Classroom Only

1
The Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth
century

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2

• From the vantage point of the early eighteenth
  century, Scotland would appear to be one of the
  most unlikely places in Europe to become a centre
  of intellectual innovation. The hold of the
  Catholic Church had been broken in the sixteenth
  century but only to be replaced by one of the
  most narrow and bigoted forms of Protestantism.

3

• in the mid-eighteenth century, the mists of
  ignorance cleared and Scotland vaulted from being
  one of the most backward countries of Europe to
  one of its most civilized indeed, the leader,
  for a period, in the developments that have led
  historians to call the eighteenth century the Age
  of Enlightenment.

4

• These developments were perhaps due in part to
  the closer ties with England that followed the
  Act of Union in 1707, made final by the failure
  of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and
  undoubtedly, the economic changes that
  invigorated Scottish industry in the latter half
  of the eighteenth century had some influence.

5

• By literature Hume meant intellectual
  productions of all kinds Scotland was
  distinguished in the sciences as well as in
  philosophy and the arts. The University of
  Edinburgh's medical school was so renowned that
  students flocked to it from all over, including
  America.

6

• The Scottish thinkers in whom we are especially
  interested are those who contributed to the
  social sciences.

7

• The leading figures were Francis Hutcheson, Adam
  Ferguson, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Lord Kames
  (Henry Home), Lord Monboddo (James Burnet), David
  Hume, and Adam Smith. The last two are the ones
  of outstanding permanent significance .

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A. SCOTTISH MORAL PHILOSOPHY
9

• To the modern reader the term moral philosophy
  denotes the branch of philosophy that deals with
  ethics a relatively small part of only one of
  the many departmental units in the modern
  university's curriculum.

10

• Historians have often drawn attention to the fact
  that the social sciences developed from subjects
  that were previously included in moral
  philosophy, and it is sometimes inferred from
  this that the fountainhead of modern social
  science was ethics.

11

• In fact the main source of inspiration for the
  eighteenth-century thinkers was the
  accomplishments of the natural sciences.

12

• When an eighteenth-century writer describes a
  proposition as unphilosophical he means that it
  lacks what we today would call scientific
  foundations. The modem usage of the term
  science stems from the early nineteenth century.

13

• There was much talk during the eighteenth century
  of extending the application of philosophical
  principles to the field of human behaviour.
  This, roughly speaking, is what the term moral
  philosophy came to denote.

14

• By experimental method Hume did not mean
  laboratory experiments but, more broadly, the
  general approach of the sciences, which
  contrasted sharply with the arid a priori methods
  of scholastic philosophy. In Hume's view, the
  counterpart of the laboratory, experiment in
  social phenomena is history, which furnishes
  empirical data.

15

• How did the Scottish moral philosophers regard
  human nature? The first point that should be
  noted is that they did not view man in religious
  or theological terms.

16

• The most fundamental philosophical question of
  theology is the foundation of one's belief - in
  particular points of doctrine or, indeed, in the
  very existence of a supreme being.

17

• This approach to theology, which was called
  Natural Religion or Deism.
• So the Christian did not have to become a sceptic
  in order to adopt the view that the way to
  advance moral philosophy was to study the
  characteristics of man as natural phenomenon.

18

• Regarding man as a natural phenomenon is,
  however, not sufficient to provide foundations
  for social science. If one hopes to construct
  general laws as the other sciences do, there must
  be sufficient uniformity of human nature to
  sustain the validity of general propositions

19

• The Scottish moral philosophers, by contrast,
  emphasized the uniformity of human nature.

20

• Adam Smith's adoption of this view became the
  foundation o economic theory, as we shall see. It
  is worth noting here that it also became the
  basis normative economics in that when Smith
  investigated The Nature and Causes of the Wealth
  of Nations,

21

• he meant to include all inhabitants inhabitants
  within the term nation, which led him
  immediately to the judgement (which some of his
  contemporaries found surprising) that a nation
  cannot be considered rich if its lower classes
  (who compose the greatest number) are poor.

22

• The Scottish moral philosophers were primarily
  interested in the social behavior of man.

