Nils von Rosenstein: An Enlightened Follower of Adam Smith in Eighteenth-Century Sweden

We have sometimes been told that Adam Smith did not have many followers in eighteenth-century Sweden. In this essay, I show that one of the most prominent thinkers and public figures of late eighteenth-century Sweden, Nils von Rosenstein (1752–1824), had a strong interest in Smith along with other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. In his 1793 Försök til en afhandling om uplysningen, til dess beskaffenhet, nytta och nödvändighet för samhället (An Attempt at a Dissertation on the Enlightenment, its Character, Usefulness and Necessity for Society), Rosenstein singled out the Wealth of Nations (WN) as the greatest work on political economy ever written. He also put forward Smith together with François Fénelon and Montesquieu as among the thinkers who had “enlightened the world.”

WN has yet to be translated fully into Swedish, but extensive translations have been published in 1909–11 and 2020, the latest edition having been brought out by the liberal think tank and publisher Timbro. Although excerpts of Smith was translated in the periodical press in the final years of the eighteenth century – in Georg Adlersparre’s Läsning i blandade ämnen – he was not published in Swedish in (abridged) book form until 1800. In total, around ten per cent of WN was available in Swedish at the turn of the nineteenth century (Vallinder 1987). The leading Swedish economic historian Lars Magnusson (2001) has argued that the only Swede who directly referred to Smith in the 1790s was David von Schulzenheim in a two-volume work published in 1794–96. But the fact of the matter is that Rosenstein placed Smith’s writings at the heart of his wider defence of the Enlightenment in 1793.

Rosenstein was the son of the ennobled Nils Rosén von Rosenstein, celebrated physician and famous professor of medicine at Uppsala University. In his own studies at Uppsala, Rosenstein was taught by the internationally renowned comparative philologist Johan Ihre. Ihre, a cousin of Rosenstein’s mother and a friend to his father, is a significant figure, since many dissertations defended during his presidium at Uppsala were influenced not only by John Locke but also David Hume. After his studies, Rosenstein, whose family was close to the Swedish royal family, rose through the ranks in the civil service.

In 1778, Rosenstein’s friend, the poet Johan Henric Kellgren, began to propagate Enlightenment ideas in the journal Stockholms-Posten by championing Voltaire’s legacy. Three years later, Kellgren defined “enlightenment philosophy” (upplysningsfilosofi) as the ability “to rise above all prejudices … in order to only follow the light of reason and in life have the love of humanity as the basis of all virtues.” Kellgren and Rosenstein would subsequently in the 1780s establish a society entitled Pro Sensu Communi (for common sense), with only themselves as members, to oppose various strands of mysticism and “occultism,” which were increasingly popular in late eighteenth-century Sweden.

Unlike Kellgren, Rosenstein went to Paris to experience the French Enlightenment first-hand. For two years from December 1782, he served as secretary to the Swedish ambassador, first the poet Count Gustaf Philip Creutz, and then Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein. The latter was married to Jacques Necker’s brilliant daughter Germaine de Staël, who once called Rosenstein “Sweden’s Aristotle” and with whom he would maintain an enduring correspondence. In Paris, Rosenstein became acquainted with Jean-François Marmontel, Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Benjamin Franklin. In a letter to Kellgren, however, he wrote that the French philosophes had lost their previous reputation, and this applied also to Kellgren’s beloved Voltaire.

In November 1784, Rosenstein was recalled from Paris when he was appointed by the Swedish king as tutor to the Crown Prince. As a result of his appointment, he was given several titles, pensions, and memberships of learned societies. He was also named Chancellor of Uppsala University. In 1786, the king set up the Swedish Academy, dedicated to the cultivation of the Swedish language, after the model of the French Academy. Rosenstein became its first permanent secretary. Serving in this role for thirty-eight years until his death in 1824, he remains the longest-serving permanent secretary. The Swedish Academy is today best known for deciding the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature.

Rosenstein’s Dissertation on the Enlightenment originated from a speech given on 26 August 1789 at a meeting of a different academy: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It was revised and published four years later as a book of more than two-hundred pages. His decision to finally publish the work in 1793 must be understood as an attempt to salvage the reputation of the Enlightenment as he understood it, when he believed that it was being sullied by Jacobins in the French Revolution as well as oppressive authorities in Sweden (see Max Skjönsberg 2023).

In a letter to Gustav III, Rosenstein described his intention of the 1789 speech as a refutation of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s thesis that Enlightenment is harmful for society. This was above all a reference to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Science (1750), known as the First Discourse, which had outraged the king and many other Swedes back in the 1760s. But interest in Rousseau was revived in Sweden in the last decades of the eighteenth century on the back of pre-Romanticism and Gustavian Gothicism, a form of Romantic nationalism centred on the glorification of an idyllic and simpler past. For Rosenstein, by contrast, all historical examples showed that learning and culture improved states rather than corrupted them. Indeed, he argued that learning and taste had reached new heights in modern France and Britain, the two most powerful countries in eighteenth-century Europe.

Rosenstein was convinced that the extent to which our knowledge of human nature had been improved was evident if the works of ancient authorities such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Tacitus were placed alongside those of Smith, Montesquieu, Helvétius, Rousseau, Adam Ferguson, and Jacques Necker. The contrast between the ancients and the moderns, and the progress philosophy had made since antiquity, were apparent from the fact that Aristotle believed that some people were slaves by nature.

In order to make a forceful case for enlightenment and improvement, Rosenstein relied especially on the authorities of the Scottish Enlightenment, including Smith, Hume, Ferguson, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, all of whom he had read and studied. His emphasis on the significance of ways of thinking in shaping human behaviour as well as the importance of the pursuit of happiness resonates clearly with these Scottish thinkers.

