Adam Smith's Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce, and Conscience.

This book is filled with surprising messages, the most surprising of which is that we apparently cannot know the meaning the author intends to convey in those messages. Because "language has a kind of fecundity with a potential proliferation of different readings, it is no longer axiomatic that the 'meaning' of a text is given by authorial intent" [p. 3]. On the contrary, "meanings are not so much present in the text but are constructed by the process of reading" [p. 13]. Even in Smith's own Lectures on Rhetoric, "the power of language is shown not to be entirely under the author's control" [p. 18]. Consequently, Brown "does not lay claim to uncovering . . . Smith's own intentions" since such a claim cannot be "justified" [p. 19]. This obviously is a troubling principle for a reviewer: apparently the reader cannot hope to "uncover" Brown's intended meaning in the book before us; and, if "the power of language" was beyond Smith's "control" then it is certainly beyond that of this humble reviewer, eliminating any hope of unambiguously conveying the meanings I have "constructed" from this work. Nevertheless, in the conviction that it is a long way from the salutary reminder that every reader brings to a text his own "interpretive apparatus" to Brown's troubling claim that we cannot hope to know an author's intended meaning, I shall press on.

Brown's claim that we cannot justly employ "the principle of authorial intention" undercuts the efforts of Smith scholars "to provide an account of the totality of Smith's intellectual output." To do so is to presume "that Smith's diverse writings constitute an oeuvre in the sense of a unified intellectual programme" [p. 207], but since we cannot know any author's intent, we cannot be certain that such a coherent system was in fact Smith's intent. We cannot even accept as evidence of that intent Smith's own statement in the "Advertisement" to the sixth eclition of his Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) to the effect that he conceived his Wealth of Nations (WN) as a part of a larger system begun in that earlier work. To do so "assumes that Smith's personality and his own understanding of his writings are definitive in interpreting the meanings of the texts and in assessing the overall structural thematicity of his works" [p. 20].

But there is much more to Brown's argument than simple agnosticism regarding the coherence of Smith's "oeuvre." We have here a resurrection of "the 'old Adam Smith problem'" in a new guise, claiming "that different discursive frames are appropriate at different moments in Smith's texts" [p. 4]. In part, the "disparate discursive structures" of TMS and WN are revealed by stylistic differences: "TMS may be read as a dialogic discourse" highlighting the moral dialogue between actor and impartial spectator, "whereas WN may be read as a monologic discourse or scientific text where the didactic voice endeavours to assert its controlling jurisdiction over the domain of the text" [p. 5]. From this we are to conclude "that WN has no place for the moral discourse of TMS" [p. 46]. However, the argument at this point [p. 45] rests on a reading of widely scattered passages in TMS from which others will no doubt "construct" a quite different meaning.

Nevertheless, the issue turns on more than stylistic differences. The treatment of justice is said to differ across TMS, the Lectures On Jurisprudence (LJ), and WN, calling into question the common interpretation, which sees Smith's treatment of justice as the unifying theme for those texts. In Brown's reading, however, "justice in TMS plays a subordinate role and is designated a second-order moral virtue. Thus, justice does not have the discursive power to unify the three texts and situate them all on the same plane of moral discourse" [p. 140]. This hierarchical structure of virtues follows from the "dialogic discourse" of TMS: since "the central argument of TMS [is] that a moral judgment is made when virtue is identified by way of the impartial spectator mechanism, . . . only beneficence and self-command unambiguously fall within the ambit of moral judgment according to the spectatorial account" [p. 46]. The "lower order" status of justice will come as a surprise to those who recall Smith's observation that "Beneficence . . . is less essential to the existence of society than justice" [TMS II.ii.3.3]. It is no less surprising to learn that justice falls outside "the ambit of moral judgment" as defined by the sympathy of Smith's spectator. To the contrary, we learn in TMS that the identification of the just punishment requires the approbation of the spectator founded on a "compound sentiment" comprising both an "antipathy to the sentiments of the agent" of the injury "and an indirect sympathy with the resentment of the sufferer" [TMS II.i.5.5; cf. II.iii.2.4 and 6-8, and LJ(A) ii.89-90]. No doubt others will "construct" from all this a meaning quite different from Brown's conclusion that because "Justice is a second-order virtue, . . . the dialogism of conscience associated with the truly moral first-order virtues is absent from its portrayal in TMS and in LJ" [p. 5].

TMS and WN are not the only works expressing "disparate discursive structures"; a similar distinction is said to apply to WN and LJ. In particular, we learn that, contrary to LJ, a "discourse based on opulence as low-price plenty is absent from WN" [p. 149]. One wonders what meaning Brown "constructs" from Smith's definition of "opulence" in the opening paragraphs of his work as a rising output per capita or from his frequent comments that a "plentiful supply" and consequent "cheapness" of goods is "to the great advantage and conveniency of the publick" [ as at WN V.i.e.26]. Nevertheless, WN, Brown insists, introduced a "new definition of wealth which . . . superseded LJ's concept"; but, curiously, what passes for a "new concept of wealth" is nothing more than the identity between national product and income: "The annual produce of the country is, thus, identical to the annual revenue, taken as the sum of all wages, profits and rent" [pp. 168-69, citing WN I.vi.16-17]. This transmogrification of "wealth" into a statement regarding income distribution leads Brown to what is likely to be seen as her most surprising conclusion, namely that Smith's well-known criticism of mercantilist policy rests not on his analysis of price adjustment and resource allocation but rather on the claim that "the mercantile system . . . resulted in overdeveloping trade and manufactures relative to agriculture, the most beneficial of all activities" [p. 7]. Few who have read Smith's account in Book I, chap. 11, of the role played by agriculture in economic growth will be persuaded by Brown's argument, resting as it does on an exaggerated reading of Smith's well-known ordering of the sectors by the "very different quantities" of capital which a given investment will produce in each [WN II.v.]. Indeed, while others may "construct" their own meanings from Brown's text, I find the arguments unpersuasive throughout.

Glenn Hueckel Purdue University