical’ 

history or (following Skinner 1975 154) ‘philosophical’ history. The key difference is the 

extent to which the story is constrained by historical evidence. 

In all cases, Smith’s explanations are based on an assumption that ‘certain basic structures of 

human motivation’ are constant (Fleischacker 2004 64). Fleischacker rightly describes this as 

a methodological choice, necessary to the construction of causal explanations. Smith himself 

stated the methodological principle that ‘in the manner of Sir Isaac Newton we may lay down 

certain principles known or proved in the beginning, from whence we account for the severall 

Phenomena, connecting all together by the same Chain’ (LRBL ii.133). Skinner (1975) 

argued (with special reference to the development of commerce in Europe, but his argument 

has wider application) that Smith saw change as the result of self- interested actions,  where 

the individual’s motivation was often political rather than narrowly economic, and the overall 

results of individual actions were not  necessarily  intended by any of them (see also Raphael 

and Skinner 1980 3). 

A complication arises because Smith sometimes described an idealised or simplified process 

of change, before allowing for the existence of distortions which alter the pattern.  For 

example,  the Wealth of Nations account of the ‘natural progress of opulence’  is followed by 

chapters explaining why Europe had not in fact followed that route (WN II.i–iii). In that case 

the argument is very fully spelled out  with no real possibility of confusion, but Smith left no 

full and considered account of the four stages theory as a whole, so it is harder to tell exactly 

how the theory should be applied. 

In both of the years for which there are lecture reports, Smith introduced the four stages with 

a little story. In the report dated 1766 it goes like this: 

The four stages of society are hunting, pasturage, farming, and commerce. If a number of 

persons were shipwrecked on a desart island their first sustenance would be from the fruits 

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which the soil naturaly produced, and the wild beasts which they could kill. As these could 

not at all times be sufficient, they come at last to tame some of the wild-beasts 

…

. In 

process of time even these would not be sufficient, and as they saw the earth naturally 

produce considerable quantities of vegetables of it's own accord they would think of 

cultivating it so that it might produce more of them. Hence agriculture. 

…

 The age of 

commerce naturaly succeeds that of agriculture. As men could now confine themselves to 

one species of labour, they would naturaly exchange the surplus of their own commodity 

for that of another of which they stood in need. (LJ(B) 149) 

The earlier year’s report has essentially the same story, at somewhat greater length (LJ(A) 

i.27–32).  

This is explicitly hypothetical, and if treated (as it is surely intended to be) as an outline of 

the actual developme nt of society it is  evidently pure conjecture  and  can hardly be taken 

seriously as it stands. Remember, though, that it was by way of introduction, and was 

directed to a lecture class of young students. The question remains: to what extent did Smith 

succeed in supporting this sort of speculation with historical evidence? 

Historical evidence 

Smith could only rely on the evidence known to him to justify his view of history. Since we 

cannot easily forget what we now know, it is worth briefly reviewing the evidence available 

in the mid-eighteenth century and noting some of the major differences between the evidence 

available then and now.  

The first thing to note is that archaeology in the modern sense hardly existed and certainly 

provided Smith with no useful evidence at all. He was therefore confined to written evidence. 

As Stewart noted, many important developments happened ‘long before that stage of society 

when men begin to think of recording their transactions ’ (1980  292),  so there could be  no 

written evidence of that time. Indeed,  early  written evidence  which we have now,  from 

Mesopotamia and Egypt for example, was not available  to Smith  because the scripts and 

languages  used had not been decoded and archives of  baked clay tablets and the like had not 

yet been unearthed. 

From the (very few) explicit references provided by Smith, the implicit references noted by 

his editors, and the contents of his library (Mizuta 2000), it is clear that Smith’s knowledge of 

the pre-medieval world was almost entirely based on classical authors, and therefore focused 

on Greece and the Roman  empire.  His own ‘History of Historians’ in the  Lectures on 

Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (LRBL ii.44–73) deals almost entirely with classical writers –  it 

seems that he preferred Livy to all other historians (LRBL Appendix 1, 229).  Almost the 

earliest identifiable source that he used, and probably about the earliest available to him, was 

Homer  (with the possible exception of the  Old Testament  of the  Bible, which deserves 

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