17
here: Greece is divided into relatively small cultivable territories separated by sea and
mountains, so each such area became the territory of a city-state.
Starting from a Tartar-style government, each city was initially ruled by a single king, but the
territories were too small for the king's wealth to outclass that of other prominent inhabitants,
leading to republican governments, either dominated by a few aristocrats or democracies with
offices open to all citizens. The development of luxury helped to promote democracy as the
wealth of the rich was diverted to private pleasures. The institution of slavery also promoted
'democracy', meaning a system open to all free, male, citizens (LJ(A) 63–73).
A developing city state faces a choice. It can either seek to keep the benefits of citizenship for
the existing citizens within its limited boundaries, a 'defensive' republic, as in classical
Greece, or it can seek to expand its territories, as Rome did, a 'conquering republic'. In either
case, the republic is doomed, because 'when the arts arrive at a certain degree of
improvement, the number of the people encreases, yet that of fighting men becomes less'
(LJ(B) 37). 'All defensive states at length fall a sacrifice to their neighbours' through military
weakness’ (LJ(A) iv.92), especially when improvements in seigecraft made it harder for them
to hold out behind their city walls. A conquering republic may defeat external enemies, as
Rome did for many centuries, but only by developing a standing army. With the development
of arts and luxury, the natural consequence of a developing division of labour, 'the rich and
the better sort of people will no longer ingage in the service. The lower ranks make up the
armies' (LJ(A) iv.88). The army commander becomes irresistibly powerful, as first Julius
Caesar and then Augustus did, and the republic becomes a 'military monarchy'.
The Roman military monarchy was, in one crucial respect, different from those of Asia. The
Roman monarchy was imposed from within, not by external conquest, and the emperors
recognized that it was in their interest to retain and improve the framework of civil law
inherited from the republic. The emperor’s rule was dictatorial, but the civil law was well
constructed and predictable, allowing continued economic development. But eventually the
(western) empire fell victim to the divorce between the citizen body and the army.
In this manner the great security, and opulence, and progress of arts and commerce which
takes place in a military government of some standing makes it both difficult and
prejudicial to the state for the people to go to war themselves. They begin therefore first to
recruit amongst the barbarians, and afterwards to make a bargain with the chiefs. (LJ(A)
iv.103)
As the defence of the western empire came progressively into the hands of Germanic tribes,
the authority of the centre faded. When the defence finally failed, the gains of the Roman
system – the extensive trade and division of labour – were lost.
18
Medieval and modern Europe
Smith described the new rulers of most of western Europe in terms very similar to those he
used about the Homeric Greeks. ‘The northern nations which broke into Europe in [the]
beginning of the 5 century were arrived at the state of shepherds, and had even some little
agriculture’ (LJ(A) ii.97). The societies they formed in Western Europe, however, followed a
trajectory radically different from the city states formed in Greece in the earlier period.
The story of development in Europe after the fall of the western Roman empire will be
familiar to any reader of the Wealth of Nations. The Lectures, more than a decade before the
Wealth of Nations, tell a very similar story, though the later work places a more systematic
stress on the role of capital accumulation. Smith emphasized two main features of the
societies that emerged in the early Middle Ages. The commerce of the towns was destroyed
by the violence and insecurity which persisted for centuries and the ‘chiefs and principal
leaders’ of the invaders seized huge tracts of land (WN III.ii.1; see also LJ(A) i.116, iv.115,
LJ(B) 50–1). These, of course, point to two of the recurrent themes of Smith’s lectures: the
‘improvement of the arts’ (or, here, its absence) and the pattern of inequality.
As Smith described it, early medieval society was in an almost static equilibrium, in which
the territorial magnates, with no urban luxuries to spend on, maintained large retinues of
dependents to maintain their power and defend their estates. They had little incentive to
improve productivity because it was more important to defend or expand their holdings. The
servile status of the cultivators and of those few townsmen who remained left them with little
incentive to produce more than a minimum, since they had no security. Primogeniture and
entails were introduced to keep the huge estates together, since dividing the estate would
leave it open to attack.
