Adam Smith's 'Coarse Clay' Political Realism

This is an edited transcript of a talk that Ryan Griffiths gave at the Research Group on Constitutional Studies Lecture Series at McGill University. You can find a video of the talk here. You can find a lightly edited transcript of Shal Marriott's response, "Hostile factions and political instability" here. 

Thank you. It's fantastic to be here. The 300th anniversary of Adam Smith's birth, visitors from the University of Glasgow, there is indeed a special weight to this evening’s events. Thank you, and welcome to our visitors from Scotland. I recently returned from the University of Glasgow. I was able to participate in the wonderful tercentenary events there. I had a wonderful time. It was thrilling to be there. I'm glad we at McGill can now play host. Thank you to the RGCS community. Thank you to Shal Marriott for agreeing to offer the response to my talk this evening. It's been a lot of fun talking about Adam Smith with you in the runup to this. I hope we continue talking about Adam Smith in the future.

I want to thank Professor Jacob Levy, my advisor for both my MA and PhD. It was in his seminar that I first read Adam Smith. To that point I had been conscientiously uninterested in Adam Smith. If I had a view about him, it was this: ‘he's for liberty and then…everything just works out.’ I probably thought he had a naive political theory. So I would've scoffed: ‘he's not a political theorist.’ If pressed to say something positive, I might have said, ‘well, he's brilliant on homo economicus, the choices he makes, the consequence of those choices. But all that's good in theory, but naive about practice, naive, especially, about human psychology.’

Now you don't know better until you know better, and when your professor is Jacob Levy you’ll have every opportunity to know better. The seminar had a short reading list; huge number of pages. Almost all of Adam Smith, nearly all of David Hume, if you subtract the histories, Mandeville, some Adam Ferguson.

What struck me when I first read Smith was that he does not, as I had thought, prioritize the liberty and then just assume everything will be okay. In fact, he permits many restrictions on liberty across his work, especially in Wealth of Nations. Jacob Viner’s article, “Adam Smith and Laissez Faire,” lists many of the restrictions.

This fact is well-known and sometimes half-explained by describing Smith as a political moderate, willing permit restrictions on liberty here and there. But this leads me to a more serious criticism of Smith, and one that I wish to confront tonight. My first, entirely ignorant, belief that Smith just never imagines liberty needs to be restricted is false; that is not a serious position worthy of confronting. My target tonight is the more serious criticism that he does restrict liberty many times, but that they're ad hoc restrictions. That is, the restrictions are nothing more than blunt, undertheorized, moderation, or bare hesitancy.

The problem is that Smith does not fund the restrictions on liberty with resources in his own theory. If this is true, if Smith is excellent at describing the good consequences of liberty, but his restrictions on it are nothing more than alien ad hoc restrictions, then we ought to really wonder if Smith can even be said to have a political theory, let alone one worth studying today.

I do think this ‘ad hoc’ criticism of Smith is a serious one, but of course I think it is ultimately wrong. Smith does have a political theory and one that is worth studying. I call his political theory ‘Coarse Clay’ Political Realism, and I'll get to that title and the political realism bit shortly. Not going to be a ton of talk of political realism, I’ll admit. I apologize if political realism in the title of the talk was part of what drew you to the talk tonight. I'm going to get it out of the way and then there's going to be a ton of antidisestablishmentarianism.

I'm going to argue against the ‘ad hoc, therefore no political theory’ position by looking at what I regard as significant restrictions on liberty in what I will call Article III of Book V of Wealth of Nations. I’ll have to show, first that he permits severe restrictions on liberty, but that they are grounded in his political theory.

Book V, Article III is about religious establishment. That is what it is about on its surface. When you turn to look at it that is what you will see. I believe, however, that it's fundamentally about the proper alignment between persuasion and coercion, which is a kind of a classical theme, and very abstract. If I told you it is about coercion and persuasion and you went and opened the book to Article III, you wouldn't recognize that. What you'd see is a discussion of the wages of the Scottish clergy. I'd sell you this exciting pitch, persuasion and coercion, and that wouldn't bear out in what you read. I want to explain that. I want to explain why Article III looks like it does, why I'm claiming it is about coercion and persuasion, and why when you go to turn to it, it'll look like a kind of policy paper on wages in a church.

So the ‘ad hoc’ thesis that I'm pressing back is going to be confronted in the following way. I'm going to use this text, Article III, and I'm going to say that across it there is a consistent normative priority of what I will call stability over time. Stability over time, then justice and then liberty. That's his ranking of normative priorities. So for each of his conclusions concerning religious establishment, I’m going to comment on how he's using stability over time and his conception of justice to ground his restrictions on liberty. I'll try to explain each restriction on liberty as grounded in resources he genuinely has in his political theory. The restrictions are not ad hoc.

I identify three distinct conclusions he makes in Article III about religious establishment, and here they are.

First, and let's say the word together, antidisestablishmentarianism about England—I remember the day I heard that word.

He makes this argument in the first seven paragraphs of Article III.

The second argument, the second conclusion about religious establishment starts in paragraph eight, and I call it non-establishmentarianism, a non-establishment argument made to America. The third argument I call vindicatory establishment, and this is made to Scotland.

Some quick intriguing things about the first two arguments—I’ll just mention these. The antidisestablishmentarian argument made to England is a proposal to use the religious movement of Methodism, a major force in the 18th century, especially in England, though also in America, to prevent what he believed was an approaching civil war. Smith’s strategy, to use Methodism to keep the peace, has, without the reference to Smith, actually been at the centre of a somewhat quaint historical thesis first offered in 1906 by Elie Halévy. It is called the Halévy thesis.

Halévy argued that what preserved peace and order in Britain across the era of the French Revolution was the presence of the Methodists. That's the historical claim. If that is Halévy’s historical explanation for why England maintained political stability, I'm saying Smith actually proposed it as a strategy for peace. There is much to say about this, but let me simply say that this connection to the literature on the Halévy thesis should excite new interest in Article III and allow us to make moral evaluations of Smith’s use of Methodism to preserve order. That's just an intriguing thing. I'm not going to comment on it more.

Second intriguing thing before I go on. The non-establishment argument to America. In 1759 he writes Theory of Moral Sentiments. He tells us that he is committed to writing a work of political theory/jurisprudence. 1759, he promises this. In the 1760s he lectures at the University of Glasgow on jurisprudence. 1776, he publishes Wealth of Nations.

