Adam Smith's inquiry into the nature and causes of the death of nations

Abstract

The year 1776 saw the publication of two of the Enlightenment's landmark texts: Edward Gibbon's multivolume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Adam Smith's multivolume Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Each was the work of an erudite scholar deeply learned in ancient and modern history. Each reflected its author's intimate conversance with the 18th century's leading theories of political economy and moral philosophy. And each in time would launch an intellectual revolution in its particular branch of social science. Yet for all this, the two works also share a further, less well appreciated similarity: both are inquiries into the causes of the decline and demise of nations.

Today we tend to associate this inquiry with Gibbon more than Smith. The Smith we have come to know is a theorist of growth and “the natural progress of opulence” and not a theorist of decline (WN 3.1).¹ Yet while his insights into growth undeniably constitute his most recognized contribution to the emergence of modern political economy, reading Smith exclusively as a theorist of growth can lead us to miss the sophistication of his inquiry into the causes of national decline. What follows thus reverses the causal arrow that has led other scholars to read Gibbon by way of Smith's influence (e.g., Pocock, 1999, pp. 309–329, 2003, pp. 372–399), and instead revisits Smith through the lens of Gibbon's key political problem in order to bring to the fore Smith's understudied inquiry into the causes of national decline and fall.

The chief benefit of this reading lies in how it clarifies an underappreciated paradox at the core of Smith's project.² At the heart of this paradox lies Smith's understanding of the necessary tension between national opulence and national power. Put simply, Smith taught that national opulence is ultimately inimical to national power; the paradox, in short, is that the very growth that political economy seeks to promote ultimately proves counter to the nation's political interests.³ Thus even as “the great object of the political economy of every country, is to increase the riches and power of that country” (WN 2.5.31), Smith repeatedly would argue that the discrete project of increasing a country's riches subverts the discrete project of increasing a country's power. Smith furthermore believed that this paradox was both natural and necessary. This is especially clear in the way he frames the paradox in his lectures on jurisprudence: “it must happen that the improvement of the arts and commerce must make a great declension in the force and power of the republic in all cases” (LJA iv.81; italics added). Or again: “wherever therefore arts and commerce engage the citizens, either as artisans or master tradesmen, the strength and the force of the city must be very much diminished” (LJA iv.85; italics added). And again, progress in the useful arts, together with “commerce, the attendant on all these, necessarily undo the strength and cause the power to vanish of such a state till it be swallowed up by some neighboring state” (LJA iv.80-81; italics added).

What is especially striking in this last formulation is Smith's insistence not only that national opulence and national power are “necessarily” in tension, but that the ultimate end or resolution of this tension is the collapse of the nation. Here and elsewhere Smith frames this in existential terms as a matter of the nation's annihilation. He takes this approach, one presumes, in order to emphasize the magnitude of the potential threat; a teacher of rhetoric and renowned rhetorician in his own right, Smith's use of rhetoric in his framing of moral and political problems in his economic writings is well appreciated today (see, e.g., Herzog, 2013; Ortmann & Walraevans, 2022, pp. 31–65). Yet the present essay's focus is less on how rhetorical concerns may have shaped Smith's methods of presenting his paradox, but rather on the substantive mechanisms Smith sees as driving the decline of commercial societies.⁴

In an effort to unpack Smith's understanding of these mechanisms, in what follows I treat them under two distinct headings: mechanisms giving rise to external vulnerabilities and mechanisms giving rise to internal vulnerabilities. By disaggregating these two distinct processes, I aim to demonstrate the role of each in Smith's inquiry into national decline, and also to contribute to a central debate in the specialized scholarship. Recent Smith scholars have increasingly become interested in the role of the concept of corruption in his thought, and have helpfully documented its significance in Smith's moral philosophy and his political theory.⁵ What follows seeks to add to this by demonstrating that Smith in fact distinguished between two discrete types of corruption in wealthy societies. Each type, he believed, can be traced to the progress of opulence, and each type he saw as having identifiable political consequences. But while one type renders the nation susceptible to external threats to its existence, the other renders a nation susceptible to internal threats to its existence. What follows takes up Smith's analysis of these challenges serially, and, in so doing, aims to show how Smith directly connects each of these threats to a specific type of corruption, as well as how he traces each of these types of corruption more generally to the progress of opulence.

