The Wealth of Nations: A Classic of English Literature

The Wealth of Nations is a true classic of English literature. It is just not one that has ever been widely loved or popularly read.

When The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, Thomas Strahan, its publisher, said “the sale … has been more than I could have expected from a work that requires much thought and reflection (qualities that do not abound among modern readers).” David Hume wrote to Adam Smith that while he doubted it would be popular (it “requiring so much attention,” and the public “being disposed to give so little”), nonetheless “it has depth and solidity and acuteness, and is so much illustrated by curious facts that it must at last attract the public attention.”

Even among politicians, Smith was only half loved. What one scholar has called the “only rigorous and comprehensive analysis of the work published in Smith’s lifetime”—written by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—was a defense of the pre-existing economic order. Although the intellectual elite knew The Wealth of Nations by the end of the eighteenth century, they were not won over wholesale to Smithian ideas.

Smith’s biographer John Rae reports Charles James Fox saying he had not read the book (despite quoting it in the House of Commons). On another occasion, when an economist said that nothing was known of political economy before Smith, Fox replied: “Pooh, your Adam Smiths are nothing.”

It was not until Pitt’s 1792 budget that any seriously Smithian ideas were important to British politics. Although the nineteenth century was more Smithian (especially Gladstone), in 1906, when newly elected Labour MPs were asked to list the books that had most influenced them, only four named Smith. There were many re-prints and translations, but Smith did not necessarily have a large, dedicated reading public. Jonathan Rose documents working class men reading Smith in the nineteenth century, but he is not a major presence in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class.

Smith has never lacked an audience among writers and thinkers, of course. In his introduction to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Amartya Sen quotes Smith telling his students that “to be an ancient” is to “have commentators”. By that standard, Sen writes, “few are more ancient than Smith.” He is to modernity what Plato is to antiquity. But unlike modernity’s other great ancient, Charles Darwin, whose books started a debate that began at once and lasted for generations, Smith is one of those authors who has had a more muted, contained reception, despite his undeniable importance.

And yet—he is so readable. Of all the great thinkers on technical or abstruse subject, Smith might be England’s best prose writer. As Edward Gibbon said, The Wealth of Nations is “An extensive science in a single book, and the most profound ideas expressed in the most perspicuous language.” Perspicacious is a word Smith enjoyed using, especially in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. He was dedicated to the perspicacious English plain style. In notes taken during one of Smith’s lectures, his students recorded:

And:

This is exactly what makes Smith such a pleasure to read. His own principles—no unnecessary words, a “natural order of expression”, and a linear sentence structure—give him true clarity. His sentences do not require you to puzzle them out once you reach the end. For anyone with a serious curiosity about the ways of the world, Smith is of undeniable importance—and he writes with the care all common readers wish to find in long and difficult books.

Although The Wealth of Nations does require a lot of attention, it is not an enemy to its readers’ understanding, unlike so many other great treatises. Smith points his prose carefully, to make all thousand pages as plain and understandable as they can be. Consider these extracts.

These are taken at random from passages I happen to have marked in the copy on my desk.

See how Smith’s sentences are made of everyday words, with “proper words in proper places”, as Swift advised. Smith avoids rhetorical flourishes. He makes one point in one clause and then moves on, perhaps with a sub-clause, and a conjunction, so that you are not left trying to keep one part of the sentence in mind while the other half rambles to its conclusion. He does however use rhetorical structures to convey his meaning forcefully. The second example, about alehouses, is a chiasmus: alehouses don’t create a disposition to drunkenness, but a disposition to drunkenness creates alehouses.

This careful clarity doesn’t make Smith a dull or heartless writer. He is no technocratic scribe. When he feels strongly, his pen burns with the enthusiasm of his thought.

Unlike so many social scientists, he writes about life in a way that retains the pulse of feeling while describing with a detached eye: “The contempt of risk, and the presumptuous hope of success, are in no period of life more active than at the age at which young people choose their professions.” (WN I.x.b.29) In his explanation of the lottery of fortune for navy men, he writes: “The distant prospect of hazards, from which we can hope to extricate ourselves by courage and address, is not disagreeable to us, and does not raise the wages of labour in any employment.” (WN I.x.b.32)

And despite his work being a descriptive account of economic science, so many of his observations are full of moral feeling: “The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants.” (WN I.viii.23) He condemns the “cobweb science of Ontology” (WN V.i.f.29) being taught in universities. He wants education to be able to “improve the understanding [and] to mend the heart.” (WN V.i.f.32)

Once you adjust for vocabulary changes (“most decisive mark”; “the presumptuous hope of success”), Smith’s prose is plain enough to be published in a magazine today. The Wealth of Nations is full of colloquial examples, daily numbers, historical parallels. Generalizations are explained with examples. He never moves on to the next point until the current point is made fully clear. Phrases like “necessities and conveniences” become repeated motifs, making it simpler for us to follow the stages of argument.

In all these manners of prose, Smith shows himself a great reader, not just of his great favorite Jonathan Swift, but of the other great English authors like Addison and Johnson. He recommended reading the novelist Samuel Richardson as well as Racine and Voltaire. Smith was a truly rounded humanist, a man who knew enough of life and books to write not just a great treatise but a work of significant pleasure.