23

• Adam Smiths great contribution was to show that
  the power of an absolute sovereign is not the
  only means by which social order may be achieved
  in a world of self-interested individuals,

24

• but his first book, The Theory of Sentiments
  (1759), was devoted to a study of social
  psychology in terms of man's propensity to desire
  the welfare of others.

25

• David Hume, in the Treatise of Human Nature,
  suggested that everyone considers the welfare of
  other persons but does not give it as much weight
  as his own.
• .

26

• Concerning the one area of social science that
  had undergone significant development prior to
  the era of the Scottish Enlightenment - political
  theory - the Scottish moralists strongly rejected
  the accepted methodology

27

• This view of the contract theory of society and
  government became general during the nineteenth
  century. Though Locke was still regarded with
  respect, because of his empirical philosophy of
  knowledge and the liberal thrust of his political
  theory, the contract approach fell out of favour.

28

• As political science developed, its emphasis was
  upon the evolution of political institutions and
  their functional roles in social organization. In
  recent years has there been a revival of contract
  theory,

29

• in the area of ethical philosophy by John Rawlss
  A Theory of Justice (1971), and in the analysis
  of collective institutions initiated by J. M.
  Buchanan and Gordon Tullocks The Calculus of
  Consent (1962).

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B.DAVID HUME (1711-76)
31

• Humes from being appointed to a university post,
  which he would have liked. Humes strongest
  attack on religion was published only after his
  death, though it was written twenty-five years
  earlier (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,
  1779).

32

• The problem focuses upon the issue of egoism
  versus benevolence in man's nature.

33

• Hume rejected Hobbes's view as failing to
  recognize that society is part of man's nature.
• Hume followed other Scottish philosophers in
  arguing that man is egoistic in the sense that he
  values his own welfare above that .of others, but
  not to the degree that he values the welfare of
  others at zero.

34

• His main objective in this connection, however,
  was not to undermine our moral judgements but to
  question the arguments made for them just as in
  his examination of religion he did not attack the
  specific doctrines of Christianity, or any other
  religion, but the demonstrations that
  religionists offer in claiming the doctrines to
  be true.

35

• This argument of Hume's opened a discussion that
  has persisted down to the present day, known in
  the philosophical literature as the is-ought or
  the fact-value dichotomy.

36

• But man, though inferior to other animals as an
  individual, is able to increase his power by
  social association

37

• Thus, in Hume's view, man was not given dominion
  over the earth by God, nor was he endowed by
  nature with the physical capacity to contest it
  with other animals, but he had acquired dominion
  nevertheless, through social organization.

38

• Humes argument can be set out as follows
• England Other
  countries

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C. ADAM SMITH (1723-90)
40

• Adam Smith is best known today as the father of
  economics, hut he made wider contributions to
  social science that we cannot neglect.

41

• The Moral Sentiments was an important book in the
  history of social science, whether one views it
  generally, or specifically in terms of the
  development of sociology and social psychology.
  It was neglected for a while by historians mainly
  because of the greater significance of the same
  author's Wealth of Nations.

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1. Philosophy of science

• Adam Smith was no exception to this conception of
  social science indeed, he was one of its
  important promoters.

43

• Smith adopted the views that Hobbes had advanced
  a century earlier that there is a common human
  nature that it is ascertainable by
  introspection and that a scientific study of
  social phenomena can be built upon this empirical
  base.

44

• Adam Smith was to discover, however, as social
  scientists have repeatedly science, that modeling
  a society is not as easy as modelling a solar
  system.

45
2. The nature of man

• The counterpart of Newton's principle of
  gravitational attraction in the modelling of
  social phenomena, so Adam Smith would appear to
  believe, is some universal property of human
  nature.

46

• In the Wealth of Nations, however, the Newtonian
  property is man's self-interest. There appears to
  be an inconsistency here the Adam Smith
  problem, it is sometimes called.