In 1790 he substantially revised and added important new parts to Theory of Moral Sentiments. In that edition he says, I still hope to publish a work on political theory but I think I might die before I finish it. He does die before he finishes it, and he burns the manuscript on political theory.

We are often told that his political theory is lost to us, but there's a catch. In 1790 he also tells us that he has actually published a portion of the planned work on political theory. This isn't commented on much. We normally say we lost his political theory work. Book V of Wealth of Nations, which contains what I’m presenting to you today on religious establishment, he reveals, was actually part of the plan of publishing that he had for political theory. So it's not exactly true that we don't have the manuscript on political theory. We have 300 and some pages of it, and it's Book V of Wealth of Nations. When I get to the argument about establishment that he makes to America it will be good to recall this fact: Smith, in essence, rushed a part of his political theory manuscript into print in 1776 and, I will argue, it contains an argument to America about religious establishment.

So, three conclusions about religious establishment: if you think these positions don't sound like Adam Smith, then you're in excellent company. All of the most eminent Smith scholars disagree with what I'm going to argue about establishment. They virtually all claim that Smith called for the disestablishment of religion. That’s the word they use: disestablishment. He called, they say, for the disestablishment of religion and he grounded that claim in religious freedom. That's the mainstream view of the content of Article III.

I don't think that's true. I don't think he grounds his arguments primarily in this section in freedom, nor does he call for disestablishment. Some might claim he called for disestablishment and grounded that in something about toleration, or disestablishment in order to create a ‘free marketplace of religion.’

All of that, I'm going to say, is wrong. It's not true. And I want to immediately pose a significant hurdle to that disestablishment argument so that I can get on with my claims and not try to rebut the disestablishment argument at each step.

So here's a hurdle that any disestablishment interpretation needs to face.

Near the end of Article III, he praises the established Church of Scotland. Yes, he does call it established church. However we might describe its structure, Smith says it counts as an established church. He praises it, and the central thing that he praises about it is that it has got a grip on the minds of the people. If you sort through the discussion of that church, you’ll find that's the moment he really settles his position on the church: it has a grip on hearts on minds.

The great thing about this church is that everyone in Scotland is converted to the Scottish church. That doesn't sound like freedom; that doesn't sound like this disestablishment. It's praise of this established church.

So here's the response of those who might defend the disestablishment interpretation of the whole of Article III. ‘Well, it's the best of a bad thing. He surely just wants it to be disestablished, he's just praising it, or maybe disguising his real argument in the praise. Probably he knows Moderates in the church,’ and so on.

That doesn't hold water. He really considered the way the church is structured. This isn't just tossed off praise. It's sort of an intricate little argument he makes. It's no passing thing.

Smith carefully considers two ways the of choosing the religious teachers for each parish. The first can roughly be described as democratic and that sounds like freedom. The other is—and there is an important history here that I am entirely skipping over—is a kind of way of having the landed elite select the religious teacher for the parish: called ‘lay patronage.’ Smith considers the options, describes some legislative history, and says ‘lay patronage’ is better. Elite appointing is better than democratic choosing. This is, to say the least, not at all a call for disestablishment of religion for the purposes of freedom.

This is a significant hurdle to the disestablishment reading. I'll come back to this argument later on, but leave for now as a problem for the mainstream reading that is opposed to mine.

But notice that what I'm finding in that argument to Scotland: he prioritized…well…something over liberty.

I said not much realism. Here's the realism bit. So my first thesis is that Smith has this priority of stability over time, then justice, then liberty. This thesis is meant to defeat the idea that Smith prioritizes liberty, and then offers a bunch of ad hoc restrictions of it.

Second thing I want to do is associate him with what we now call political realism. Before I do that, here's the quotation that was the inspiration for my title:

The perfection he’s referring to is that of perfect virtue. Perfect virtue: somebody who is perfectly generous, has their sentiments perfectly attuned to how much generosity they should express, how much friendship they should express, and in which ways, and so on. Most people can't achieve this perfection. We're made of ‘coarse clay.’ Most of us can, however, capably follow the rules of justice. The idea of the passage, then, or how I want you to think of it for the purposes of my title, is that we can't be held accountable for failures of virtue. We can't be held accountable for failing to live up to the heights of virtue. To suggest a distinction in contemporary moral responsibility literature, we can have failings in virtue attributed to us, but can't be held accountable for the failings. Smith would have put that same distinction in the terms of imperfect (attributability) and perfect (accountability) rights.

In any case, the point is that we're not subject to, in essence, punishment for not achieving the heights of virtue. Because humans are made of ‘coarse clay’ we are excused from punishment in failings of virtue that do not concern justice.

Here is an important example of what I think of as a ‘coarse clay’ description of an agent that begins to pull his thought over into what we think of as realism.

In an arresting passage in the 1790 edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments he says we have a disposition to admire—I'll prefer ‘awe’ and will explain that difference if asked—to awe at powerful people. This awe is such as to permit their injustices, and lesser vices. This awe at the powerful is pervasive among us. Enough of us, enough of the time, as I often say about it, have this disposition to awe at the powerful.

In general, even when in awe at the powerful, we know that we could be criticized morally for permitting powerful people to act vicious. This acknowledged gap between our moral understanding of perfect virtue, and the actual practice of our ethical lives is what I'm calling a ‘coarse clay’ description of an agent. We don't believe that standing in awe of someone who is powerful but does not merit our awe is proper behaviour, yet enough of us, enough of the time, fail to check our awe by our best moral standards. We don't, upon reflection, think that it is morally good to stand in awe of people who don’t merit that awe, but we still do it. We can't be perfectly virtuous. We're made of ‘coarse clay.’ This means that nobody should be held accountable for this failing. We're weak. The catch is that as a social phenomenon this awe, this permissive awe, has awful political effects.

I want to give you just quick analogy so that you get a sense of what this is awe at the powerful is getting at.