In one instance, Rosenstein speaks of the “Scottish philosophers” who had in his view best treated themes such as the centrality of sentiments and the passions, the slowness and coldness of the understanding, and the natural desire for esteem. Only a few of the Scottish literati’s works had been translated into Swedish at this time. Rosenstein would himself later write a short preface to the Swedish translation of William Robertson’s History of Charles V (1769), published in four volumes between 1800 and 1804, in which he argued that Robertson surpassed Greek and Roman historians thanks to his philosophical bent. 

The fact that Rosenstein referred to several book titles in English in the Dissertation’s footnotes – including Smith’s WN (1776), Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), and Kames’s Sketches on the History of Man (1774) – indicates that he is likely to have read most of the Scottish philosophers in English rather than in French or Swedish translations. Indeed, Rosenstein had an early and strong interest in English literature and was known to be an anglophile. Ferguson’s book was translated into Swedish in 1790, the year after Rosenstein’s text had been delivered as a speech but four years before it was actually published as a revised and extended work. A review of the Swedish translation of Ferguson’s Essay in Stockholms-Posten, most likely written by Rosenstein, stated that Scotland had produced more eminent philosophers than any other country in modern times. Only two editions of Hume’s essays on political economy had been published by this time (for their publication history including their eighteenth-century translations, see the critical edition of Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary 2021, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp and Mark A. Box).

Interestingly, Rosenstein pointed out that WN had been written by a “metaphysician,” which suggests that he did not only know of Smith as a political economist but also as a moral philosopher. His reference to Hume as a model human being hints that he may have been familiar with Hume’s brief autobiography “My Own Life” and especially Smith’s accompanying Letter to Strahan.

Rosenstein’s criticism of Rousseau involved some concessions to the Genevan, as he argued in a way similar to Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) that wealth and luxury did not produce happiness on their own. Since he referred to Smith as a “metaphysician,” it is likely that he had read TMS, or was at least familiar with it. Importantly, Rosenstein argued that the wish to improve one’s condition was the most common of all passions. This was distinctly close to the position of Smith, who called “the desire of bettering our condition” a wish that “comes with us from the womb.” (WN.II.iii.28) Like Smith, Rosenstein believed that laws that made the pursuit of bettering our condition difficult would always be despised, and that restrictions on trade and industry would only encourage cheating. In short, he wanted trade to be “as free as is possible.” (On Smith and Rosseau, see Rasmussen 2008, Hont 2015, Griswold 2017, and Sagar 2022).

Rosenstein wrote that the study of economy and finance was initiated by the likes of Pierre Le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert, and Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban in France – long before François Quesnay and the Physiocrats, he pointed out – and Sir William Petty and Charles Davenant in England. Perhaps unsurprisingly but still noteworthily, Rosenstein contended in a footnote that the best work on finance ever written was Smith’s WN. By criticizing the “bullionist” policies of the Spanish Empire and instead favouring domestic industry and manufacturing, alongside agriculture, he showed himself to be Smith’s faithful follower.

It is easy to understand why Rosenstein was interested in political economy. Sweden was a former European superpower, whose heyday had been in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, it found itself increasingly dependent on subsidies and support from European allies, notably France. Its economy was largely agrarian, and its trade in iron was policed by protectionism. Enlightened Swedes such as Rosenstein wanted their country to refocus its energies on wealth and welfare rather than warfare. Gustav III had different ambitions, however, and he viewed himself as the self-appointed leader of the European Counter-Revolution, until he was assassinated by discontented nobles in 1792.

In his discussion of political economy, Rosenstein could have but did not cite the Swedish-Finnish political economist Anders Chydenius (1729–1803), with whom he corresponded and indeed to whom he sent the Dissertation, and who is often said to have anticipated many of the theories in Smith’s WN (see Carl G. Uhr 1964 and Jonasson and Hyttinen 2011). But Rosenstein’s references were almost entirely non-Swedish and frequently Scottish. After having received the book, Chydenius wrote back to Rosenstein, dubbing him “the most prominent defender of Freedom of Thought and Enlightenment in the Nordic countries,” and in the same letter he argued that he had himself sought to advance the cause of enlightenment since the 1760s, when he actively worked to pass the Freedom of the Press Act of 1766 in Sweden.

Rosenstein’s Dissertation on the Enlightenment is yet another example of the colossal impact of Smith’s writings. Smith’s influence on great thinkers from Karl Marx to Friedrich Hayek has attracted enduring interest from scholars (see, for example, the essays by Spencer J. Pack and Craig Smith in Berry, Paginelli and Smith (eds.) 2013). Glory Liu (2023) has recently written about Smith’s longstanding afterlife in America (for which, see also Samuel Fleischacker 2002). The reception of WN in Great Britain and France has been well-studied (see Richard F. Teichgraeber, III 1987 and Richard Whatmore 2002, respectively), as has his readership among relatively ordinary readers in the English-speaking world (David Allan 2008, Mark Towsey 2010, and Max Skjönsberg 2023). Smith in China is an interesting subject for a plethora of rather obvious reasons (see Luo Wei-Dong’s chapter in Hanley (ed.) 2016). But even though Smith’s reception has been studied selectively by economic historians in Sweden, Rosenstein’s Dissertation on the Enlightenment demonstrates that there is more work to be done on his reception beyond the Anglophone world. It also shows how the study of peripheries can illuminate our understanding of the wider Enlightenment, and the role of political economy within it (on this, see also Butterwick, Richard, Davies, and Sánchez Espinosa (eds.) 2008 and John Robertson 2005).

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