47

• The determinants of human behaviour, we now
  realize, are very complex. Adam Smith simplified,
  as all scientists do, for heuristic purposes
  that is to say, he adopted the notion that man is
  a rational animal for methodological reasons

48

• it enabled him to proceed with the analysis of
  social phenomena by construing them as springing
  from the purposive behaviour of rational
  individuals that one observes by introspection
  and by regarding others as homologous to oneself.

49

• According to Adam Smith, man's main goal is to
  better his condition.

50

• Though this passage in the Wealth of Nations
  refers specifically to man's propensity to save
  in order to accumulate wealth, it can be read
  more generally as expressing Smith's view that
  man is the dissatisfied animal, always desiring
  improvement.

51
3.Moral sentiments

• Smith believed, one might be able to go on to
  consider the ethical problem of what constitutes
  morally good sentiments and their practical
  implications in concrete cases.

52

• The determination of what ought to be cannot be
  derived from the investigation of what is, but
  the philosophy of empirical science tells us that
  the study of what is so in fact is the proper
  place to begin.

53

• God - would formulate moral judgements but how a
  very imperfect being - man - is able to do so. He
  rejects the idea that man is furnished with an
  innate moral sense which tells him what is right
  and what is wrong.

54
4. Division of labour

• The opening sentence of An Inquiry into the
  Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
  discloses what the author considers to be the
  chief cause of that wealth

55

• The great improvement in the productive powers of
  labour, and the greater part of the skill,
  dexterity, and judgement with which it is
  anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been
  the effects of the division of labour.

56

• Man is, according to Smith, endowed with a
  propensity to truck and barter, so he has the
  requisite natural characteristics for the
  development of markets. Smith clearly appreciated
  that this raises a very basic scientific question

57

• how do markets function as a means by which the
  differentiated activities of many individual
  producers are co-ordinated?

58
5. Value

• In order to operate successfully a firm must
  consider what it can obtain in revenue by selling
  a product and what it will have to pay to obtain
  the labour, raw materials, and other factors
  necessary to produce it.

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• These revenues and costs are determined in part
  by the prices of products and the prices of
  production factors. The general theory of
  economic organization through markets explains
  how movements in these prices adjust the
  production of commodities and the demands for
  them to one another.

60

• The distribution of income in a specialized
  economy is also bound up with prices, since what
  each person receives as income depends not only
  on the quantity of factors he sells but also on
  the per-unit price received for them. The income
  that a labourer receives, for example, depends
  not only on the number of hours he works but on
  the wage rate per hour.

61

• Smith focused the investigation of the
  determinants of value strictly on the conditions
  of production, or supply demand factors were
  considered relevant only to fluctuations in the
  day-to-day prices of commodities, not to their
  natural prices.

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6. The invisible hand

• The concept of an invisible hand in the Wealth
  of Nations is simply the idea that there are
  governing laws controlling economic processes
  just as there are laws governing natural
  phenomena.

63

• The buying and selling that goes on in a market
  economy is an orderly system while each
  participant in the market intends only to serve
  his own interest, in the process of doing so he
  is led by an invisible hand to promote an end
  which was no part of his intention - that is, to
  play his part in a co-ordinated, well functioning
  economic system.

64

• Smith's own investigation of the market mechanism
  did not lead him to conclude that it could
  work as an order-producing system all by itself.
  Individual activities cohere into a co-ordinated
  whole only where there is a general framework of
  custom or law that establishes rules of justice.

65

• For this a government is necessary, but the
  proper functions of government are not confined
  to the maintenance of national defence and the
  administration of internal justice. Smith had a
  great deal of confidence in the market mechanism
  but he did not regard it as working perfectly.

66

• Smith's main objective was to improve the
  economic policy of the state by providing a sound
  foundation of economic analysis. His conclusion
  was that a great deal of improvement could be
  brought about by dismantling much of the
  apparatus of state intervention that had grown up
  in England piece by piece since Tudor times.

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7. The economic conception of historical stages

• In the Wealth of Nations there is a great deal of
  historical material, which would probably have
  established Adam Smith's reputation as a
  historian.
• It is possible that Smith's interest in economics
  developed from his early view that economic
  factors are the real determinants of history.