Smith's concerns with regard to the external threats to which commercial opulence renders advanced nations susceptible is rooted in one of the fundamental principles of his political theory: the primacy of national defense. Smith very explicitly claims “defense” is “much more important than opulence” (WN 4.2.30). And while the specific context of this claim demands recognition—it comes in a discussion of the 1660 Acts of Navigation, in the course of which Smith presents an exception to his otherwise generally unqualified support for free trade (see Collins, 2022)—the idea at its heart reappears at several places in his political thought, and in particular his accounts of the origins and ends of political society. Smith repeatedly argues that society's origin lies in an attempt to provide effective defense against external invaders. The original impetus for mutual association in the age of hunters was a concern for “mutual safety” and “mutual defense” (LJB 19, 27–28) so that allies “might be at hand to give one another assistance and protection against the common enemy” (LJA iv.36-37; cf. LJA iv.64). This need to secure means of mutual defense against invasion only grows as society progresses. Tracing the transition from the “savage” hunters to the next evolutionary stage of “barbarian” shepherds in which government and property rights were born (Fleischacker, 2004, pp. 174–202; Hont, 2009; Schliesser, 2017, pp. 170–181), Smith continues to insist on the primacy of mutual defense, noting that villages of shepherds too “combine together under their different heads to support one another against the attacks of others” (LJA iv.38). Smith continues to emphasize the role of law and government in providing for “domestic peace” as well as “security from the foreign invader” as society progresses (LJB 210). And this concern reaches its apogee in advanced commercial societies, in which “the first duty of the sovereign” is “that of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies” (WN 5.1.a.1; cf. WN 5.1.a.42 and WN 4.9.51), leading Smith forthrightly to insist that “the most important part of the expense of government” is “that of defense and protection” (WN 4.7.b.20; cf. LJB 6).⁶

Smith's concern with securing the means of providing for effective external defense is thus a primary focus of both his historical analysis of the progress of opulence as well as his normative political theory. This is well appreciated today. What is less well appreciated is the degree of Smith's concern with regard to the ways in which the progress of opulence in a nation in fact makes it more rather than less difficult for a nation to secure the means of defending itself and thereby fulfill the first duty of the sovereign. Smith's claim on this front is that even as government works to secure the conditions of peace that make the growth of commerce and national opulence possible, the growth of opulence which good government makes possible ultimately subverts the peace and stability of government by compromising national defense. Smith's positions on this front are to be found in what he says as well as in what he fails to say. Smith in fact says next to nothing about the ways in which national opulence might benefit defense; conspicuously absent from his discussion, for example, is any treatment of how a broader tax base can generate revenue increases that can augment defense spending. On this front, Smith limits himself to a single (albeit crucial) paragraph on the technological advantages enjoyed by militaries of advanced civilized societies (WN 5.1.a.44). Instead, he focuses on how the growth of national opulence renders the nation susceptible to destabilizing violence from both without and within.

Both of these forms of destabilizing violence Smith traces to the corruption that he believes to be the necessary consequence of commercial progress. In a series of passages that have received and continue to receive significant scholarly attention, Smith traced “the effects of a commercial spirit on the government, temper, and manners of a people, whether good or bad, and the proper remedies” (LJB 224).⁷ Here and elsewhere Smith frequently presents these effects as moral effects, using the language of “temper” and “manners” and “virtue” and “character” to describe them. This moral language is especially evident in his study of the “poor man's son” in TMS, which notoriously presents power and riches as “enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniences to the body”—machines “ready at every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush into ruins their unfortunate possessor” (TMS 4.1.8; see, e.g., Hill, 2017). But Smith was not just a moralist, and alongside—indeed embedded within—his study of the moral effects of commercial corruption is an appreciation of the political and economic causes and effects of these evident moral changes.

