Chen Jiaying read "Adam Smith's Biography": Understanding Smith from the "Science of Man"

British Conservative MP Jesse Norman and his book Adam Smith (translated by Li Ting, CITIC Publishing Group, January 2021) (Source/Photo)

The book is divided into three parts. The first part, The Life, introduces Smith's main views on various issues in the preface to Smith's life. The second part, Thought, systematically expounds Smith's thought while refuting misunderstandings of Smith's thought. Part III, Impact. The original title of the book was Adam Smith – what he thought and why it matters, and the title of the Chinese translation is "Adam Smith' Biography – The Thoughts of the Father of Modern Economics" in Chinese translation. Both titles focus on Smith's thought, and indeed Smith's life was uneventful, as he himself put it, "nothing but books." He left no flowery story, and posterity does not even know what he actually looked like, although countless people have admired the statue of Smith on Edinburgh Avenue. When it comes to life circumstances, what moves me the most is his sincere friendship and close exchange of ideas with Hume and Burke, his contemporaries. After the publication of Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Hume was first "nervous and trembling", afraid of disappointing the expectations of readers, and after careful reading, a heart was put down, "it is very deep, the argument is stable and sharp." There is nothing more touching than such a sympathetic relationship.

In the author's view, Smith should not be classified as an "economist" in the popular sense. He did not propose much original ideas in economics, Smith regarded himself as a philosopher, he was indeed a philosopher—Smith's goal was to establish a "science of man", although Smith himself did not use this phrase. The "science" mentioned here has a broader meaning than the "science" commonly used today, and refers to the understanding of various phenomena in a vast field through systematic inquiry. Smith did not see the business world as a world without morals, but more generally opposed the separation of economic activity from politics, personal psychology and psychosocial, moral, and legal, but sought to weave these many aspects and many layers into an interlocking and understandable whole.

The ideal of the eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Smith was to establish a human science. In the next two centuries, one social science after another was established, and a large number of empirical studies were made on all aspects of human beings, and natural sciences such as biology advanced by leaps and bounds, and also profoundly affected our general understanding of human beings. However, the inquiry into the human being as a whole has gradually become barren. I read a quote by Karl Polanyi from a book by the young scholar Xu Jin, "In modern times, contrary to the embedding of the economy into social relations, social relations have been embedded in the economic system." That's what Polanyi said decades ago, and alas, this trend is even stronger today. Reading Smith along this trend almost inevitably leads to serious misunderstandings. The author of this book, under the overall care of "the science of man", understands the seemingly contradictory imperial masterpieces of "TheOry of Moral Sentiments" and "The Wealth of Nations", which greatly helps to eliminate the widespread misunderstanding of famous Smith topics such as "The Invisible Hand".

Chen Jiaying