Adam Smith’s pre-eminence

Whereas Scotland in the eighteenth century was already credited with the native talent of its metaphysicians and historians, its association with political economy owes more to hindsight than to contemporary perceptions. By the early decades of the nineteenth century the association was strong enough to become part of an English caricature of the ‘Scotch pheelosopher’, who was assumed to combine an interest in political economy with another Scottish habit of enquiry – the pursuit of the origins and development of civil society from ‘rudeness to refinement’ by means of a form of history in which universal psychological principles and socio-economic circumstances played twin illuminating roles. By then of course an imposing work by a Scotsman that employed both of these modes, Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), had begun to make its way in the world. It was therefore appropriate that the first course of lectures on post-Smithian political economy in Britain should be given by Dugald Stewart, who for a decade after 1799 employed his chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh for just that purpose. The result of Stewart’s initiative was to produce for Smith a small band of Scottish-educated grandchildren in the shape of those who founded the Edinburgh Review in 1802, making it the main organ for disseminating the latest views on political economy for the next three decades.