You used to hear politicians described as ‘Teflon.’ Scandal after scandal, nothing sticks to him. We say ‘he's Teflon.’ It’s telling that I can say that and we each might think of different politicians whom that description fits. Moreover, you might be imagining that my political hero was ‘Teflon’, a crook who never paid the penalty, while I am imagining that your political hero is the ‘Teflon’ villain. Notice the pervasiveness of that, and its polarity. It seems like every politician's made of Teflon. Smith’s idea, I think, is not that the politician is ever made of Teflon, there's nothing particular about their charisma or anything. The problem is in us; we forgive the scandals and vices of politicians. That's why this pops up all the time. The new way of saying ‘he’s Teflon’ is: scandal after scandal, ‘now we got 'em. Ah, well nevertheless.’ It's that statement, that kind of idea, the dejection we feel when the powerful get away with things that the less powerful, the less privileged do not get, that I want in your mind.

So Smith argues that we have this permissive awe at the powerful. What do I mean by ‘the powerful’? They are those people with many means to whatever ends. That's what I mean by powerful. So I do not mean nor does Smith mean just the king, just the leader, just a politician. I mean celebrities, coaches, PTA presidents. They have many means to ends partially because they've got money, partially because people want to be around them, do good things for them. Crucially, the king and the rebel each have their vices and injustice excused by this permissive awe.

You'll be saying to yourself, ‘I don't have permissive awe towards the prime minister.’ No me neither, but I do with my celebrities, I do with the people. I like stand in awe of them. I forgive them their sins. I explain their vices away. I’m subject to this kind of, we might say, motivated reasoning. Moreover, it might not be that I do feel this permissive awe, but given that I reckon that you do, I might alter my behaviour in way that amounts, behavaviourally, to the same thing. Enough of us, enough of the time, are in the grip of this awe at the powerful, so that effectively we behave as if each of us really is in awe of the powerful.

Now, the connection of this to realism. Theory of Moral Sentiments is a book on moral philosophy, normative ethics, metaethics, moral psychology. In such a book, it is unsurprising that he says it's morally wrong that we have this permissive awe. We shouldn't admire people who don't merit it. It's morally wrong. He says this moralizing about is nothing new, moralists ‘of all ages’ have said it have complained about it.

But here is why I said the passage is arresting. One is reading a book of moral philosophy, and all of the sudden Smith says that though this behaviour is immoral, and a cause of injustice, ‘we must acknowledge’ that the powerful always receive this awe. The moralists say we shouldn't admire people who don't merit it, and Smith agrees, but ‘we must acknowledge’ that the powerful receive our permissive awe. My claim is that he's saying we political theorists must acknowledge this as a fundamental fact. One is reading a work of moral philosophy, and suddenly it is political theory. A line is draw, and Smith carves out a principle for political, but not moral, theory.

Moral philosophers can pick apart the psychology of this awe. It's got all kinds of fascinating parts. A lot of the quirks of our psychology that Smith is so good at explaining are involved in this awe at power. He reduces this awe at the powerful to a bunch of interesting psychological facts. I think ultimately at the very bottom of it is what he calls a ‘love of system.’ Explaining that would take me into a lot of detail that is not for this talk. So all I want you to see is that he says it's morally wrong and of course moral philosophers should care about the reducibility of it and study the psychology and see what can be eliminated. But politically speaking, he seems to say, it's a fundamental fact of politics. And that's what I call it. The fundamental fact of politics is that enough of us, enough of the time have a disposition to admire the wealthy and the powerful—the wealthy, of course, are just people with many means to whatever ends.

I will offer a more substantial argument in a moment, but I simply want to suggest that this acceptance of our moral failing places him in the category what we now call political realism. Here I am only suggesting that there is at a family resemblance between what passes for membership criteria in the political realism club and Smith’s acceptance of a serious moral failing for political, but not moral theory. The fact that we admire the powerful isn't an object that political theorists can explain away, or moralize about. We accept it and draw our normative political theory in light of that fact.

Here is a different suggestion for counting Smith as a realist. I am claiming that Smith described individual agents as made of ‘coarse clay.’ We don't live up to moral demands. We awe at the powerful even when we recognize that we shouldn't.

I now want to add this: the basic material of politics, maybe, political ontology, that a normative political theorist has to confront is coarse and uniform clay—to continue the ‘coarse clay’ theme. There are individual agents and they are made of ‘coarse clay,’ but there are also collective agents and these are of a greater size than individual agents. When you do normative political theory you need to account for both things. Individual agents are made of ‘coarse clay’—don't live up to moral demands—but there are also collective agents. Basic material: coarse and ununiform clay.

I want to try to explain this fairly quickly. I'm going to say that this insistence on collective agents as part of the basic material of political theory explains the concreteness of Smith's realism and actually accounts for some of the concreteness you see in realism, more generally.

Pulling a useful quotation from out of its context, Smith says of the state of nature, ‘there's no such state existing,’ so don't worry about it. I want to tell you why I think he says it just could never exist. What he can say about its non-existence grounds his claim that you have to rule in collective agents: they'll always be there.

Here's a story: John, Paul, George and Ringo. They each desire glory, or at least, desire not to be low-status. Hobbes says people desire glory. It’s a common claim: People desire glory. Glory derives from comparison with people; being above somebody else; it's positional, tied to scarce rank and so on.

Imagine that John, Paul, George and Ringo, they're all subject to this but they're in the state of nature. None of them has any more glory than any other. On top of this, there just isn't much glory around to be had because there's no commonly acknowledged ranking.

But what happens is, John violently subdues Paul. I'm hovering over some text in Wealth of Nations, here. Smith says, we have a love of domineering, but you don't have to buy that for this to work. John violently subdues Paul. It happens. He takes glory in doing this and George sees all this. George wants glory, too, and that's all we're looking at right now. George says, ‘I've got two options to get glory,’ probably others, but let's just say he says two: ‘one, I can try to attack John and try to get glory that way.’ It's risky. ‘The thing I'll do is go under John, prop him up, and so be above Paul. I'll fan John’s ego: ‘Oh my god, what a great thing you've done. Paul was a miserable soul. You're such a wonderful guy.’

George props him up, now he’s second in command, or at least aligned in some way with John. George got access to glory. George increased John’s glory and made some for himself. Smith can explain this in many ways and it is core to the permission he gives to us to awe at the powerful.

George, rather than confronting John, or running way, builds John up in the interest of getting glory. There is a person above him, a person, say, with more glory, but by aligning with that person he is better off in terms of glory than he had been before violent-John subdued Paul. Aligned with king John, and above Paul.

