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  5. Shaftesbury's Letters and Character in Adam Smith's "Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres"

Shaftesbury's Letters and Character in Adam Smith's "Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres"

 

Bry Martin

Liberty Fund

Discussion: February 5, 2018

Shaftesbury’s Letters and Character in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

At noon on December 15, 1762 at Glasgow University, Adam Smith held his usual thrice-weekly lecture on rhetoric, continuing his two-week march through “the character of some of the best English Prose writers”—Jonathan Swift, Sir William Temple, and Joseph Addison—making “comparisons betwixt their different manners.” By now his audience of teenage boys, including two collaborating outliners responsible for what we know of Smith’s rhetoric, would have drawn a rule from their professor freshly famous for his foundational work of moral psychology, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). He repeated different standards for good writing, but they were mostly made of the same stuff: a good writer wielded sympathy (meant very much in the same sense of his Moral Sentiments) to reach his reader through plainness, precision and clarity. “When the sentiment of the speaker is expressed in a neat, clear, plain and clever manner, and the passion or affection, he is poss<ess>ed of and intends, by sympathy, to communicate to his hearer, is plainly and cleverly hit off,” so Smith had told them a few weeks before, “then and then only the expression has all the force and beauty that language can give it.” In his procedure, Smith paid close attention to the fitness between the character of the author and his style. Jonathan Swift, a morose man, reflected the style of a “plain man,” unmindful of social niceties and conventions and more apt to boldly assert than argue. The diplomat and memoirist Sir William Temple, respectful to the older generations, carried a “simple man” style, not above using a creaky old figure of speech if it got the point across. Addison’s modesty kept him from ornamental extremes and polished him into a “most polite and elegant writer.” But each of these were, Smith believed, good writers because they followed Smith’s rule that good style “consists in Express<ing> in the most concise, proper and precise manner the thought of the author… in the manner which best conveys the sentiment, passion or affection” that the author wants to communicate to the reader.1

One might have expected the Wednesday lecture to lionize another great writer, for it devoted itself almost entirely to Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, the bestselling philosopher whose Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times had burned through eleven editions in the half-century since it was printed. After all, Smith occupied the Chair of Moral Philosophy formerly held by the “never to be forgotten Mr. [Francis] Hutcheson,” his own boyhood teacher at Glasgow, an explicit champion and admirer of Shaftesbury. According to Isabel Rivers, Hutcheson’s printer in Glasgow produced a number of Shaftesburean texts in the 1740s and 1750s, publishing not only a new edition of the Characteristicks in 1743-1745, but a separate edition of his Moralists, a poem on The Judgment of Hercules, and a number of classics that Shaftesbury had admired, while a rival printer in Glasgow had published another edition of the Characteristicks in 1758. Smith himself had expressed, if not agreement, at least respect for Shaftesbury in his Letter to the Edinburgh Review in 1756, listing Shaftesbury as among the seven British philosophers who had made original contributions to philosophy. And the framing of intellectual history has long positioned Shaftesbury, who lodged morality in a developing “moral sense” exercised by sociability and self-reflection, as a father figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. On a far-off day, freedom would wreathe each with a distinguished Liberty Fund edition, attractively priced to sell to the public.2

And yet Smith came to bury Shaftesbury, not to praise him. Shaftesbury was “much inferior” to Swift, Temple and Addison but had “till very lately in this country a character much Superior to that of the others” because of “the ignorance of true propriety of language.” He had broken Smith’s rule, instead of finding the concise, proper word to express a sentiment, he had “formed to himself an idea of beauty of Stile abstracted from his own character,” implying that Shaftesbury was both narcissistic and captive to some abstract ideal. That character, so Smith taught his students, had little to recommend itself. For Shaftesbury was “of a very puny and weakly constitution, always either under some disorder or in dread of falling into one,” and thus he was disinclined to mental rigor; attentive to the froth and diversion of fine art; ignorant and contemptuous of natural philosophy; and, too refined to accept others’ schools or faiths, ultimately giving himself up to his own mish-mash of spiritual and philosophical Platonism. “As he was of no great depth in Reasoning,” Smith observed,” he would be glad to set off by the ornament of language what was deficient in matter.” His style, “pompous, grand and ornate” seemed modeled on Plato, but dressed in the politeness of the gentleman. He tried to be funny, but he wasn’t. And his figures of speech were overstuffed, with little rational substance to them. All in all, Smith had savaged a man who was in many ways his intellectual grandfather—through Hutcheson—for not only his fustian style, but his feeble body, his namby-pamby intellectual engagements, and his bombastic, vapid expression.3

