capitalism

470 Smith, Adam (1723–1790)
America was the slave population reproducing itself by the
mid-18th century. Virtually everywhere else, the persistence
of human bondage depended on continued importation
of captured slaves.
Servile rebellions faced severe free rider problems, and
the only successful slave insurrection was in Haiti, ending
in 1804. A more frequent and efficacious form of slave
resistance was running away. As a result, slavery has never
thrived unless some combination of geographical, political,
or cultural barriers curtailed flight—barriers like the U.S.
Constitution’s fugitive slave clause. The freeing of slaves
by their owners, in contrast, has been common. These manumissions
would often take the form of skilled slaves buying
their own liberty in mutually beneficial transactions.
Only in the British Caribbean and the southern United
States did governments deprive masters of the right to free
individual slaves, a policy that rendered American slavery
significantly worse for the slaves.
Slavery always required an array of legal, political, and
military safeguards, yet it endured well into the 19th century.
Although no one enjoyed being a slave, only a few
thinkers—primarily early classical liberals—had challenged
the institution’s legitimacy or necessity before
Quakers organized the world’s first antislavery society in
Philadelphia in 1775. Western Europe had already experienced
a receding of this most extreme form of bondage, and
small-scale emancipations began in the northern United
States. Then starting with British colonies in 1833 and finishing
with Brazil in 1888, more than 6 million slaves
achieved some kind of freedom in the Western Hemisphere.
The international abolitionist movement—despite being a
small minority in many countries—eliminated in a little
over a century a labor system that had been ubiquitous for
millennia. Today we live in a world where slavery may still
persist clandestinely, but no ruler, no matter how vile or
ruthless, would dare get up and publicly endorse owning
another human being. Thus, the abolition of chattel slavery
stands as the most impressive and enduring of all classical
liberalism’s triumphs.
See also Abolitionism; Douglass, Frederick; Garrison, William
Lloyd; Racism; Slavery, World; Spooner, Lysander
Further Readings
DT
Davis, David Brion. Slavery and Human Progress. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1984.
Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free
Men: A History of the American Civil War. Chicago: Open
Court, 1996.
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Sowell, Thomas. “The Economics of Slavery.” Thomas Sowell, ed.
Markets and Minorities. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
SMITH, ADAM (1723–1790)
Both a philosopher and political economist, Adam Smith
was one of the principal thinkers of 18th-century Scotland,
whose name is intimately associated with the early history
of economic science. He was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, in the
late spring of 1723—the exact date is unknown—and was
baptized on June 5, 1723. The son of the comptroller of the
customs at Kirkcaldy, who died 5 months before his birth,
Adam was educated in the grammar school there. At the age
of 15, he was sent to the University of Glasgow, where he
studied moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson, one of
Scotland’s greatest thinkers, and in 1740, he entered Balliol
College, Oxford, as an exhibitor (i.e., as a student possessed
of a scholarship). Smith’s interest in the philosophical
system put forward by his fellow Scotsman David
Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature was published in
1739–1740, clashed with the Aristotelian epistemological
and metaphysical presuppositions that dominated Oxford
thinking, and Smith soon determined to leave England.
In 1746, he relinquished his scholarship and embarked
on a series of public lectures at Edinburgh under the
patronage of Henry Home, Lord Kames, Scottish attorney
and philosopher. Kames, who was already regarded as an
important scholar in the history of law and theoretical history,
was impressed with Smith and undertook to sponsor
Smith’s lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres. The lectures
were well received and led to Smith being offered
the chair of logic at the University Glasgow in 1751. In
the following year, Smith was appointed to the more
remunerative professorship of moral philosophy, a post
earlier held by Hutcheson, in which he remained for the
next 13 years. During his tenure at Glasgow, Smith published
his first work, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, which
appeared in 1759.
In A Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith addresses the
following question: From whence springs our ability to
condemn certain intentions and actions as immoral and
approve others as morally worthy? This problem is especially
vexing inasmuch as we are able to judge our own
behavior as either moral or immoral despite the fact that we
are strongly motivated to act in our own self-interest. Smith
maintained that our ability to form moral judgments is a
function of our being possessed of a basic moral faculty
that motivates us to act as an impartial spectator of our own
and others’ actions. This moral sense, which Smith labeled
sympathy and which is not reducible to our rational faculties,
allows us to see ourselves as others see us and, thus,
permits us to live harmoniously with others despite our
being self-regarding and passionate in our own interests. It
serves not only to promote our own well-being, but to bring
our actions into line with a society of other moral individuals,
thus contributing to the happiness of mankind.
Adumbrating his discussion of the economic benefits that