How Scottish Presbyterianism gave birth to economics

Adam Smith, moral philosopher and founding father of political economy, was born 300 years ago in 1723. His mother, widowed before Smith’s birth, was a devout Presbyterian. Records show that Smith was baptised on June 5th, 1723. He was born in the small fishing village of Kircaldy, renowned for linoleum, near Edinburgh in Scotland.

In 1997, I visited Kirkcaldy, expecting to find a shrine to Adam Smith. I found a plaque on the site of the house where he was born. There is a simple monument in nearby Canongate where Smith was buried following his death in 1790.

Smith entered the University of Glasgow at the age of 14, an age not uncommon in those days. He then won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. Having spent a number of years at Oxford, he returned to Glasgow where he was appointed professor of moral philosophy at the age of 29.

When taking up the chair in Glasgow, Smith signed the Calvinist Westminster Confession of Faith before the Glasgow Presbytery. There are plenty of theological references in Smith’s work – he refers to “the Deity” and to “divine design and providence”. Smith appears to have been sincere in his belief and attended church.

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Some economists have challenged this view but others are quite positive about his belief.

Back in Glasgow, Smith’s friends included the philosopher David Hume and the merchant Andrew Cochrane, founder of the Political Economy Club. Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, invited Smith to become tutor to his stepson, the Duke of Buccleuch. They went to Toulouse, Geneva and then Paris.

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Smith then returned to Kirkcaldy where he worked for a number of years on The Wealth of Nations which was published in 1776 when he was 53 years old.

Smith produced two great books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. If you dared to pick a single phrase as a key to each book, you might pick “inner man” and “invisible hand”. According to Smith, the ability to form moral judgments came from an inner man who guides decisions. Perhaps the inner man is a relation of St John Henry Newman’s ‘inner voice’ of conscience?

Smith says that political economy has two distinct objectives, first to provide subsistence to the people and secondly, to provide sufficient means for the state to provide public services.

The invisible hand of the market does not imply unfettered capitalism but Smith thought that self-interest could be turned to the common good. The self-seeking rich are often “led by an invisible hand…to advance the interests of society.”

But often is not always. Marx, while he respected Smith, did not agree that the pursuit of self-interest would prove fruitful for the wider society and Keynes argued that governments must take action when markets fail.

Smith does not have many references to Ireland, but he has great praise for the Irish potato. The “porters and coal-heavers in London and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be, the greater part of them, from the lower rank of people in Ireland, who are fed with this root. No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human condition.”

Also, Smith viewed the restrictions on exports from Ireland, which then limited Ireland’s ability to trade, as wrong. In The Wealth of Nations he spoke of the “invidious restraints which at present oppress the trade of Ireland.”

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Relatively little is known of the private life of Smith, who never married. A quantity of his private papers was destroyed as often happened in the 18th century. The influence of Smith on generations of students of economics was immense. His influence was also on Keynes’s “practical men.”

Nobel laureates in economics often referred to Smith. To take one example from 50 years ago, Simon Kuznets who received his early education in Kharkov in Ukraine before his family moved to the United States – and whose best-known work examines the relationship between economic growth and inequality – said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1971 that his study went back “to the beginnings of our discipline, as indicated by the title of Adam Smith’s founding treatise, Wealth of Nations, which could as well have been called the Economic Growth of Nations.”

Dr Finola Kennedy was the first woman to receive a PhD in Economics at UCD. She is the author of Cottage to Creche: Family Change in Ireland’ (2001), Frank Duff: A Life Story (2011) and Local Matters: Parish, Local Government and Community in Ireland (2022).