Ringo sees all this. He wants glory. Suppose all he does is, by imagination, align himself with John, George, or both. He thinks ‘I'm like them. I'm on their side. Yay!’ The way you might do with a sports team unbeknownst to them. When they finish in first place, I feel glory, pride. I might simply bandwagon jump. In this case it’s not that evidence of a connect that gets me glory, but simply my mental act of saying ‘that’s the team I like.’ That's what Ringo does.

He thinks ‘what they say, I like that.’ He might try to do some complicated thing where he imagines himself as them and glories that way. The point is that there's a ranking, first place, second place, John, George, and those ranks are scarce. The glory here though, is not scarce.

Economic terms can help here. Ringo can just sit there and imagine that he's aligned with them and John doesn't say, ‘Hey, stop using my glory I want to use it right now!’ John and Ringo can share in the glory of being over Paul at the same time. The glory deriving from the ranking is not a rival good. It doesn't bother John at all if Ringo is imagining himself as John, or imagining himself as aligned with John. If John knows about it all he probably thinks it is good: ‘This is increasing my glory.’

Championship parades depend on glory’s non-rivalry. First place team doesn't say to the fans, ‘get out of here I need to use my glory.’ They say ‘whip it up. I want more of this.’ The glory is subject to network effects. Although it's tied to scarce rank and it's comparative, the glory is non-rival and it is non-excludable. John, that is, can't stop Ringo from sharing in his glory. It's not a club good. Ringo can just sit there and access it. Nor is there a public goods problem about because they all have incentives to glory. It doesn't bother them that somebody ‘free rides’ on their glory. The free-riding, if that’s what we call it, makes more glory.

So what I'm claiming here is that enclosing glory in rank makes it abundant. What we want when we want glory is hierarchy. Settle a ranking, any ranking, as long as I’m not last.The pursuit of glory does not drive us apart like a state of war in Hobbes, pursuit of glory drives us into hierarchies, and reinforces them.

The example of us propping up violent-John is only supposed to connect to the idea that we awe at the powerful and that this ‘coarse clay’ aspect of individual agency is permissible. Our awe at the powerful causes practical authority to emerge. But I aiming to add now that because of this phenomenon, we must always assume the existence of collective agents. Because we want glory we're always going to be found in groups, or if we're not in groups, we will be doing all we can to form them. We will be desperate to submit to some focal point around which we can manufacture glory.

We set up this hierarchy to pursue glory. This is what Smith tells a famous character of his that he adds in 1790, the ‘man of system.’ The ‘man of system’ is a political reformer. He wants to arrange society on his ‘ideal plan of government.’

Smith tells the ‘man of system,’ ‘you act as if all the agents in your mind conform to your plan.’ Full compliance; they all have the same ‘principle of motion,’ as Smith puts it. ‘That's what you believe,’ Smith says. ‘But it isn't true because you're not accounting for the fact that there are collective agents.’ These groups have an agency of their own, a ‘principle of motion’ of their own, different from individual agents. He says ‘you have to account for both of individual and collective agency and you're failing to do that. When you fail to do that, you ignore the existence of province's, cities, churches, secondary associations. They don't show up on your radar and you're making, I think, a methodological mistake. Forget the morality of it or the justice of it. You're not doing political theory. You're not understanding how political theory works; you're not working with the right basic material.’

So what I'm saying here now is imagine the ‘man of system’ says: ‘okay, individual agents. Tell me who they are. Are they animals? Animals could be agents. Are these agents aliens?’ ‘No,’ Smith says, ‘they're human beings and they work like this. They're made of ‘coarse clay,’; sympathy works like this,’ and so on.

The ‘man of system’ then wants to know about this second thing he must rule in, ‘collective agents, what are they?’ With individual agents he had to be told ‘no, it's not animals. It could be animals. No, it's not aliens. It could be. Individual agents, they are human beings.’ Collective agents. What do you say? You cannot simply say ‘a collectivity.’ That doesn’t tell him anything new, or anything that could explain their ‘principle of motion.’ You say, ‘who are collective agents, well, the church of England.’ You refer to actually-existing things.

Realism is known for using that term, ‘actually-existing.’ In answering ‘who are collective agents,’ you don't invent some abstract thing just like you didn't with individual agents. You said ‘human beings with this moral psychology are your individual agents.’ With collective agents., you say the Church of England, the would-be American state, and the Church of Scotland. That's why when you turn to Article III, though I am saying it is an analysis of the proper relationship between coercion and persuasion, you see a quite fine-grained discussion of the history of the Church of Scotland. These churches, and the constituent parts of America’s ecclesiastical conditions, are the collective agents you need to discuss when you are studying the proper relationship between coercion and persuasion. Smith talks about the Church of England as ‘a great incorporation’ who operates on its own ‘principle of motion,’ in Article III, paragraphs one to seven.

In these paragraphs—one through seven—he describes a cycle of rise, decline, and collapse. To my mind, this cycle, which recurs across his works, is a cycle generated by the institutional alignment of persuasion and coercion, of which religious establishment is his example. The alignment of persuasion, the church, and coercion, the state, in the interest of securing lasting authority is perpetually self-defeating. When once you align coercion and persuasion you will get a perpetual rise, decline, collapse and the reestablishment of the alignment such that the cycle begins again.

This perpetual cycle is the central problematic of Article III. It is described in paragraphs one and seven. Each of his ecclesiastical proposals is an attempt to either solve or manage the cycle. It is crucial to grasp that the cycle structures everything else that he talks about in Article III.

Article III doesn't have a triptych as its frontispiece, but it ought to, so I have given it one. I will take you through this perpetually self-defeating alignment of persuasion and coercion by showing you the three images and going back and forth between Smith’s words in 1776 and the underlying history to show you that he is at once describing the cycle in the abstract while pointing to actual events.

In paragraph seven Smith says that times of ‘violent religious faction’ are usually also times of ‘violent political faction’. He puts us, in other words, in the time after the collapse of an alignment of church and state.

Because the people in the war will have seen church and state aligned before, a new alignment becomes the by far most likely outcome of the war. An ambitious politician looks for a sect that has got a grip on hearts and minds and makes an agreement: ‘Let's align to form a new establishment of religion.’

This is the start of the cycle. The new king wants a clergy in order to deepen his authority. He wants them at his coronation casting his rule as divine, and so on. The clergy will agree, but will ask the new king for two things in return. ‘Destroy my adversaries,’ that's the first thing. The violence is important. He's referring back to something like the Restoration in England.