Until recently Smith’s lecture has not troubled scholars as much as it should. The blast has not been passed over in silence, but it has been treated as a difference over style: plain man Smith aghast at the Earl puttin’ on the Ritz. That has changed with Doug Den Uyl’s [hereafter Doug, to either alleviate or exacerbate the awkwardness of referring to someone familiar to all present by the formal third person] article, “Das Shaftesbury Problem.” Doug raised, and then dismissed, the possibility, which he called “the promixity thesis,” that the intellectual closeness between Shaftesbury and Smith caused the rancor, as Smith was keen to differentiate himself. Doug noted that Smith never showed any such animosity, quite the opposite in fact, to his friend Hume, who was closer than Shaftesbury to his position. He then suggested some real differences between Shaftesbury and Smith, that combined with a potential misunderstanding of Shaftesbury’s project, might have led to the excoriation. Where Smith prized clarity and precise communication with the reader, Shaftesbury’s enterprise was fundamentally Socratic—he wanted to challenge the reader and ultimately to promote the sort of self-reflection that might better him or her and lead to higher truths. Doug connected this approach to style to a different moral foundation: Smith founded moral life and self-understanding on the sympathetic relationship to others in society, while Shaftesbury encouraged both moral development and self-understanding through self-examination. Both philosophers, Doug underlined, had different ends—"self-perfectibility” for Shaftesbury and “social propriety” for Smith. Doug’s responders James Otteson and Ryan Patrick Hanley questioned this last characterization of Smith’s end as “social propriety,” arguing that Smith’s project was primarily descriptive, not aimed at “moral reformation.” They also raised other alternatives for Smith’s rancor at Shaftesbury—perhaps Smith balked at Shaftesbury’s revolutionary ambition in overturning old systems of philosophy and religion, Hanley wondered, or Smith’s faith may have been shaken by Shaftesbury’s treatment of Cartesian science, as Otteson queried. In a later article, Catherine Labio justly raised, but did not pursue, the possibility that Smith’s attack on Shaftesbury may stem from his general anti-aristocratic attitudes. Still, possible alternatives aside, none of them have tried to better Doug’s explanation of Smith’s lecture and I doubt I would be able to do so, either.4

If I can add anything to Doug’s account it is to respond to his call for historical evidence that might help us understand the lecture better. First, I will explore Smith’s stated source for Shaftesbury’s character, Shaftesbury’s printed letters, and the use he makes of them, showing that his conclusions are traceable to facts in the letters, but hardly explain the construction of a psychological profile far from the most plausible interpretation of those letters. Next, I will consider how Smith’s discussion of Shaftesbury groups him with other writers who are commonly classified—whatever their actual party—as deists and Commonwealthmen, and that Smith may have deplored the inward, unsociable psychology of such an independent strain of religion and politics.

But I want to emphasize at the outset that the moral stakes Doug shows in the differences between Smith and Shaftesbury are high enough in themselves to explain the rancor. In Moral Sentiments, Smith gave a convincing portrait of how people develop proper moral behavior and self-definition as they give and receive (and imagine receiving from others) sympathetic approval and disapproval. That sympathy was perfectly compatible with human corruption as well as virtue, as Smith showed in his description of the human tendency to admire or show compassion to wealth and rank, while only a small philosophical few pay such sympathetic respects to the good and wise. Yet Smith had no recommendations for moral reformation, for how those good few could evangelize or purge the many of their corruption. It seems, rather, that larger moral transformation would either be the work of evolving material conditions, as Smith’s stadial theory suggests and/or the Invisible Hand. Either way, Shaftesbury’s admonition to look within for truth and challenge others to likewise search for moral improvement and perfection could only come off as profoundly un-sympathetic to Smith, while possibly also dangerous if it were not so ineffective. And all this might account for a great deal of the barbed, somewhat unfair remarks Smith threw out at Shaftesbury, particularly as he harped repeatedly on Shaftesbury’s Platonism, his tendency to draw ideals from his own mind, and how he could never reconcile himself to other people’s philosophical movements and faiths.

The Letters in Historical Context

In the lecture, Smith described his source for Shaftesbury’s personal character as hailing from “what we can learn from his Letters,” an often neglected source of information on Shaftesbury that bears no small role in both his fame and derision over the eighteenth century. Shaftesbury’s letters published in the eighteenth century were extremely fragmentary—a set of ten letters Shaftesbury had written to Michael Ainsworth, a young man at Oxford from 1707 to 1710, published in 1716; and a set of 14 letters to his friend Robert Molesworth and two to his friend John Cropley spanning September 1708 to November 1709, collected in 1721. The Molesworth letters, particularly, were an instant bestseller, going through at least three editions in 1721, at a time when Shaftesbury’s final posthumous rendering of the Characteristicks, the 1714 second edition, awaited another printing, and showed little sign of becoming one of the great British philosophical bestsellers of the century. The only sustained commentary on the Characteristicks in the first decade after its publication belonged to the Genevan exegete and Locke admirer Jean Le Clerc in a translated French review in 1712, and while a 1718 proposal for a new English dictionary spoke to his literary stature in recommending it cite “the Authoritys of the most approv’d Authors, from Chaucer to Shaftesbury,” there is little evidence that the Characteristicks had set the public afire the way good political red meat could. Mandeville, whose original 1714 Fable of the Bees did not mention Shaftesbury, would twice quote Shaftesbury in a 1720 work as “the learned Nobleman” and “one of the most Polite Authors of the Age…” For its first ten years, then, the Characteristicks seemed to fade into obsolescence, a work of admirable style, but gaining none of the partisan and intellectual controversy that might bring the late Earl back to the conversation.5

