Oslington Paul - Adam Smith as Theologian

First published 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Adam Smith as theologian / edited by Paul Oslington.

p. cm.(Routledge studies in religion ; 14)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Smith, Adam, 1723-1790Religion. I. Oslington, Paul.

B1545.Z7A213 2011

230.092dc22

2010048765

ISBN13: 978-0-415-88071-8 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-81641-7 (ebk)

ANTHONY WATERMAN

PAUL OSLINGTON

The charitable reader of this book will forgive the anachronism of its title. Adam Smith was not a theologian. Nor was he an economist. These are present-day labels for present-day intellectual enterprises. There has been much division of labour in the academic industry since Smiths day. The modern university is an ever-expanding pin factory. Though some lines of descent may be traced, there is little resemblance between the kind of work we do now and the kind of work that Adam Smith did at Glasgow in the 1750s, or that William Paley did at Cambridge in the 1760s.

In the 18th century the learned were known as men of letters. Only in the 19th century did the new genus men of science appear. But at least since the Renaissance men of letters had often specialized in either divine letters or humane letters. The former, known in the 18th century as divines, studied the Bible and the Fathers, the history and development of church doctrine, what in the 18th century were known as natural and revealed theology, respectively, and what we might today call philosophical theology and philosophy of religion. The latter, originally known as humanists, studied the literature of classical antiquity, history and philosophyincluding both the natural philosophy of Newton that we now call science, and moral and political philosophy both classical and modern.

Yet even this specialization was never complete, in Britain at any rate, before the mid-19th century. Partly because of the requirements of the university curriculum, which existed both to train the clergy of the national church and to educate the next generation of the ruling class in their responsibilities and duties, academics such as Smith and Paley had to keep a foot in each camp. Though today Paley is remembered chiefly as a divine, his lectures in moral and political philosophy contained matter we can clearly identify as economic analysis and which led Keynes to call him the first of the Cambridge economists. Though Adam Smith is generally thought of as the father of what his English successors called political economy, he lectured at Glasgow on natural theology among other things, and his published works contain much that is now recognized as theologynot to mention ethics, history of science, psychology, linguistics, aesthetics and literary criticism. But in fact both Paley and Smith were regarded, and would have regarded themselves, as philosophers . (Smith was poking gentle fun at himself in admitting that only the vanity of the philosopher prevents him from seeing that in genius and disposition he is not so different from a street porter.) By far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age, Smiths friend David Hume, never held any academic appointment at all, and was therefore unconstrained by curricular requirements. But he made important contributions to what we should today call history, political science, political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, economics and theology.

What is at issue is whyand howwe identify our current intellectual preoccupations with certain elements abstracted from the relatively undifferentiated texture of our predecessors writings. For this is what we are doing when we describe those elements as theology or economics or by the label of any other modern disciplinary category.

When we irreverently set one of our funny, 21st-century hats upon Adam Smiths dignified, 18th-century head, our reasons for doing so, and the way we go about it, will depend very much on just which hat we have in mind. If we are interested in Adam Smith as economist, for example, we shall use present-day theory to identify the analytical content of Wealth of Nations , believing, as Samuelson put it, that within every classical economist there is to be discerned a modern economist trying to be born. Economics is a scientific enterprise: we hope and expect to see the growth of knowledge. Thus we study economic theory in retrospect in order to understand and appraise the extent to which economics knowledge has broadened and deepened since Smiths day.