5
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
6
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