The 1721 Molesworth Letters regained the public’s attention, trading on family and political gossip, but most of all, finally giving the elusive Shaftesbury stable, definitive character as a principled “Old Whig,” unwilling to trade his beliefs to play the political game. The substance of the letters were actually narrow and private, involving Shaftesbury’s reluctant efforts to marry, which eventually took on ather pitiless rationalizations about his antique self-sacrifice in undertaking an “experiment” to marry a dull, good woman, rather treated as livestock than the future countess Jane Ewer. “Will it be enough, that I take a Breeder out of a good Family, with a right Education, fit for a mere Wife,” Shaftesbury wrote to Molesworth, “and with no advantages but simple Innocence, Modesty, and the plain qualities of a good Mother, and a Good Nurse? This is as little the modern relish, as that old fashion’d wife of Horace’s.” The letters also provided some mild political chatter and asides on political figures of his day, including John Somers and the Lord Treasurer Sidney Godolphin. But the impression of Shaftesbury as a particularly strident example of the “Old” or Commonwealth Whig would have come from the dedicatory introduction provided by Shaftesbury’s great intellectual frenemy, John Toland, who had once published Shaftesbury’s An Inquiry concerning Virtue (1699) without his permission and was sinning again by publishing his private correspondence. Toland’s Shaftesbury was an overwhelmingly political animal, a hero of the Old Whig principles who had stared down the corruption of the Williamite Whig Junto government (“Apostate Whigs” as Toland called them). The Apostate-Whigs had charged Shaftesbury with being “splenetick and melancholy; whimsical and eaten up with vapors… too bookish, because not given to Play, nor assiduous at Court… no good Companion, because not a Rake nor a hard Drinker… no Man of the World, because not selfish nor open to Bribes.” But Toland, having circulated this charge to the world, would not let it stand, instead boldly standing up for his friend. It was Shaftesbury’s shock at the loss of principle, and his ill-health, that “inclin’d him to affect retirement.” Toland did much to fix the impression of Shaftesbury as a man of uncompromising principle, rather disappointed by the fallen natures of political men who failed to live up to it.6

The characterization, if probably overstating Shaftesbury’s alienation with the Junto, got the gist of Shaftesbury’s Old Whiggery and Commonwealthman-ism essentially correct, pointing out a pugnacious partisanship rather obscured in the philosophical elevation of the Characteristicks. Shaftesbury’s grandfather had famously been Anthony Ashley Cooper, the First Earl, the greatest architect of the opposition Country Party (sometimes styled “Whigs” after 1681) in the 1670s and early 1680s, which had called for the exclusion of James, Duke of York from the royal succession, the purging of Catholicism at court, the preservation of Parliamentary decisionmaking from tampering and the toleration of Protestant dissenters. As England split into Whig and Tory in the decades after the Glorious Revolution, it was the First Earl’s former associates and their heirs, principally John Somers for the Whigs, and Robert Harley for the Tories, who emerged as leaders of each side, both sides claiming the mantle of the “Old Whig” tradition. Such a contest made royalty out of the Third Earl, and while each side courted his support, in the end he threw his weight firmly behind the Whig Somers, the unnamed recipient of his Letter concerning Enthusiasm. Lawrence Klein has argued that the Characteristicks was intended to shape a new political culture that the Whigs could dominate, and among the strongest pieces of evidence he adduces is a letter Shaftesbury wrote to Somers around the publication of the Characteristicks declaring his intention to perform a kind of aikido on the Tories, flipping their predominance in learning and manners:

Whilst their [the Tories’] Soveraignty in Arts & Sciences, their Presidentship in Letters, their Alma-Mater’s and Academical Virtues have been acknowledg’d & taken for granted, they who treated the Poor Rivall Presbitereans as unpolite, unform’d, without Literature, or Manners, will perhaps be somewhat mov’d to find themselves treated in the same way: not as Corrupters merely of Morals & Publick Principles; but as the very Reverse or Antipodes of Good Breeding, Schollership, Behaviour, Sense & Manners.

While most of the anthologized works of the Characteristicks exude no naked partisanship, the Miscellaneous Reflections, the new work of the third volume added to the anthologized works of the previous two, contains language that can only be taken as combative to the High Church constituency of the Tory party. The Letters would have only confirmed suspicions of Shaftesbury’s partisanship.7

The result, in any case, was a reinvigoration of Shaftesbury’s place in the conversation.

The year 1722 brought a second edition of the Tory Mary Astell’s Bart’lemy Fair attacking the irreligion of Shaftesbury’s Letter concerning Enthusiasm. A third edition of the Characteristicks followed the next year, along with a second edition of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, this time dissecting Shaftesbury’s philosophy and declaring that “the two Systems cannot be more opposite than his Lordship’s and mine.” Smith’s later teacher, Francis Hutcheson, then under the patronage of Molesworth in Dublin, would come to Shaftesbury’s rescue in An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue . . . in which the Principles of the late Earl of Shaftesbury are Explain’d and Defended, against the Author of the Fable of the Bees, printed in London by Shaftesbury’s own printer John Darby in 1725. Shaftesbury was back and he would not leave. The Anglican minister John Brown’s Three Essays on the Characteristics (1751), an over-four hundred page commentary criticizing the Characteristicks, took Shaftesbury to task for his advocacy of ridicule and raillery, his idea of grounding morality in a natural taste for the morally beautiful, and for his slights to revelation, all of which Brown saw as a groundwork for irreligion. The dedication remarked that Shaftesbury “took it into his Head to oppose the solid Wisdom of the Gospel, by the Visions of false Philosophy. As His, at best, is but the Cause of Wit and Eloquence, all the support he could give it was only to tell us how PLATO wrote.” And with this and in his quip that “the admirers of Lord S. who love pompous Declamation,” we can see something of the rumblings of Smith’s future criticism of Shaftesbury. Brown’s Essays went into four editions by the time of Smith’s lecture, and was abstracted in the Gentleman’s Quarterly in 1751, provoking two defenses of Shaftesbury to likewise enter print. Smith was almost certainly aware of this ink squall over Shaftesbury’s irreligion and his ridicule, and it is probable that it was what he was referring to when he told his class that “Shaftesbury till very lately in this country had a character much superior…”8