Smith's arresting assessment of the moral consequences of specialized, divided labor has rightly received a great deal of recent attention. Of particular scholarly interest has been Smith's proposed political response to this problem, and in particular the degree of public funding he in fact envisioned for the educational systems he proposed to offset corruption.⁸ Yet this focus on the nature and extent of his envisioned cure has left two elements of his diagnosis understudied. One concerns the degree to which Smith regards this corrupting process as a natural and indeed necessary process; Smith here again thus insists that these ills “necessarily” emerge “in the great body of the people” of “every improved and civilized society” if government fails to intervene. The second is that Smith sees this corruption as taking several discrete forms. Smith envisions not just some general corruption of character, but a corruption specifically of the “intellectual” virtues, the “social” virtues, and the “martial” virtues.

This disaggregation is important because even as Smith traces the corruption of all three of these types of virtues back to the repetitive nature of specialized labor, he goes on to argue that the political problems consequent to the corruption of the martial virtues are distinct from the political problems consequent to the corruption of the intellectual virtues. Specifically, where the corruption of the martial virtues increases the nation's susceptibility to threats from without, the corruption of the intellectual virtues increases its susceptibility to threats from within. Smith's treatment of the way in which the corruption of the martial virtues renders a nation susceptible to external violence is especially striking. Smith is as explicit as he can be that “the security of every society must always depend, more or less, upon the martial spirit of the great body of the people” (WN 5.1.f.59). To compromise the martial spirit of the nation—as Smith clearly thinks commercial progress does—is thus to compromise the strength and security of the nation. And in developing his arguments on this front, Smith makes three distinct claims.

The first is the most obvious: namely, that the vitiation of martial spirit and martial virtue incapacitates opulent citizens to defend their opulent states. Wealthy citizens, quite simply, are ineffective warriors—a point Smith would repeatedly make in his published and unpublished writings. In his jurisprudence lectures, Smith thus argues that “another bad effect of commerce is that it sinks the courage of mankind, and tends to extinguish martial spirit” (see also Heilbroner, 1973, p. 254). This is so, he explains, because “in all commercial countries the division of labor is infinite, and every ones thoughts are employed about one particular thing”: maximizing returns on one's labor. But Smith also sees something tragic here: “among the bulk of the people military courage diminishes” as a direct result of their focus on lucrative employment. And thus “by having their minds constantly employed on the arts of luxury, they grow effeminate and dastardly” (LJB 331)—a denunciation that is in keeping with views Smith expresses elsewhere regarding how certain types of luxury lead to “dissolution of manners” (TMS 1.2.3.4).

Smith's critique of the effects of luxury on the martial virtues is also in keeping with a familiar classical republican tradition on whose tropes he here very clearly draws.⁹ But to these conventional republican critiques of the effects of opulence and luxury Smith adds a second, far more original critique that goes well beyond traditional republican concerns.¹⁰ Herein lies his second key claim: that the increased susceptibility of advanced commercial societies to foreign invasion owes not only to the way in which labor specialization might compromise martial spirit and martial virtue, but also to the ways in which the division of labor compromises military readiness and recruitment. In making this claim, Smith subtly but importantly shifts away from republican concerns with virtue and character to a more original set of insights into how the progress of opulence decisively shapes (and indeed for the worse) national institutions.

Here, in accounting for how the population of commercial societies can grow even as its “number of fighting people” shrinks, Smith reiterates both the core concept of his paradox of national opulence and national power, and the degree to which this inverse relation is in fact “necessary.” But Smith also goes on to show that not only is it not in the individual's interest to leave behind their lucrative pursuits to go out into the field, it is also not in the nation's economic interests. “In a state where arts, manufacturing, and handicrafts are brought to perfection,” the state “cannot dispense with the laborers in this manner without the total loss of business and the destruction of the state” (LJA iv.79). Thus, another level of the paradox: not only does the structure of the labor institutions of a commercial society disincentivize military service and thereby compromise the nation's capacities for defense, but compelling artisans to leave their bench and serve in the military necessarily hampers the national economy in ways that themselves hasten the “destruction of the state.”