The clergy, Smith says, are ‘weary of humoring the people,’ of trying to be popular among the people, so their second demand is: ‘guarantee my wages.’ He calls it independent provision, a tithe, a landholding, that is granted to the clergy independent of whether or not lots of people are coming to church on Sunday. That's what they want. Why? ‘Because my vocation, the thing that I love is learning and deepening my faith. The thing I don't like is telling the same old crowd-pleasing sermons. Everybody wants to hear the same…’ You get the story.

The king established the clergy and granted them their requests, that is the first step in the cycle done. The second step is the decline.

Because the clergy have their wealth guaranteed independent of their popularity, they give themselves up, he says, to ‘indolence’ in everything except ‘learning.’

This is how we get this first image. This is by William Hogarth. It's called Sleeping Congregation. It is from 1736. The clergy is indolent, and this is the result: the sermon is perhaps learned, but it is putting everyone to sleep.

In 1736, the year of Hogarth’s print, Smith is about to go to University of Glasgow. It's a wonderful university then as now, Francis Hutcheson is there. Smith loves it.

A few years before 1736, at Oxford, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism and his brother Charles, started a club. They called it—I think maybe somebody else called it—the holy club. They would meet daily, pray hourly, and ask each other accountability questions so as to promote their holiness. You can still go to Methodist accountability meetings where you'll read John Wesley's accountability questions. They were very methodical about their holiness. They were called methodists. The insult became the name.

In 1738, Wesley has an evangelical new birth. His heart, he famously says, was ‘strangely warmed.’ This experience, ‘heart strangely warmed,’ is the site of unending accusations of his being an enthusiast, which is a pretended inspiration of God in the believer. Wesley would always push back, insisting that he is not an enthusiast. He's canny about this. He knows his conversion experience, the thing that looks like enthusiasm, and what he says he can do for others is wildly attractive, but he knows that being tolerated by the church is the game. He's an ordained Anglican priest and he always conceives of Methodism as a movement internal to the Church of England. It is a revivalist, not a dissenting, movement. Methodism only separates from the Church after both he and Smith die.

We are still in this second phase, the decline of the regime of persuasion and coercion, church and state.

Around 1740 Wesley is giving sermons to audiences of 20,000 in the open air in London. 1740 is when Smith leaves Scotland to go to Balliol College, Oxford. He goes. He finds it dreary. The teachers there, he famously says years later in Wealth of Nations, have given up ‘even the pretense of teaching.’ Why? Why do they fail to be engaging teachers? For the same reason an established clergy will give themselves up to indolence: they have their wages guaranteed. They have tenure. Their calling is their research, not the teaching.

People enjoy quoting that piece of text on Oxford, but Smith might've first heard that charge said by John Wesley in 1744. Wesley held what is called a ‘university sermon’ at Oxford. He was a fellow at Lincoln College and with this sermon he essentially breaks with Oxford forever. It's a huge event. William Blackstone comments on it, Wesley has the text of his sermon published and distributed. People know about it everywhere.

I can place Smith in Oxford the month before Wesley’s sermon as he sends a letter back from Oxford to his mother saying he should have written ‘oftener.’ Because Wesley’s was a university sermon all the colleges of Oxford would be in attendance for the sermon at St Mary’s Church. In short, there is very good reason to believe that Smith was personally in attendance and, in any case, it is next to impossible for Smith not to have known about the event.

This is what Wesley does in his sermon. He turns pulpit right, which is where the high church teachers from Oxford are sitting. These are the teachers of the clergy that's become indolent. He says, ‘you respected teachers, are you filled with the spirit that your office so absolutely requires?’ Of course they are not, is Wesley’s answer. Religion in England is languishing.

Pulpit left, the students. ‘What shall we say of the young people of this place?’ They don't read, don't pray, they drink too much. Smith, we can imagine, is eating this up because that's what he's saying about Oxford in the letters he is sending home. You can imagine Smith in the pews, while this dominant figure of the era, John Wesley, is utterly shaming Oxford, its teachers, and the established clergy.

The point of the sermon is to announce Wesley and his itinerant, open-air, lay-preachers as the ones who can restore the faith in England. Wesley asks, ‘by whom shall this Christianity be restored?’ The clergy, these teachers, they’ve let it wane, just like Hogarth depicted in the sleeping congregation and just like Smith describes it in 1776, Wealth of Nations. ‘But suppose you have this desire of reviving the faith. You don't have any power apportioned to the effect; you've tried a few faint attempts.’ It'll be restored ‘by young inconsiderable men…I know not whether ye yourselves could suffer it.’ ‘Inconsiderable men,’ this is a reference to the Methodist practice of allowing lay preachers to lead events. Men utterly unlike the Oxford elite will revive the faith, but, he predicts, you won’t be able to ‘suffer it’, meaning, the established clergy will call in secular authority to persecute us.

This takes us to the third stage in the perpetually self-defeating alignment of persuasion and coercion, tracking, as I am, both the history of the eighteenth century and Smith’s narration of the cycle in paragraph one of Article III.

Methodism was in a very charged debate throughout the eighteenth century and Wesley obviously knew it could get worse. They were at the centre of debate in the famously lively public sphere in England. The Methodists were accused at the same time of being Jacobites and Cromwellian Puritans. The contradictory charges are absurd, but the scholars who write on Methodism say that what matters is not the accuracy of accusations, but that they were made and the political drama they imply. Methodists were seen as politically, deeply important to think about.

So, we have establishment rising from out of a religious and political civil war as the first phase of the cycle; the second phase is the decline of that regime, the waning of the persuasive powers of the clergy; that very decline opens market space to religious upstarts. Demand for religion remains high, but the poor supply—the boring sermons of the established church—opens space for a new religious movement to emerge. Division of labour, meet extent of the market. This is the crucial phase of the cycle because the established church, just as Wesley had predicted, and just as Smith tells it, will now call in coercive force, the state, the king, to persecute the upstarts.

One year after Wesley’s incendiary sermon is the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, and Wesley, in the sermon, is seeing it coming. He mentions ‘Romish aliens’ on the march. It is in this context, then, that we have to appreciate the political significance of the Methodists being accused of being Jacobites—they were being accused of inciting rebellion. However strongly Wesley would criticize the established clergy, he knew to insist that his was a movement internal to the Church.

So what's happening now, in the third phase, just as Smith tells it in paragraph one, is you have a very popular religion, Methodism, and it is attracting the attention of the established clergy who now want to wield the king’s coercive power against the upstarts.