Smith’s Use of the Letters to Create a Psychological Profile

It is rather doubtful that Smith ever read Toland’s introduction to the letters, but he probably nevertheless picked up indirectly on Shaftesbury’s Country Whig or Commonwealthman politics. The Glasgow editions of the collected letters—a 1746 edition from Hutcheson’s printer, Robert Foules, and an edition appended as part of a fourth volume to the 1758 Characteristicks—cut out Toland’s introduction entirely. But they kept Toland’s sometimes-loaded annotations, so Smith would have seen some examples of Toland’s attempts to connect Shaftesbury to “Old Whig” or Commonwealthman politics. For example, when Shaftesbury wrote Molesworth on November 4, 1708, rather sighing that “the days are long since past, that you and I were treated as Jacobites [i.e., favorers of the restoration of James II and his line],” Toland clarified it with a more strident note: “The truly apostate Whigs, who became servile and arbitrary to please court empirics, branded all those as Jacobites, who adher’d to those very principles, that occasion’d and justify’d the revolution.” Smith’s remarks that “We are told” Shaftesbury was a good Parliamentary orator almost suggests he consulted Toland’s edition, but his “we do not find he was ever distinguished in debate or Deliberation in Politicall matters” is hardly consistent with Toland’s introduction, which argued Shaftesbury was an effective adversary to the “Apostate Whigs.” Smith’s treatment of Shaftesbury was, on the surface, apolitical. If there is one thing he almost certainly derived from the Molesworth letters, it was Shaftesbury’s physical frailty and his anxieties for his health, which do appear throughout the letters, but otherwise the Molesworth letters (unlike, as we shall soon see the Ainsworth letters) are not particularly helpful for understanding his character of Shaftesbury.9

Smith’s criticisms of Shaftesbury were common of his criticisms of other Commonwealthmen in the lectures, with whom he frequently grouped Shaftesbury in considering pompous style in the lectures on rhetoric. He not only lumped Shaftesbury in the lecture with the anti-Walpolean Scottish Commonwealthman poet, James Thomson “and others of that sort,” but in other lectures coupled Shaftesbury with Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, the alienated former Whig, turned transient Tory prime minister, turned disaffected Commonwealthman author of The Craftsman. Style was at the forefront of each comparison; those who praised Shaftesbury and Thomson were ignorant not for their Old Whiggery, but as to the “true propriety of language.” In the previous lecture he had remarked that Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke “presume,” and they “display their superior dignity etc. Swift his superiority of Sense.” But Shaftesbury, Thomson and Bolingbroke were hardly the only flowery writers of the Augustan period, and their writing—nationalistic verse, classicist ethics, anti-Walpole pamphlets—seems less immediately connected by style than political posture, that of disaffection with the corruption of government ministry or court and praise of the virtue of the patriotic gentleman keeping a distance from it. Shaftesbury, Thomson and Bolingbroke—for all his Toryism—are all now frequently connected to dominant Commonwealthman thought and to each other. In the Moral Sentiments Smith had cited a passage from Thomson’s Seasons as the prime example of “those whining and melancholy moralists, who are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our brethren are in misery, who regard as impious the natural joy of prosperity…” In Smith’s jibe at Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury at adopting a style that rather conveyed their “dignity” rather than “sense,” there is a sense that Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury played the patrician like the aristocrats they were. Whether Smith thought that all this Old Whiggery and Commonwealthman business was, in fact, a patrician politics, scoffing at the corruption of the politicians who got their hands dirty and did something while affecting a virtuous retirement masking apathy and incapacity is unknowable. Something like this attitude is reflected in the Moral Sentiments, where Smith writes that governments are run, “by men who were educated in the middle and inferior ranks of life, who have been carried forward by their own industry and abilities,” and that “the great, after having regarded them first with contempt, and afterwards with envy, are at last contented to truckle…” Still, although we can see tantalizing patterns of affiliation in the Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Thomson rhetorical grouping, Smith placed what partisanship he had too close to the vest, for us to ever know how much this political grouping was intentional or coincidental.10

That “dignity,” Shaftesbury’s nobility (perhaps Bolingbroke’s as well) seems to have nettled Smith, who had rather fixed ideas of the aristocracy’s ineptness at bold ambitious endeavors. Smith considered the public’s greater admiration for “the rich and the great” rather than the “wise and the good” in the Moral Sentiments very much in the manner of a rhetorical clash between pompousness and superfluity and precise expression and communication. Smith wrote of two roads that one might take: one leading to “the study of wisdom and the practice of virtue,” the other to “the acquisition of wealth and greatness.” Taking one road or the other develops a character, “the one, of proud ambition and ostentatious avidity; the other, of humble modesty and equitable justice.” And each prescribes different “models” or “pictures” for behavior, “the one more gaudy and glittering in its colouring; the other more correct and more exquisitely beautiful in its outline: the one forcing itself upon the notice of every wandering eye; the other, attracting the attention of scarce any body but the most studious and careful observer.” Smith’s metaphor was undoubtedly visual, but was also a tidy summary for style, and for human character, too—one that was manifestly anti-aristocratic and expressed the moral defect Smith found in Shaftesbury’s ornate prose. Smith’s treatment of the chronically underappreciated precise Swift and the overappreciated florid Shaftesbury shows a case in point. This essentially stylistic and aesthetic consideration is only the jumping off point to a broader social analysis— “the middle and inferior stations of life” are characterized by vigor, prudence and ability, while the “superior stations of life” seek pleasure and amusing dissipation. “In all the middling and inferior professions, real and solid professional abilities, joined to prudent, just, firm, and temperate conduct, can very seldom fail of success.” In comparison, the great desire pleasure: “In quiet and peaceable times… the prince, or great man, wishes only to be amused… The external graces, the frivolous accomplishments of that impertinent and foolish thing called a man of fashion, are commonly more admired than the solid and masculine virtues of a warrior, a statesman, a philosopher, or a legislator.” If we compare this description to Smith’s portrait of Shaftesbury as feeble, drawn to the amusement of art rather than the rigor of science, too delicate for religious fellowship, and perhaps a good political speaker, but not one who can debate or deliberate well, we can see Shaftesbury sliding very much into one of Smith’s social-moral types. Smith’s quip that “Politeness is so much the virtue of the great, that it will do little honour to any body but themselves,” are the words of a man set at an unbridgeable imaginative distance from Shaftesbury, in style, character, and standing.11