To bolster his argument, Smith cites several empirical case studies. One is the fall of Rome, which he traces directly to that moment when the Romans “arrived at a considerable degree of improvement both in arts and commerce” and consequently became “less fond of going out to war” (LJB 46–47; LJA iv.88; cf. LJA iv.99), aware that they “made more by their trades than by going to war” (LJB 49; LJA iv.103). Another is the fall of China to the Tartars. Ming China, he insists, was a classic instance of an advanced nation in which “the division of labor and luxury have arrived at a very high pitch” and whose “conquest is easy” as a result (LJB 332); thus, his cautionary tale of the conquest of “the indolent, effeminate, and full fed nations of the southern parts of Asia” by the “active, hardy, and hungry Tartars of the north” (WN 5.1.g.1; see Hanley, 2014). A third case is the Britain of Smith's own day. Smith clearly found troubling the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, when “four or 5 thousand naked unarmed Highlanders took possession of the improved parts of this country without any opposition from the unwarlike inhabitants” (LJB 331; cf. LJB 159). This would have never happened in a previous age: “200 years ago such an attempt would have roused the spirit of the nation” for their “ancestors were brave and warlike, their minds were not enervated by cultivating arts and commerce, and they were already with spirit and vigor to resist the most formidable foe” (LJB 331–332)—a claim that provides the essential referent for Smith's otherwise seemingly incongruent but crucially significant claim in Wealth of Nations that “it is now more than two hundred years since the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, a period as long as the course of human prosperity usually endures” (WN 3.4.20).

In sum, allowing workers to work and not fight is prejudicial to the nation's military strength, but compelling them to fight and not work is prejudicial to the nation's economic strength. To all this, Smith can imagine only one solution: a commercial state must have the “wisdom” in peacetime to fund and train armies of professional soldiers (Hanley, 2014, pp. 378–379). Smith's well-known defense of the superiority of standing armies to militias then is not only an intervention in a long-standing republican debate (see Montes, 2009) but an institutional response to a fundamental political problem unique to commercial modernity. It is in this context that we need to read his claim that in “an opulent and civilized nation,” a standing army “can alone defend such a nation against the invasion of a poor and barbarous neighbor” such that “the civilization of any country can be perpetuated, or even preserved for any considerable time” (WN 5.1.a.39).

National opulence provokes invasion at the same time it renders wealthy nations incapable of resisting invasion. And thus, the tragic and necessary upshot: “improvement in arts and cultivation unfit the people from going to war, so that the strength is greatly diminished and it falls a sacrifice to some of their neighbors” (LJA iv.91).

Our focus to this point has been on the external threats to national security and integrity that Smith associates with the progress of commercial opulence. But Smith also insists that advanced commercial nations are subject to internal threats—threats he here again will identify as the direct consequence of the progress of opulence. And especially striking in Smith's analysis of these internal threats is their structural similarity with the external threats. For even as Smith makes clear that the locus of these threats has shifted from external to internal, the essential dynamic at their root remains the perennial tension between rich and poor, and the constant potential for violence latent in this tension.

These are striking passages that demand to be read in several contexts. They first are to be read as evidence for Smith's fundamental belief that government exists to secure property rights.¹² Yet this, while true, does not in itself account for one of the most crucial elements of the passage: the degree to which Smith believes that civil society exists not simply to preserve property rights, but also or especially to preserve those inequalities of property, and specifically those moderate rather than extreme inequalities he elsewhere claims are indispensable to commercial progress. This is an important element of Smith's argument that has been helpfully brought out in recent work on Smith and inequality,¹³ and has also been noted in recent work on Smith's debts to Rousseau.¹⁴ But for all this, there is another less well appreciated context for these passages. For when we set Smith's theory of the origins and ends of the government as they pertain to the first duty of the sovereign next to his account of the origins and ends of government as they pertain to the second duty of the sovereign, what becomes evident is that the fundamental constant in Smith's theory of government is the omnipresent threat of violence between rich and poor. Taken together, this attests not merely to Smith's deep sense of the fragility of civilization, but also to the degree of his awareness of two distinct threats to our fragile civilization: the external threats posed by poor nations to rich nations and the internal threats posed by poor individuals to rich individuals.