The next image is from a painting by John Griffiths—which, I have to mention, happens to be my dad's name. The etching made after the painting is from 1765. The preacher here is George Whitefield. In 1741 Whitefield was a central figure in the Cambuslang Revival, a series of immensely popular public sermons held in Cambuslang just south of Glasgow. Smith, we know, owned a volume of essays on the event. Whitefield, along with John and Charles Wesley, is the other great figure of eighteenth-century Methodism, from its Calvinist wing.

In the painting he is field-preaching to common people. The painting is titled, ‘Enthusiasm Displayed.’ Remember Wesley was aiming to be as fascinating as an enthusiastic religion, without admitting the charge. It is a vital religion, attracting people especially from worst-off labouring classes. The preachers are fiery, anything but boring, and why? Because they know that that's how they're gaining adherents. They, and Wesley is clear about this, their popularity depended on the foil of the boring established clergy.

Wesley, time and again, vehemently opposed any movement to disestablish the Church or for Methodism to separate from it. Wesley is clear about this throughout his life. As Smith tells it, the third phase begins with the growing popularity of a religious upstart, and he names Methodism as the current example of one, and it ends with the established clergy successfully leveraging the coercive power of the state to persecute the upstarts.

Persecution, brings on the fourth phase: the collapse of the regime. The next image in our triptych is again by Hogarth. There's a complicated history of this print, but it is crucial to see that Hogarth returns to same church from the 1730s image, the one where the clergy were putting the congregation to sleep. Revisiting it 30 years later, it is wildly different. The density of allusion to actual events is astonishing, but the central thing to see is that it is a kind of frenzied event, a chaos. Why? Why has everything become so disturbed? In Smith’s telling, the church called in the state to persecute the upstarts, and this exacerbates the problem. Now coercive power has been used to persecute the field-preachers, the popular lay-preachers we saw in the Griffiths painting. This persecution exposes the king, the coercive power, to real criticism: he is backing a church with waning persuasive powers and persecuting a new sect that is actually delivering a faith that the people desire.

That sect, both in Smith’s text, and Hogarth’s image is made much more radical from the challenge. They seize the moment. The king’s coercive force bites hard when it is backing an unpopular faith, the religious upstarts know this, so they pour it on. You see the preacher, that's George Whitefield again, his wig has popped off from his efforts and it reveals a Jesuitical tonsure—this is another version of the accusation that the Methodists are not revivalists, but Jacobites, rebels, looking to overthrow the existing regime.

William Hogarth’s prints were not aristocratic decoration, they were popular culture written down, or drawn out. When his engravings would circulate in other countries the images would be translated into words, because they were so thick with images that relayed stories from English culture.

Whatever Hogarth’s intentions might have been, the message from Smith’s text is ‘watch out, we are on the eve of civil war.’ In Smith’s Article III the idea is that the religious upstarts have been persecuted; this deepens the unpopularity of the clergy and the king; the regime collapses into civil war. This takes us from paragraph one, now to paragraph seven.

So what happens at this moment in this cycle of the perpetually self-defeating alignment of persuasion and coercion? We are in religious and political, civil war, what solves it, what ends it? A new alignment of persuasion and coercion, a new king, a new clergy, re-establishment. The combination of the arguments of paragraphs one and seven are themselves a hurdle to the disestablishment reading: disestablishment will beget re-establishment. The cycle continues, and we can return to the boring church, Hogarth’s Sleeping Congregation. So that's the cycle: a) establishment, b) indolence, c) upstarts and their persecution, d) violent religious and political faction and a new establishment.

Smith has to confront it. His ecclesiastical argument must find a way to extend the peaceful phase of the cycle. So let us go back to what I will call the king's quandary.

We return to the third phase. The upstarts, in this case the Methodists, are popular and the established clergy demands the king pass laws against their practices, jail them, attack them. It is a quandary because the king’s authority is tied to this clergy. The king does not want the clergy to turn on him. They still have some popularity among the people and he’d rather they use it to build him up than to tear him down. He also knows that if he persecutes the upstarts at the command of this declining clergy, his coercive force could become hated.

So what can the king do? Scholars have, in essence, told us that recommends disestablishing the Church. But here is what Smith says about confronting the clergy: it is ‘perfectly ruinous, to employ force and violence…upon the clergy of any established church.’ Moreover, disestablishment, as I read paragraph seven is no way out of the cycle of collapse, because, out of the chaos of violent political and religious faction, will come re-establishment.

Disestablishing is perfectly ruinous, persecution of upstarts drives the cycle onwards into civil war. Can the king deny the clergy’s request to persecute the upstarts? No, because they will ‘employ all the terrors of religion in order to oblige the people to transfer their allegiance to some more orthodox and obedient prince.’

Smith is posing this king’s quandary as the one that the English polity finds itself in at this moment in real time, 1776. To think about how Smith will solve or lessen the tension in the king’s quandary let me remind you of what I have claimed is his normative priority of values: stability over time, justice, and liberty. Let me say a little bit about each of these so that I can identify his moves as reflective of this priority of values.

Stability over time. Smith has just given us, in paragraphs one and seven, a theoretical account, a built-up understanding of the perpetual self-defeat that is the result of aligning coercion and persuasion with the aim of securing authority. This, immediately, should explain the meaning of stability over time. That value gets its meaning because of Smith’s careful depiction of cycles of regime collapse. This cycle of collapse is one that animates his history of feudalism, the Catholic Church and the reformation, versions of the idea can even be found in his writings on the origins of language. It's all over his writings, which is to say that the cycle is part of his political theory.

In aiming to get stability over time, then, even at the expense of liberty, for instance, he would not be proposing an undertheorized, ad hoc, solution, but one that comes from resources he genuinely has. His solutions to collapse, which may involve restricting liberty, derive from his theory of cycling regimes.

So, when I return to the king’s quandary as it he found it in England, we will be looking to see how he aimed to realize the value of stability over time. The question, given his priority of values, is how to prolong the peaceful phase of the brutal cycle, how to deny the clergy their ruinous request.

Now we can see the place of this value in the recommendation he gave to the Church of Scotland. Smith was not simply tossing off some thoughts about this Church, his specific recommendations of lay patronage, derive from, flow from, the general account of regime cycling that frames the entirety of Article III. Scotland was in the peaceful phase of its cycle. Smith's prediction was that in aligning coercion and persuasion make each insufferable. That's why his appeal to the grip the Church had over hearts and minds was so decisive. It's worse if they don't have it.