But it seems that rank and politics were not all that was at play. Shaftesbury’s reputation as a deist—a religious perspective coincidentally shared, perhaps, by Bolingbroke and Thomson—also nettled Smith, rather more, it appears, on grounds of sociability than theology. Shaftesbury was, according to Smith, raised and educated under men “who have no very strong affection to any particular sect or tenets in Religion, who cried up freedom of thought and [and] Liberty of Concience in all matters religious or philosophical without being attached to any particular men or opinions.” Although as a matter of religious politics and toleration this upbringing allied Shaftesbury with Puritans, “The Grosness of their conduct, the little decency or appearance of devotion that they used in their manner of worship shocked his delicate and refined temper and in time prejudized him against every scheme of revealed religion.” Thus, instead of finding the likeminded, he turned to look at the ancients, above all the Platonists, so that his “Philosophy and Theology is the same in effect with theirs but modernized a little and made somewhat more suitable to the taste then prevailing,” with a dash of Locke and Hobbes thrown in. Smith, in other words, saw Shaftesbury as a follower of natural religion, the essence of Deism, and a denier of revealed religion, and thus, Christianity. Smith’s view of Shaftesbury’s reputed Deism probably had no decisive role in setting Smith against him. Smith, of course, was friends with David Hume, who felt free enough to joke with his friend that the enthusiasm of the bishops, “these Retainers to Superstition” for the Moral Sentiments might bode ill for its reception among “true Philosophers” and to urge Smith, “I doubt not but you are so good a Christian as to return good for evil and to flatter my Vanity, by telling me, that all the Godly in Scotland abuse me for my Account of John Knox and the Reformation etc.” Gavin Kennedy’s study of Smith’s revisions to the theological content of the Moral Sentiments away from revealed religion after the death of his devout mother may either suggest a disillusionment later in life, as Kennedy proposes, or a sympathy with Deism all along stifled by his devotion to his mother and the expectations of his position as Chair of Moral Philosophy. Yet what is striking about Smith’s criticism of Shaftesbury’s Deism is that he musters no attack on faithlessness itself, but rather upon Shaftesbury’s unsociable instinct, a “delicate and refined temper” that led to it. It is less atheism or Deism that Smith attacks than the lack of sympathy that leads Shaftesbury to frame his own project of Platonic religion.12

Smith’s ideas of Shaftesbury’s religious development seem to have come from a different collection of letters than the Molesworth letters responsible for the impression of his feebleness and possible hypochondria. Smith seems to turn instead to Shaftesbury’s letters to Michael Ainsworth, a young man from his home manor of Wimborne St. Giles, Dorset, who was studying at Oxford to be a minister. In these letters—which are often cited by Shaftesbury scholars for their surprising ambivalence towards Locke and their clarification of Shaftesbury’s ideas of a developmental “moral sense”—Shaftesbury plays something like the guru to the young man, waxing frankly on religion and philosophy in a rather pedantic tone that would have been wholly inappropriate for writing Molesworth. In the first letter, Shaftesbury wondered at the way some of the High Churchmen had attacked Locke’s rational arguments for Christianity, to which Shaftesbury pointed out that reason safeguarded the Church from “PHANATICISM” described in terms that could conceivably cover much Calvinistic theology and liturgy:

Where does the Stress of their [i.e., the fanatics] Cause lie? Are not their unintelligible Motions of the Spirit; their unexpressible pretended Feelings, Apprehensions, and Lights within; their Inspirations in Prophecy, extempore Prayer, Preaching, &c. are not these, I say, the Foundations, on which they build their Cause? Are not our cold dead Reasonings, (as they call them,) a Reproach and Stumbling-Block to them...

After showing how reason is a safeguard against a rather Calvinist strain of fanaticism, Shaftesbury then praised several pre-eminent, mostly Low Church, Anglican divines, who allegedly built their theological arguments on reason like Locke. He then turned to praise England’s “Bishops and Dignify’d Church-men, (the most worthily and justly Dignify’d of any in any Age)” both for being “inclinable to Moderation in the high Calvinistick Points” and for being “for Toleration, inviolable Toleration….” Shaftesbury’s love of toleration and reason and his debt to Locke for his ideas on both shines through, as Smith said it did, and so, too, he painted a rather ridiculous caricature of some Calvinist worship and theology. But all this was rather the standard talk of Low Church Anglicanism at the time, lionizing Low Church writers, praising moderation, toleration and reasonableness, chastizing Dissenters and High Churchmen alike, for the scruples and bigotry that divided the Church. At no time did Shaftesbury express that he had been “shocked” by Calvinism, or evince a “delicate and refined temper,” or religious fellowship altogether. Shaftesbury’s break with Calvinism appears, but Smith’s rendering of it is loaded with a psychological and biographical load that the letter can hardly bear.13