Smith's worry about the magnitude of these threats helps explain his sustained focus in both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations on the mechanisms of social order. TMS thus presents intersubjective exchanges of sympathy as fostering “the harmony of society” (TMS 1.1.4.7) and justice as the principal means of preventing social bonds from being “broke asunder” by “mutual resentment and animosity” (TMS 2.2.3.3), culminating in “the disorder and confusion of society” (TMS 2.2.3.8) that threatens to render society itself “a scene of bloodshed and disorder” (TMS 7.4.36; cf. TMS 2.2.3.6-7). Yet while these aspects of Smith's social theory are well-known, less well appreciated is his vision of the role played by commercial opulence in this destabilizing process. Smith's concerns here turn on how commercial progress reconfigures traditional social orders, and indeed often for the better. In his account of feudalism in Wealth of Nations, he famously argues that the introduction of commerce and manufactures created opportunities for economic and geographic mobility of which the least well-off were the greatest beneficiaries; “introduction of arts, commerce, and luxury” (LJA iv.157; cf. LJA iv.72; LJB 59), it is argued, severed the bonds of dependence and introduced “a revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness” (WN 3.4.17).¹⁵ So too, “the gradual improvements of arts, manufactures and commerce, the same causes which destroyed the power of the great barons” also subverted the traditional authority of the clergy (WN 5.1.g.25; cf. WN 5.1.g.22), and also realigned authority structures in the shepherding age (WN 5.1.b.7).

In each of these instances, Smith very clearly presents the introduction of commerce and opulence as a beneficial act of creative destruction that subverts traditional authority structures and social hierarchies in ways to be welcomed. Yet elsewhere he calls attention to a darker side of this subversion, noting that the progress of opulence can also change the balance of power between social orders in potentially destabilizing ways. In his lectures on rhetoric, he gives the example of the ancient Athenians. The Athenians were once “the most enterprising and active people in all Greece,” but “commerce and luxury entirely altered the state of affairs,” giving “the lowest an opportunity of raising themselves to an equality with the nobles; and the nobles an easy way of reducing themselves to the state of the meanest citizen” (LRBL 150; Sagar, 2022, p. 198). Further, “commerce, as it introduced trade or manufacture into all the members of the state made them unwilling to attend the courts” (LRBL 151). Civic obligations thus came to be neglected amid the spread of commercial opportunity, as men who saw their labor richly rewarded became “very unwilling to leave their work for an employment which brought them no profit” (LRBL 151). The progress of commercial opulence in Athens thus proved inimical to civil participation and service, with the result that the burdens of judicial service were shifted from the rich on to the poor.

Smith elsewhere says that the same is true of the military: “when arts and luxury have in the natural progress of things been introduced into the state, and considerable improvements have been made in these, the rich and better sort of people will no longer engage in the service” (LJA iv.87-88; cf. LJA iv.93-94). The growth of commercial opulence fundamentally alters the composition of the military by drawing the “rich and better sort of people” away, creating a vacuum to be filled by others: “whenever luxury comes in after commerce and arts,” the “only people who could go out to war in this state would be the very lowest and most worthless of the people” (LJA iv.84; cf. LJA iv.169). Military service then comes to be no longer the province of “gentlemen” but rather a “mob” composed of mercenaries drawn from “the dregs of the people” (LJB 40; see also LJA iv.93). Smith finds this tragic; where once the nation was “defended by men of honor,” when “improvement of arts and manufacturers was thought an object deserving the attention of the higher ranks, the defense of the state naturally became the province of the lower.” Thus, his conclusion: “when arts and commerce are still farther advanced and begin to be very lucrative, it falls to the meanest to defend the state”—and this, he pointedly notes, is “our present condition in Great Britain” (LJB 335).