Second value, justice. The virtue of justice consists in a disposition to regard oneself as mutually accountable to all others. Much to say, but the basic thing is that one way to encourage the practice of justice is by increasing the means people have to achieve self-respect. Even if that is not clear, simply note that one thing I will have to spot in the ecclesiastical arguments he is going to make is some sort of support for justice conceived as this disposition to regard oneself as mutually accountable to all others. I can offer much more support for this argument, but we only need outlines.

Third value, liberty. I say this advisedly, I don't know what he means by liberty. The best essay there is on Smith on liberty is by Christopher Barry from the University of Glasgow. What Berry does, among other things, is show us how complicated it is to sort out what Smith means by the word. There are some accounts of Smith’s conception of liberty that I think I have grounds for disagreeing with, but for my purposes this evening, we'll be fine without pinning down a meaning. Let us leave it open and see whether we need to have something to say about liberty within the ecclesiastical arguments he makes.

At the end of paragraph one, Smith has left us in the king's quandary: disestablish, persecute the dissenters, or deny the request to persecute. He has left us with the quandary, but he does leave intriguing suggestions that indicate that he is trying to discover ways of taming the threat of the religious upstarts without persecuting them. In paragraph two, Smith speaks in a series of allusions and metaphors that make it hard to track his precise argument. He speaks of mendicancy, organizational aspects of what appear to be Gallican principles, all while offering comparisons of religious teachers to generals, and armies. It is complicated, but I assure you, the mendicancy, the Gallican allusions, they map on to how people were describing Methodists at the time. The Methodists are twice mentioned by name in the first paragraph and, using popular images of the day, he continues to refer to Methodists throughout Article III. We need not go into all those references, because there is really only one of them that secures my antidisestablishmentarian reading.

The king is stuck, and the question is how Smith can provide him, or rather provide the English state, with some wiggle room to manage the growing crisis? Well, Machiavelli has an idea. Smith explicitly references Machiavelli and directs us to what he says about Sts Francis and Dominic in The Discourses. The Methodists were, I show in the dissertation, commonly described as mendicants, and sometimes compared precisely to Sts Francis and Dominic. Smith’s reference is to Discourses III.I and here is its title: “In order for a Religion or a Republic to Have a Long Life, It is Often Necessary to Bring it Back to its Beginnings.” What Machiavelli proposes to secure the long life of a regime is what’s called an ad fontes renewal. The idea was especially popular in the Renaissance, but Smith proposes an updated, social-psychology, version of it.

What does Machiavelli say? The passage is incredible; it is Machiavelli in full lather. What worked, what renewed the regime, was this command that Francis and Dominic gave to the people: they told people it was ‘evil to speak evil of evil.’ Context makes his meaning clear, but we can explain it by reference to what I described John Wesley as forcefully pressing in the very sermon Smith was witness to. ‘You high churchmen,’ Wesley said there, ‘you are corrupt, evil.’ Throughout his life, though, Wesley insisted that ‘it is evil,’ wrong, ‘to speak evil,’—which gloss as the call for the downfall of the Church—of ‘evil,’ meaning, corrupted by their establishment. Wesley insisted, ‘go to the Anglican Church on Sunday, though they have let the faith wane.’ It is evil to speak evil of evil. Keep Methodism, that is, as a revivalist movement internal to the church. Do not rebel. Do not revolt. Keep going to church, support the tradition, but we together shall renew it. That was Wesley’s idea, Smith knew that it was, and he wanted the English state to heed Machiavelli’s advice.

Let the Methodists renew the faith, let them lay-preach, field-preach, deny the established clergy their demand to persecute them. How can the established clergy accept this, though, how does this avoid confronting them? It certainly involves some confrontation. They demand you persecute, and all that is offered to them is that Wesley and the Methodists do not want to unseat them. ‘The Methodists are conservative. They seek to renew our regime, not rebel against it.’ This is what the king, the English state, can say to the clergy who are demanding action against the Methodists. I am suggesting that this opens the door, it lets the king out of the quandary, just a little bit. Perhaps the clergy can be persuaded to let the Methodists be, so long as they teach that it is ‘evil to speak evil of evil.’ The king, the English state, has taken some of the leverage the clergy might otherwise have, by pointing this out about the Methodists.

But Smith is not done thinking his way out of the quandary.

What if the clergy nevertheless insist, ‘ban their practices, break up their field meetings, and how dare you use Machiavelli to suggest otherwise!’ Certainly, as I quoted him, Smith does caution against confronting the clergy. What is left to do? How can we slow the cycle of collapse by resisting the demand to persecute? How can the demand to persecute be denied?

Smith is about to quote 500 words of David Hume. Despite what scholars constantly say about the quotation, Smith is endorsing, not challenging Hume’s position. Here is what Hume says you should do to an established clergy: you should ‘bribe their indolence.’

Smith has suggested that you first tell the clergy that you refuse to persecute, or to provoke the Methodists, because they are intent on reviving the faith, renewing, not rebelling against, our regime. They don't want to overthrow us. They want to stay in the Anglican church. The problem was that the clergy still might insist. Well then, on Hume’s advice, ‘bribe their indolence.’ ‘How about, dear clergy, you don't do any more popular preaching and you just study?’ Smith tells the king, the coercive power, he tells the state explicitly that the clergy cannot be confronted head on, disestablishment is not an option, but your remaining ‘means [of controlling the clergy] seem to consist altogether in the preferment which [you have] to bestow upon them’ Their preferments; you can pay them off, just like Hume says.

The Methodists are revivalists, let them do their work, and if that’s not enough, I’ll increase your landholdings, or the tithe. What was awful before is now what is needed: the king now needs the indolence of the clergy. The English state ought to deny any request to persecute the Methodists, and if it must, it ought to bribe the clergy to let the revival happen. That's threading the needle.

Consider the same idea of a birbe, but now made to the teachers at Oxford who had ‘given up even the pretense of teaching.’ Imagine approaching the professors, asking them to stop teaching, and to give that work over to younger people. Just do research, no more teaching, and I'll increase your wages. It's a bit insulting, perhaps, but it's not something that's unacceptable, right?