Another letter to Ainsworth contained Shaftesbury’s alleged denial of revelation. Shaftesbury counseled Ainsworth to look not to “the Wonders themselves” but “the Excellence of the Things reveal’d.” That Smith might see this kind of talk as a shifty attempt to slip the wholesale disenchantment of revelation through the backdoor seems natural, but on its face Shaftesbury was saying that there was both a philosophical way and an unphilosophical way to know revelation—the “Vulgar” knew revelation by “Miracles” and “positive Precepts and Commands,” but the “wise and virtuous” knew it by “the Nature of the Thing.” As we have already seen there was a large literature, peaking in the 1750s, both arguing for, and defending Shaftesbury from, accusations of irreligion, denial of revelation included. Smith may have simply picked up on what was already in the air, and seeing such a suspicious quote against miracles, concluded Shaftesbury truly was opposed to revealed religion. But an open attack on revelation would have been extraordinary in a letter to a young minister-in-training at Oxford, one that would have broken or complicated their relationship, if it was truly understood in that sense. The letters continued without any such evident turmoil.14

Finally, Smith’s attribution of Shaftesbury’s Platonism and his self-directed intellectual regimen may also have derived from the Ainsworth letters. Shaftesbury prescribed Ainsworth a classical reading regimen heavy with Neo- and Classical Platonism—Simplicius, Cebes, Origen of Alexandria, and, cautiously, starting with just the Alcibiades, “the Divine Plato”—as well as Stoicism—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Further, Shaftesbury counseled Ainsworth against allowing others (except Shaftesbury) to perceive his moral development or involve them in his self-examination. “Keep your Virtue and Honesty to your self: For if it be truly such, it will be in no Pain for being kept secret,” Shaftesbury advised, “And thus you may be safe, and in due Time, perhaps, useful also to others. Learn to Discourse and Reason with your self, or, as you honestly do, in Letters to me. Trouble not others nor be provok’d to shew your Sentiments…” One might see Smith’s description of Shaftesbury’s transformation, “desirous of forming some system to himself more agreeable to his own inclinations and temper,” plunging into the ancient world and molding a Platonic system out of it, expressed in the Ainsworth letters. It is certainly hard to imagine Smith stomaching this kind of inward, profoundly un-sympathetic view of moral education and development, which in many ways treated other people as a potential obstruction of moral development, not a foundation of it. Indeed, Shaftesbury’s insinuation that virtue, and perhaps reason, is not genuine if it concerns itself with how others might take it, by implication criticizes any moral theory grounded on sympathy, or spectators actual or impartial, as a kind of corruption.15

The Riddle of Smith’s Intentions

In short, it seems to me that the source of Smith’s character of Shaftesbury in his blistering lecture was, as he said, the letters—principally the ten letters to Ainsworth—which contain matter pertaining to nearly everything Smith said on the subject. And yet if all the ingredients are there, the interpretation Smith made of the letters is highly speculative, even implausible. Repeatedly, Smith translated Shaftesbury’s reasoned arguments and admonitions to Ainsworth as biographical facts about Shaftesbury’s own moral development. It is not, for example, just that Shaftesbury believed that reason was a guard against strains of Calvinism he viewed as fanatical (in one letter) and that he thought miracles a rather shabby way to approach revelation (in another), but rather Smith connected the two and placed them as biographical facts contributing to Shaftesbury’s psychological makeup. At some point in his life Calvinist worship “shocked his delicate and refined temper and in time prejudized him against every scheme of revealed religion.” In effect Smith psychologized Shaftesbury, turned his argument about beliefs into a cautionary and peculiar “character” that need not be argued against, rather the ill effects of his mental wiring on his style studied, and hopefully the adoption of his style avoided. Anti-aristocratic and perhaps even political animosity may have contributed to fill in some of the gaps between the plain language of the letters and the developmental portrait of Shaftesbury Smith painted. Taken as philosophical argument, Smith’s characterization of Shaftesbury seems inaccurate, a wholly inadequate and borderline abusive way of rebutting Shaftesbury’s beliefs. But that is to mistake Smith’s purpose in giving the lecture, which was concerned with creating a “character” that might vividly impress a stylistic rule upon the boys assembled in front of him, with no thought that what he was saying would ever be published as a definitive criticism of the famous philosopher. In its own way, it served a similar purpose to Smith’s earlier characterization of the “simple man” and “plain man” to introduce the styles of Temple and Swift, full of peculiar tics and minute observances that would make the profile stick in the mind. We might wish he had been more charitable and precise in his intellectual disagreements with Shaftesbury, but Smith was a good teacher, and his students probably appreciated the choice of a clear stylistic rule punched by quirky anecdotes.