Things changed, very slowly, as the king, who had even larger resources than the leading
barons, succeeded in establishing some stability. Feudalism, in the formal sense, represented
a step towards royal control, as the barons were forced to accept that they held their land from
the king in return for military service. Critically, monarchies encouraged relatively
independent urban development as a counterweight to the land-owning nobility, allowing a
slow development of manufacturing and trade, and an increasing availability of luxury
consumption goods. The improvement of the arts finally tipped the balance, as feudal lords
sacrificed their military power and switched their spending from maintaining dependents to
luxury consumption. The landlords now had reasons to maximize rent income, and
introduced contracts which gave tenants greater security of tenure and incentives to increase
output. A relatively independent middle class of merchants, farmers and master craftsmen
started to emerge.
A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness was in this manner brought
about by two different orders of people who had not the least intention to serve the public.
To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The
19
merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own
interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny
was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution
which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.
(WN III.iv.17)
A key difference between ancient Mediterranean society and post- medieval western Europe
was the absence of slavery in the latter (though not, of course, in European colonies). Smith
thought slavery was the norm in human societies, so its abolition in some places required
explanation.
Slavery
…
has been universall in the beginnings of society, and the love of dominion and
authority over others will probably make it perpetuall. The circumstances which have
made slavery be abolished in the corner of Europe in which it now is are peculiar to it, and
which happening to concurr at the same time have brought about that change. (LJ(A)
iii.117)
Slavery had been abolished in western Europe, but not in ‘Moscovy and all the eastern parts
of Europe, and the whole of Asia, that is, from Bohemia to the Indian Ocean, all over Africa,
and the greatest part of America’ (LJ(A) iii.101).
Smith listed a number of factors to account for the special case of Europe. In the centuries
following the Germanic invasions urban manufacturing and trade almost ceased. ‘Our
ancestors were then a rough, manly people who had no sort of domestic luxury or
effeminacy; their whole slaves were then employed in the cultivation of the land’ (LJ(A)
iii.121), so slavery consisted of villainage,
16
in which cultivators were tied to the soil and
subject to the judgements of the lord’s court. The king had a motive for seeking to end this
form of slavery in order to weaken the hold of the landowning nobility and to widen the sway
of royal courts. It was even in the landlords’ interest to emancipate the villains, once their
tastes had swung over to luxury consumption, since free cultivators would be more
productive. In addition, the church and clergy found that they had a greater ‘authority over
the lower and more laborious part of mankind than over the rich and the powerfull’ (LJ(A)
iii.118), so sided with the villains. Villainage ended, Smith argued, where both monarchy and
church were powerful (LJ(A) iii.121–2; LJ(B) 142 has a rather weaker claim). The ending of
servitude in (parts of) Europe was important, of course, in itself, and also important (with
other conditions, such as an appropriate legal system) in creating a setting in which
individuals have incentives to produce as efficiently as possible. Slavery, for example, acts a
barrier to invention (LJ(B) 299–300).
16
Now usually spelled villeinage, that is, serfdom.
20
Asia
Smith’s lectures focused on Europe – reasonably so, since they were lectures on
jurisprudence for an audience of young Scots. The great civilizations of Asia were only
mentioned in passing. There is almost nothing about the early history of south or east Asia,
while only the Tartars featured significantly from western and central Asia. He saw the
Asiatic societies of his own time mainly in terms of the effects of conquest by Tartars or
Arabs. ‘The Tartars, a savage nation, have overrun all Asia severall times and Persia above
12 times’ (LJ(A) iii.41).
Asiatic governments
…
are purely military. Turky, Persia, and the other countries were
conquered by Tartars, Arabians, and other barbarous nations, who had no regular system
of laws and were entirely ignorant of their good effects.
…
A Turkish bashaw or other
inferior officer is decisive judge of every thing, and is as absolute in his own jurisdiction
as the signior. Life and fortune are altogether precarious, when they thus depend on the
caprice of the lowest magistrate. A more miserable and oppressive government cannot be
imagined. (LJ(B) 46)
Smith saw China, for example, as rich and well developed but also as stagnant, due to
arbitrary government and lack of security, as well as trade barriers.