Smith uses these claims in part to point out the danger of trusting the defense of the opulent nation to mercenaries. Yet this is only part of his worry. Smith is not only troubled by the ways in which the abdication of military service by the wealthy weakens the military but also by the way in which this abdication leads to a dramatic shift in the distribution of social power, as the military becomes an institution of the poor. Smith cannot but see this as a worrisome development given his belief that “upon the ability of each particular order of society to maintain its own power, privileges, and immunities, against the encroachments of every other, depend the stability of the particular constitution,” and that a constitution is “necessarily more or less altered, whenever any of its subordinate parts is either raised above or depressed below whatever had been its former rank and condition” (TMS 6.2.2.9). Thus, even as Smith clearly welcomed social mobility, he also recognized the possibility of social instability in abrupt changes in “the established balance among the different orders and societies into which the state is divided” (TMS 6.2.2.10; see also TMS 6.2.1.20; Hill, 2006, p. 643).

Commerce's rebalancing of social power thus not only has direct effects on specific public institutions, but also on the ways in which certain social classes have access to and control over such institutions. Put in the terms of the previous section's review of external threats to security, Smith's concerns with regard to the realignment of social orders might be classified as an institutional or structural concern. But also as before, Smith identifies a moral concern on the internal front as well as an institutional concern. And also once again, he presents these moral concerns as a direct result of the progress of the division of labor. The key difference is that even as these concerns spring from a common root, the internal political problem to which they give rise is distinct from the external threats consequent to the corruption of the martial virtues.

Smith's key claim on this front is captured in one of his most striking and sweeping generalizations: “in every commercial nation the low people are exceedingly stupid” (LJB 329). The stupidity and “mental mutilation” (WN 5.1.f.60) consequent to the progress of the division of labor is of course one of the most striking elements of Smith's account of public education in the final book of the Wealth of Nations. But why does Smith think this mental mutilation is in fact a necessary condition in “every commercial nation,” and why exactly does he take this stupidity to be a political problem?¹⁶

Here Smith lays out a side of the corruption endemic to the division of labor that is distinct from the corruption of the martial virtues. For what worries him here is not the cowardice of commercial citizens but their intellectual incapacity to judge either their moral duties in private life or the interests of the nation in public life.¹⁷

Smith will soon after return to the political implications of this incapacity for judgment. In so doing, he shows that the political problem to which the corruption of the intellectual virtues gives rise is distinct from the political problem to which the corruption of the martial virtues gives rise. For while the corruption of the martial virtues renders a nation susceptible to external threats, the corruption of the intellectual virtues renders a nation susceptible to internal threats, and above all, the threats posed by a very particular sort of domestic political actor. Smith presents these threats at the end of his well-known proposal for public education at taxpayer expense. But what demands further attention is the way in which Smith presents stupidity and the corruption of the intellectual virtues as at once the product of commercial progress and also an existential threat to the integrity and stability of the state.

The corruption of the intellectual virtues threatens “the safety of government” in “free countries” by giving rise to the threat of “the most dreadful disorders.” Specifically, the corruption of judgment makes the general populace uniquely susceptible to a particular type of domestic or homegrown threat: that of self-interested religious actors who would seek to manipulate the people of “ignorant nations” via “the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition,” and self-interested party leaders and politicians who promote “faction and sedition” in order to advance their own interests. Smith elsewhere strikingly attests to the destabilizing dangers of “violent religious controversy” and “violent political faction” (WN 5.1.g.7) and insists that “the animosity of hostile factions, whether civil or ecclesiastical” is “by far the greatest” of “all the corruptors of moral sentiments” (TMS 3.3.43). It is for this reason that Smith thinks that just as only a state-funded standing army can defend opulent commercial nations from the attacks of foreign enemies to which the corruption of martial virtues makes it susceptible, only a state-funded system of education can prevent opulent states from succumbing to the domestic enemies to which the corruption of its intellectual virtues renders it susceptible.

The foregoing has sought to call attention to a paradox at the core of Smith's thought which deserves more attention than it has received. At the heart of this paradox lies Smith's understanding of the dialectical relationship between wealth and power. Restated simply: achievement of national opulence, the aim of political economy, is necessarily inimical to the maintenance of national power. The growth of opulence specifically renders nations simultaneously susceptible—to use Smith's locution in The Theory of Moral Sentiments—to threats posed by “hostile nations” without, and to threats posed by “hostile factions” within (TMS 3.3.43).