Still, we are left to speculate why Smith had no great regard for Shaftesbury. It seems that Doug’s position that there were fundamental differences in their moral theories between a sociable and sympathetic morality and a rather inward Socratic process of self-examination, has repeatedly resurfaced, coloring the anti-aristocratic, anti-deistic and perhaps anti-Commonwealthman differences expressed in the character. Shaftesbury is too inward, too in love with his own refinement, too un-sociable, too smitten with models drawn from antiquity. These observations hum a similar tune. I would like to make one further suggestion, however. At no time in the lecture did Smith ever present or psychologize Shaftesbury’s most famous moral ideas—the parallel of moral and natural beauty, the moral sense, or benevolence as virtue. All of these ideas Smith would have first encountered as a student through Hutcheson, whose own presentation of many of them in the Inquiry into the Ideas of the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue defended Shaftesbury in a much more straightforward, precise, thorough, systematic treatment than Shaftesbury had ever given these concepts. In Moral Sentiments Smith presented Shaftesbury as something of a modern Stoic philosopher who placed virtue in “maintaining a proper balance of the affections, and in allowing no passion to go beyond its proper sphere.” At the very least, the description was woefully incomplete. But if we look to the section where we would should find Shaftesbury, Smith’s review of those philosophers who believe virtue to consist in benevolence, we will find no mention of him. Smith acknowledged the Cambridge Platonists (though not Whichchote, who enjoyed a preface by Shaftesbury), but then quickly latched onto the true master: “But of all the patrons of this system, ancient or modern, the late Dr. Hutcheson was undoubtedly, beyond all comparison, the most acute, the most distinct, the most philosophical, and what is of the greatest consequence of all, the soberest and the most judicious.” These qualities that supposedly vaulted Hutcheson to the top of a moral philosophy commonly associated with Shaftesbury in the Moral Sentiments very nearly approximated Smith’s stylistic rule and the qualities that Shaftesbury’s own character and style supposedly lacked in the lecture. Later on in the lectures, Smith conceded some small praise to Shaftesbury over his Inquiry concerning Virtue, the sole work within the Characteristicks that approached the kind of formal treatise structure Hutcheson used, noting the logical validity, if not soundness, of Shaftesbury’s argument: “Whether his Reasoning be sufficient or not, his method is perfect…” Perhaps there was something like the “proximity thesis” at work, only by which Smith differentiated his former teacher rather than himself from Shaftesbury. Or perhaps Smith simply came too late to Shaftesbury, having already read Shaftesbury’s famous principles examined more philosophically and precisely by Hutcheson. Smith’s lecture inspires so many “perhapses,” so incapable of ultimate resolution, but hopefully the conjecturing itself will bring us to a better appreciation of Smith and Shaftesbury and the many uncertain ways that they connected.16

  1. All citations to Adam Smith’s own words in this essay have come from The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 8 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985). Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (hereafter, LRBL), i.v.56, i.90-95, 118, 127, 130, 133 [hereafter, LRBL]. A good overview of the Lectures, arguing for Adam Smith’s place as a defender of “modern” rhetoric against ancient styles and forms, can be found in Wilbur Samuel Howell, “Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric: An Historical Assessment,” Speech Monographs 36 (1969): 393-418. J.C. Bryce’s introduction to the Glasgow Edition speaks to both the history of the manuscript and the relationship between Smith’s ethics and rhetoric, pointing out that the transcribing student, had underlined (rare for him), “by sympathy,” probably to denote Smith’s emphasis in the lecture. Bryce, “Introduction,” in Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985), 1-6, 18-19.↩

  2. Adam Smith, Letter to the Edinburgh Review, 10; William E. Alderman, “English Editions of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 61 (1967): 332-333; William Robert Scott, Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), passim; T.C. Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (London: Ampson, Low et al., 1882), 183 (“There are no two names, perhaps, in the history of English moral philosophy, which stand in a closer connexion. The analogy drawn between beauty and virtue, the functions assigned to the moral sense, the position that the benevolent feelings form an original and irreducible part of our nature, and the unhesitating adoption of the principle that the test of virtuous action is its tendency to promote the general welfare, or good of the whole, are at once obvious and fundamental points of agreement between the two authors.”); Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-1780, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2:184-186, and more generally for the transmission and alteration of Shaftesbury’s thought in Scotland and England, 2:173-199.↩

  3. LRBL, i.133-148.↩

  4. For an example of an old interpretation of Smith’s take on Shaftesbury, there is Wilbur Samuel Howell, “Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric: An Historical Assessment,” Speech Monographs 36 (1969): 403-404, the lecture reflects “the dislike of the new rhetoric for superficiality of subject matter and the ornate style as its necessary concomitant”; Douglas Den Uyl, “Das Shaftesbury Problem,” The Adam Smith Review 6 (2011): 209-223; James R. Otteson, “Response,” in ibid., 224-227; Ryan Patrick Hanley, “Another response,” in ibid., 228-231; Catherine Labio, “Adam Smith’s Aesthetics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, ed. Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli, Craig Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 115.↩

  5. LRBL, i.138; Letters from the Right Honourable the Late Earl of Shaftesbury to Robert Molesworth, [ed. John Toland] (London: W. Wilkins, 1721); Several Letters Written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the Vniversity (London: J. Roberts, 1716); Bernard Jean Le Clerc, Extract and Judgment of the Charactersticks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (London: Egbert Sanger, 1712); The Criticks, Being Papers upon the Times (London: W. Chetwood, 1719), 97; Mandeville, Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness (London, 1720), 239, 241; Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F.B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1988), 1:lxxii-lxxiii.↩

  6. Shaftesbury to Robert Molesworth, November 20, 1708, July 19, 1709 and November 1, 1709, Letters from the Earl of Shaftesbury to Robert Molesworth, 16, 40, 42; [John Toland], “To a Young Gentleman at Oxford,” in ibid., viii, xv-xvi. Shaftesbury’s son dismissed Toland’s character sketch of Shaftesbury in his anonymously penned dictionary entry of his father. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 4th Earl of Shaftesbury], “Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of),”A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, ed. John Peter Bernard, Thomas Birch, and John Lockman (London: James Bettenham, 1739): 9:179-186.For the rather fraught relationship between Shaftesbury and Toland, see Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 134, 204-207, 217-218, 237-239; For Toland’s and Shaftesbury’s place in oppositional Country politics and Whig commitments, see Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 150-172. For both, lumped together under “The Molesworth Circle” in their place in the Commonwealthman tradition, see the work that still stands as something like the Dictionary of National Biography of this political tradition, Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004), 121-129↩