Parts of Europe had also been overrun but had recovered their independence. ‘Germany is
every 10 or 12 year almost totally possessed by the troops of foreign states, but no city ever
remains with the conquerors. Hungary has been often conquered by the Turks, but was never
long in their possession’ (LJ(A) iii.45–6). Smith explained the difference between Europe and
Asia by pointing to the existence in Europe of a hereditary territorial aristocracy who lead
attempts to restore the status quo ante, and by arguing that Asia lacks a corresponding class
because of the prevalence of polygamy, itself introduced by Tartar conquerors, which
undermines the hereditary principle. Again, Europe appears as a special case.
Conclusion
The four stages theory served Smith in two different ways. First, it had a static, or
comparative, function in accounting for the form of law and government in different
societies. Thus, hunters live in small groups with little need for a concept of property,
pastoral peoples need a concept of property in herds of animals but not necessarily in land,
and so on. In a lecture course on jurisprudence, that is, on the forms of law and government,
this clearly bulks large, but it is not, as it stands, a theory of history. It becomes a theory of
history when the stages are placed in order, with a claim that each stage, given suitable
conditions, evolves into or is replaced by the next. The evidence available to Smith provided
some basis for the first, comparative, use of the idea of four different types of society, but not
for the second use, as a theory of history, except for the final stage, the evolution of a simple
21
agricultural society towards the commercial stage. The evolution from hunting via
pastoralism to agriculture was wholly conjectural. Smith gave no substantive account of the
transitions between stages before the transition from agriculture to commerce, making it
perhaps doubtful whether the four stages theory deserves to be called a theory of history at
all.
A very simple, mechanical, version of the theory would have the institutions and
development of a society determined wholly by the stage it has reached, so all (say) pastoral
societies would be the same. Smith’s use of the theory is clearly more flexible than this, as it
had to be given the very different evolution of ancient Mediterranean societies and of post-
Roman Europe. Indeed, he seems to have seen the success of Europe not as inevitable but as
a remarkably lucky special case.
If the four stages alone do not determine the evolution of society, that does not mean that
anything goes. Smith’s discussion of history is (implicitly) deterministic, in the sense that he
aimed not simply to describe but to explain the economic, legal and governmental
development of society, that is, to identify the causes which led one path to be followed
rather than another. He clearly recognized that adventitious events, such as the fact that
Queen Elizabeth 1st of England was childless (LJ(A) iv.171), could matter, but wherever
possible he seems to have preferred general to particular explanations. Roughly speaking, one
might say that Elizabeth’s decision to run down the assets of the monarchy, thus undermining
her successors’ position, shunted the development of government in England onto a different
track, but it was still a track governed by more fundamental considerations.
General causal factors operating at the level of whole societies can only take effect through
the actions of individuals. Smith’s view of individual motivation, as set out in the Theory of
Moral Sentiments, was complex, and cannot be discussed here. In his discussions of history
the motivation of the relevant actors is essentially self- interested, though, as Skinner has
pointed out, it was a self interest which was often ‘political rather than simply economic’
(1975 168). It is not, in fact, clear that any simple distinction between economic and political
motivation can be drawn. Thus, for example, if early medieval magnates sought to keep the
family estate together for purposes of defence, it was their source of income (as well as
power) that they were defending. It makes little sense to debate whether to call their
motivation economic or political.
Haakonssen (1981) and Winch (1983) in their criticism of ‘materialist’ readings of Smith
rightly insist on the importance of non-economic factors, but they seem to want more. As I
read them, what they really want is to reject determinism altogether in order to make room
for a ‘science of the legislator’, who can design institutions and policy to improve social
welfare. There is no doubt that the Wealth of Nations, to take the most obvious example, is in
part a work of advocacy, making a case against the ‘mercantile’ system and in favour of
‘natural liberty’, so Smith must have thought that advocacy can make a difference, despite the
deterministic character of his treatment of history. The issue here is surely methodological.
22
The past cannot be changed, so the study of history can only explain what actually happened.
The future is not tied down in the same way, though the scope for choice may be constrained
by factors revealed by the study of history.
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