Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson: The Wealth of Nations, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, and the Militia Question

Adam Smith Made the Case for the Free Market. Then, in the Same Book, He Wrote the Strongest Objection to It.Two men were born in Scotland in 1723, a county apart. They joined the same Edinburgh club, kept the same friends, and worked from the same premise about what commercial life does to a people. They never agreed about the remedy, and the disagreement is more specific and more difficult than it is usually made to sound.This episode opens by taking a famous story apart. Every account of Adam Ferguson tells you that at Fontenoy in May 1745 the young chaplain of a Highland regiment was found in the front rank with a drawn broadsword, was threatened with the loss of his commission, told his colonel what he thought of the commission, and marched off with the men. Walter Scott told it. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica printed it as established fact in 1911. A Victorian painter put it on the wall of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1897. The regiment’s own museum now says it could not have happened, because Ferguson had not yet left Scotland. The scholarship goes further and doubts he was present at all. What is left without the broadsword is a better story anyway: a minister who never finished his divinity training, who got the post because he spoke Gaelic, and who spent nine years attached to Highland soldiers in the immediate aftermath of a rising, at a time when the clothes those soldiers wore lawfully in uniform were criminal for every other man and boy in Scotland on pain of transportation.The Smith half runs from the salt pans and nail-makers of Kirkcaldy to the Glasgow chair he called the happiest years of his life, and then to the argument itself. What the mercantile system actually was and why he gave a whole book to dismantling it. The system of natural liberty passage read in full, including the eleven words that get dropped and the reason he gives for discharging the sovereign — which is an objection about capacity, not about rights, and which arrives a hundred and fifty years before the twentieth century made that argument famous under another name. The butcher and the brewer and the baker, and why that passage is about persuasion rather than selfishness. The invisible hand, which appears three times in everything Smith published, once in an essay describing pagan superstition, and which became the famous line only when a tradition needed a slogan. And the writing about merchants and guilds, which is as harsh as anything produced on the left since.Then the turn. The book opens with the pin factory, eighteen operations, ten men, forty-eight thousand pins. Several hundred pages later Smith goes back and writes down what that life does to the man living it — that he becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become, and that he is equally incapable of defending his own country. Nobody made him put that in. Adam Ferguson had printed a related warning nine years earlier and drawn the opposite conclusion: that some things divide without loss and some do not, that shoes are one kind and citizenship is the other, and that a nation which contracts out its own defense has dismembered the human character. Smith answered that a militia cannot match professionals, that only a standing army preserves a civilized nation — and then said the half almost nobody quotes, that the martial spirit of the people is worth preserving anyway and deserves the serious attention of government.The hour closes with an honest reckoning neither man survives cleanly. Ferguson wrote an anonymous pamphlet against the American case, printed at government expense, and then crossed the Atlantic as secretary to a peace commission sent to end the war on British terms. Smith spent his last twelve years as a commissioner of customs, inside the establishment his own fourth book had attacked, having first gone through his wardrobe, found almost nothing in it whose import was legal, and burned it. Then three objections, all built from the primary text, including the strongest thing anybody says against reading these men the way this series reads them.Did this leave us more free, or more governed?⏱️ CHAPTERS0:00:00 - The Legend of Fontenoy and Adam Ferguson0:02:41 - Two Men, One Premise: Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith0:03:57 - Podcast Introduction and Previous Episode Recap0:05:31 - The Select Society, The Militia Club, and Scotland’s Grievance0:12:59 - Kirkcaldy and the Early World of Adam Smith0:17:24 - Academic Postings: Hume, Hutcheson, and Smith0:19:34 - The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Impartial Spectator0:27:21 - Attacking the Mercantile System in The Wealth of Nations0:31:28 - The System of Natural Liberty and the Duties of the Sovereign0:37:32 - Deconstructing the True Meaning of the “Invisible Hand”0:41:32 - Smith’s Warning About Merchants, Monopolies, and Guilds0:44:29 - The Pin Factory and The Hidden Costs of Divided Labor0:48:44