Emma Rothschild
liberalism and socialism, or the left and the right. It is also a drama, as will
be seen, of the nature of human nature.
Adam Smith died in 1790, and he was transformed, within a very
few years, into a stateless fiction; an adjective (‘Smithsche’ was used in
1795, and ‘Smithian’ in 1800); an unproper noun (the German publicist
Friedrich Gentz was described by the Morning Chronicle,in1802,as‘the
German Smith’); or a verb (Coleridge referred to ‘a rich man perfectly
Adam Smithed & Mackintoshed’).
7
Smith was also identified, confusingly,
with both English and French politics. For the French diplomat Alexandre
d’Hauterive, writing in 1800, the new economic theory of the times –
‘what is called, in my opinion, rather too pompously, the science of polit-
ical economy’ – was an adjunct of English power, in which the ‘vessels of
England cover all seas; she sends soldiers, arms, money, agents to t he four
parts of the Earth’; little more than a pretext for ‘interfering in the most
important relations of the social, administrative and political organisation of
all nations’ (Hauterive 1800,pp.140, 150–1, 255).
For the Prussian/Austrian economist Adam M
¨
uller, Smith was by contrast
almost French. The ‘onesideness’ of the new political science was for M
¨
uller
a repudiation of ‘national feeling,’ in the interest of private property. Adam
Smith and his follower s conceived of the state as a ‘useful enterprise’, and not
as an object of reverence: as a wilde ehe, a ‘wild marriage’, or a relationship
without commitment. Smith was thereby identified with French power,
and with the origins, in the philosophy of the French Enlightenment, of
revolutionary destruction. His system was in M
¨
uller’s description a ‘theory
of the absolute tiers-
´
etat’; ‘Smith’s cosmopolitan views and his concept of
freedom could only bring happiness at the moment of greatest decline
for all nationalities in Europe’ (M
¨
uller 1931,p.86, 1817, i,p.228, 1936,
p. 305). The Edinburgh publicist William Playfair found it necessary, in a
new edition of the Wealth of Nations published in 1805 and embellished
with extra chapters and obnoxious footnotes, to defend Smith against the
charge of having been in agreement with the ‘French Oeconomists’ (or
physiocrats) of the 1760s: ‘I must, and do attribute to them, and those with
whom they associated, most of the terrible transactions of the last sixteen
years’ (Playfair 1805, i,pp.297, 308).
7 Article of 22 December 1802 in the Morning Chronicle, enclosed in a letter of 18 January 1803 from
Gentz to Karl August B
¨
ottiger, in Gentz 1909,p.264; entry from July–September 1808, in Coleridge
1973, iii, text, 3565; a nd see Rothschild 1998.
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