  7. For Harley’s courtship of Shaftesbury, see Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 308; Shaftesbury to John Somers, March 30, 1711, reprinted in Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 152; Keith Feiling, A History of the Tory Party, 1640-1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 479-493. An example of Shaftesbury’s anti-Tory language in the Miscellaneous Reflections:

    ‘Tis them doubtless that we owe the Opprobriousness and Abuse of those naturally honest Appellations of Free-Livers, Free-Thinkers, Latitudinarians, or what’ever other Character implies a Largeness of Mind, and generous Use of Understanding…. ‘Tis thought dangerous for us to be over-rational, or too much Masters of our-selves, in what we draw, by just Conclusions, from Reason only. Seldom therefore do these Expositors fail of bringing the thought of LIBERTY into disgrace. Even at the expence of Virtue, and of that very Idea of GOODNESS on which they build the Mysterys of their profitable Science, they derogate from Morals, and reverse all true Philosophy; they refine on Selfishness, and explode Generosity; promote a slavish Obedience in the room of voluntary Duty, and free Service; exalt blind Ignorance for Devotion, recommend low Thought, decry Reason, extol Voluptuousness, Wilfulness, Vindicativeness, Arbitrariness, Vain-Glory; and even deify those Weak Passions which are the Disgrace rather than the Ornament of human Nature.” Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Doug Den Uyl, 3 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001), 3:187.

    ↩

  8. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (London: Edmund Parker, 1723), 372; Mary Astell, An Enquiry after Wit, 2nd ed. (London: John Bateman, 1722); Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (LondonL John Darby, 1725); John Brown, Essays on the Characteristics (London: C. Davis, 1751), ii, 18n; Charles Bulkley, A Vindication of My Lord Shaftesbury, on the Subject of Ridicule (London: John Noon, 1751); Robert Andrews, Animadversions on Mr. Brown’s Three Essays on the Characteristicks (London: John Noon, 1752); Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, Volume XXI (London: Edward Cave, 1751), 215-218, 249-252, 297-302, 351-355; LRBL, i.137 (emphasis added).↩

  9. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Letters of Shaftesbury, author of the Characteristicks, collected into one Volume ([Glasgow]: [Robert Foules], 1746); Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. A New Edition. 4 vols. (Glasgow: n.p., 1758); LRBL, i.140; [Toland], “To a Young Gentleman at Oxford,” xvi-xviii, 13n.;↩

  10. TMS III.3.9. Thomson is rather easy to connect to Shaftesbury. His Seasons placed Shaftesbury among a Whig political and philosophical canon that included John Hampden, Algernon Sidney, Locke, Robert Boyle, Newton nad Milton in a list of England’s greats: “The generous ASHLEY thine, the friend of man;/ Who scan’d his nature with a brother’s eye,/ His weakness prompt to shade, to raise his aim,/ To touch the finer movements of the mind,/ And with MORAL BEAUTY charm the heart.” James Thomson, The Seasons (London: n.p., 1730), 90-92. Robbins notes Thomson’s admiration of the Characteristics and asserts that “the seasons paraphrased parts of the Third Earl’s work.” Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, 253. My Bolingbroke assignation is more debatable. For Robbins, Bolingbroke was only disingenuously a Commonwealthman, and essentially “a freethinker and a Tory, albeit one who could put Scripture to his own uses and cite the canonical Whig writers in defense of his own devious ways.” Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, 289; Isaac Kramnick, however, stressed how common the strands of thinking were between Bolingbroke and the Commonwealthmen, Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 236-260., and Kramnick thought Bolingbroke probably drew from Shaftesbury’s ideals of sociability, though not his ideas of benevolence, to attack the Hobbesian and Lockean social contracts. Ibid., 89-90. For a comparison of their deism, where Shaftesbury figures as an inward-directed Platonic deist, Bolingbroke rather stridently anti-Platonic deist, see Alfred O. Aldridge, “Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke,” Philological Quarterly 31 (1952): 1-16. Whatever Bolingbroke’s sincere beliefs, however, he often looked, talked, and walked like a Commonwealthman to others, and Bernard Bailyn has shown that his appeal in colonial American largely overlapped with, and his arguments were largely identical to, such a Commonwealthman classic as Cato’s Letters. Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1992) 39-40n. and accompanying text.↩

  11. TMS I.iii.2.5,6 I.iii.3.2, 5, 6; LRBL i.139-140.↩

  12. LRBL, i. 138-143; David Hume to Adam Smith, April 12, 1759, Correspondence of Adam Smith, 35-36; Gavin Kennedy, “Adam Smith on Religion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, 473-481.↩

  13. Shaftesbury to Ainsworth, February 24, 1707, in Several Letters Written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the University (London: J. Roberts, 1716), 4-6; LRBL, i.138-139, 141-142.↩

  14. Shaftesbury to Ainsworth, February 8, 1710, in Several Letters, 32-33; LRBL, i.142.↩

  15. Shaftesbury to Ainsworth, April 2, 1708, Several Letters, 18 and Shaftesbury to Ainsworth, January 28, 1709, Several Letters, 21-23; LRBL, i.142-143. There is no evidence that Smith was aware of Shaftesbury’s preface to the sermon collection of the Cambridge Platonist, Benjamin Whichchote, although it was included in the fourth volume of the 1758 Glasgow edition of the Characteristicks along with the Letters. If he had known about it, it might have changed his view of the development of Platonism in Shaftesbury’s thought and its potential compatibility with Christianity.↩

  16. TMS, VII.ii.I.48, VII.ii.3.3; LRBL, ii.126.↩