Of course it is insulting to English clergy: he's quoting Machiavelli, Hume, but none of this is much worse than was commonly said to the established clergy. It was commonplace to say that the Church had lost its appeal. What Smith is doing is not hidden because it is not in slightest bit heretical, nor even outside the bounds of common sentiment.

This bribe to the clergy, combined with the Methodist renewal, that is what will prolong the peaceful period in England. It is antidisestablishmentarian. Establishment is bad because it gets you locked in this cycle, but Methodism was offering a way of slowing it down. This amounts to prioritizing stability over time over liberty. There is no appeal to greater freedom from antidisestablishmentarianism, but the argument he makes is not ad hoc. It is grounded in an analysis of persuasion and coercion that he is committed to across his works. The specific recommendation, ‘bribe their indolence,’ is a move within that analysis. It is not some external commitment unrelated to the basic problem. I believe it is an example of his systematic prioritization of stability over time, justice and liberty, but it is hard to sell you on that interpretation from what I can offer this evening.

What about the place of justice in this antidisestablishmentarian argument? We can agree, without knowing what he means by liberty, that liberty is simply doing no work to justify this bribe and that acceptance of Methodism. So, justice, is that doing any work?

In Article III, he says, that when people come into a large city from a small town in which they had a ‘character to lose,’ they get ‘sunk in obscurity and darkness.’ They lose a sense of their social and moral standing. They can easily be taken advantage of, can fall into vice and so on. But, such people, he says, they ‘never emerge so effectually from this obscurity as by becoming the member of a small sect.’ This is precisely the feature of Methodism, its provision of community to people who need it, that made that quaint historical thesis, the Halévy thesis, have the plausibility that it had. It is a big important fact about Methodism that it did provide social goods, recognition goods, to the worst off. The field- and lay- preaching, the hope of new births, it, in short, kept people going. It gave them a social bearing, a ‘character to lose’ that is a precondition for being just, for holding yourself mutually accountable to all others. It gave them the social bearing to think of themselves as having the standing to hold others to account.

And Liberty? He simply does not mention liberty, nor does the nature of the antidisestablishment argument show any signs of valuing it. There is one big exception, and it is his appeal to what we now call freedom of association.

Freedom of association, as we know it, is two things. First, an individual right to join an association. This right supports the well-being of people who are in need of community, among other good things. The other side of freedom of association is a group right. The right of the association, the freedom granted to it, to control its members. This was a right that Wesley was fighting for and using without formally having. It is important that a religious sect be able to excommunicate members for, as Smith says, ‘the credit of the sect.’ Wesley’s Methodists were under constant scrutiny and he wanted to be able to disassociate his group from the bad behaviour of any of the members of it. If bad behaving members bring down the name, the ‘credit of the sect,’ we’ll all suffer and I, Wesley is thinking, need to defend myself against the ‘encroachments’ of other groups.

This power to defend themselves is exactly what Smith says is a key means to stability. From the 1790 edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments:

So if liberty has a place in the antidisestablishmentarian argument it is, as liberty often is in Smith, as a means to justice and stability. Freedom of association is instrumentally valuable.

Finally, the non-establishment argument to America. The entire antidisestablishmentarian argument is, in its core, complete by the end of paragraph seven. Paragraph eight begins with this telling, crucial, arresting sentence:

‘But if politicks had never called in the aid of religion…’

What is the unstated sentence that naturally precedes this? By beginning the paragraph with ‘But if…’ he forces us to hear this as the implied preceding sentence: When politics has called in the aid of religion, then bribe the indolence of the clergy if there is a revivalist movement about. ‘But if’ it never has, if politics has never aligned with religion, if persuasion and coercion have never been aligned in your polity, then whatever you do, don't align them, don’t establish a church. In this way you avoid the cycle altogether. England was stuck in the cycle: disestablishment, or collapse, begets re-establishment, decline, persecution, collapse. This is what happens where politics has called in the aid of religion.

The only place in the world at this time that looks like a polity that could refrain from establishing a church is America. Indeed, many of the American colonies have some form of established church, and Smith mentions a couple of them, but there is no American State, American Federation, American Confederation that has had an alignment of politics and religion. The American state would be a new thing in the world. Should an independent American state come about it might be possible to avoid establishing a religion. And this is what recommends non-establishment, ‘a plan,’ as he puts, of ‘no ecclesiastical government.’

Remember that I said Book V, of which Article III is a part, derives from, as he thought of it, his manuscript on jurisprudence. He is not going to wait to publish it until it is complete; he rushes it into print in 1776. He attaches it to Wealth of Nations to say this: don't establish a clergy.

This paragraph is what has attracted all the attention of scholars. It is from seeing this and how well Smith thinks it could work, that the disestablishment argument has gained any plausibility. Scholars think it is a call for freedom and that it dominates the rest.

It doesn't. Smith is at pains to show the cyclical nature of regime collapse where politics has called in the aid of religion—at pains to show that it is perpetual. You cannot confront a clergy successfully, but you can manage them by managing their ‘preferments.’ The non-establishment argument, he insists, is specific to context: where ‘politicks had never called in the aid of religion.’ That first sentence marks a transition from one argument to another. He is explicitly telling us that he has finished one argument, antidisestablishmentarianism, that works in one context and this is a new and distinct one. ‘But’, and that word is crucial, ‘if politicks had never called in the aid of religion,’ everything's different. Don’t establish a religion.

What he says to recommend this non-establishment model is similar to what recommends the antidisestablishmentarian one: stability, justice, and liberty. I think I can vindicate that by what he says in paragraph nine, but I’ve used up a lot of time, so let me conclude.

I'll end with this. I call his political theory ‘coarse clay’ political realism, so what can that theory offer us, as Bernard Williams would say, ‘now and around here’? One lesson, and I think this is perfectly general: never align persuasion and coercion. One example of such an alignment is the nation-state, persuasion and coercion. ‘That's a politician I'd like to have a beer with’ is an alignment of coercion and persuasion. Never do that sort of thing. The coercive backing undermines the persuasive force and dangerously deepens the unpopularity of each.

Last thing: he's concerned that we over obey. That was the sort of thing I began with, individual agents of ‘coarse clay.’ Even when we know the powerful do not merit our admiration, we mercifully offer it, giving free reign to their vices. Political theorists! Manage, do not motivate or justify obedience. Obedience is a problem, not the thing we should be trying to get. Thank you.