Jesse Norman is an unusual MP. The Conservative member for Hereford and South Herefordshire was alone in the Commons for not declaring, ahead of the 2016 referendum, if he was for Leave or Remain — on the charmingly punctilious grounds that he could best represent all his constituents if he stood aloof from the fray.
That’s the sort of fastidiousness one might expect from a former philosophy lecturer, and it is in that guise that Norman has written a wonderfully clear account of the life and thought of Adam Smith.
The latter is infinitely more memorable than the former. As Norman himself puts it, Smith’s personal life was as featureless as the Sahara: an only child born in Kirkcaldy in 1723, he never married, nor had any close personal relationship beyond an intense bond with his mother (with whom he lived up to her death).
But the richness of his thought was one of the marvels of his or any other age. He was not just “the father of modern economics”. The Wealth of Nations (1776) is the work by which he is now universally known, but for Smith this examination of commerce was to be part of a multi-volume explanation of human nature and society. Unfortunately, the only other substantial work that remains is his Theory of Moral Sentiments: as he lay dying in 1790, Smith (who would redraft his work many times, in painfully cumbersome handwriting) insisted to his executors that all his incomplete work be destroyed.
However, the author of this volume — well over two centuries after that death — is as dedicated as any friend could have been in doing justice to Smith’s memory. Above all, he seeks to rescue the austere Scot from the widespread opinion that he was the forefather of “neoliberalism”, a lazy term (used only pejoratively) to define the proposition that society needs nothing other than free markets to provide the best for all.
Norman takes Naomi Klein as the most fashionable example of this: to her, he says, Smith is “the prime mover of a materialist ideology… an apologist for wealth and inequality and human selfishness — and a misogynist to boot”. It is true that Smith is best known for the idea of the marketplace as the “invisible hand” that, without any form of central planning or consciously altruistic purpose, promotes the optimal outcome for rich and poor alike. But for Smith, this was absolutely not about money: he saw commerce as the means by which people were directed, in their own interests, to behave well and honestly towards others. He would have loved Airbnb and Uber, at least for the transparent way in which they allow providers and users to rate each other, and thus inculcate helpfulness and honesty.
And, in complete contrast to Klein’s caricature, Smith was remarkably egalitarian for his age. He caustically observed that “civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor”. He opposed slavery long before it was made illegal by the British government, thundering in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): “There is not a Negro from the coast of Africa who does not possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind.”
As for the (in any case anachronistic) charge of misogyny, Norman unearths one of Smith’s least-well known works, Lectures on Jurisprudence, in which the sage of Kirkcaldy tells his students: “The laws of most countries being made by men, generally, are very severe on the women, who can have no remedy for this oppression.”
Norman is fully justified in asserting that “the moral world Smith argues for is a profoundly egalitarian one, and acutely aware of the possibility of oppression”. What the Naomi Kleins of the intellectual marketplace have never understood is that the freer the markets — which means open competition, not crony capitalism — the more opportunities there are for self-advancement for the least privileged. As this Conservative MP observes at the end of his fine book, there are still many lessons from Smith’s work for the current generation of politicians to study and emulate.
[This article was first published in the Sunday Times on July 8, 2018]