Smith's treatment of this paradox and his placement of it at the center of his political theory reveals him to be a more sophisticated political theorist than he has sometimes been taken to be. It has long been appreciated that Smith was at once a champion of both wealth and virtue. For many years, scholars treated these seemingly competing strands within his thought in terms of “liberalism” and “republicanism.”¹⁸ But in retrospect, any effort to claim Smith for either liberalism or republicanism seems as much a non-starter as the old debate over the ostensible tension between The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations canonized as Das Adam Smith Problem. In both cases, what is interesting and enduring is not whether he was committed to one good or another, but rather how he synthesized them in a unified comprehensive theory. Showing that Smith both welcomed and was worried by the consequences of the progress of national opulence (see also Rasmussen, 2008) has been an aim of this study.

Yet even if this inquiry has been successful in uncovering the consistency of Smith's thought, it leaves another question unanswered: namely, that of what nations and national leaders ought to do in the face of this paradox. Smith himself repeatedly suggests that the proper end of political inquiry is political action. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he tells us that “political disquisitions, if just, and reasonable, and practicable, are of all the works of speculation the most useful” (TMS 4.1.11), and in his lectures on rhetoric, he insists that “the design of historical writing is not merely to entertain.” Good history does more: it “sets before us the more interesting and important events of human life, points out the causes by which these events were brought about and by this means points out to us by what manner and method we may produce similar good effects or avoid similar bad ones” (LRBL 90; see also 106, 111). If so, one might reasonably ask what lessons he expected his audience to take away from his own inquiry into and examples of national decline and fall.

The answer, I think, is twofold. First, Smith helpfully and hopefully emphasizes—especially in his published writings—that political actors are not the victims of fate but in fact can help to steer outcomes via a self-aware application of national policies. Faith that political actors can use their agency to maximize the possibility of desirable outcomes is after all central to Smith's project as a public writer; had Smith no faith in agency, his very authorship of the Wealth of Nations and its attack on British mercantile trade policy would be difficult to explain. So too, the emphasis in the Wealth of Nations on institutions (and its calls for a standing army and a public education system in particular) suggests an optimistic faith in the capacities of “the wisdom of the state” and “the science of the legislator” to mitigate politically destabilizing threats, and a worry that if practical action is “neglected,” then indeed “disorder will ensue” (LJB 310).¹⁹

At the same time, Smith's optimism must not be confused with idealism. Smith very clearly believed in human agency. But alongside his hopeful attestations of the efficacy of political action, he also insists that human action can only delay but never circumvent the inevitable. This worry is especially prominent in the jurisprudence lectures. Here, as we have seen, Smith is far from sanguine about the capacities of institutional solutions, repeatedly insisting that every government “seems to have a certain and fixed end which concludes it” (LJA iv.99), and darkly calling attention to “that fated dissolution that awaits every state and constitution whatever” (LJB 46). These explicit and repeated assertions of the inexorability of national decline and fall run counter to claims that Smith rejected “endist eschatologies” (Hill, 2019, p. 119, 122), and that his thought operated independently of “the assumption that corruption and decline is the inevitable fate of all political communities” (Sagar, 2022, p. 148). On the contrary, Smith's sustained articulation of the “causes” by which “states necessarily come to an end” (LJA iv.74-75) suggests that he was quite capable of imagining national decline and fall, and that he spoke of necessary national collapse far more explicitly and frequently than of the possibility of permanent escape from such necessity.

The fact that these concerns are especially pronounced in the jurisprudence lectures raises important interpretive questions. Among them: Does the difference in the tone of the lectures as compared to the published account in the Wealth of Nations suggest a change in substantive position on the efficacy of the institutional solutions? Or is it perhaps the case that the difference in tone can be accounted for by either exaggerations or misattributions of the transcribers, or (to my mind more likely) Smith's awareness of the differences in his audiences? This might explain why Smith, in a published book written for legislators and policymakers and influencers, would emphasize the efficacy of institutional proposals, and so conspicuously celebrate the “the powerful arm of the civil magistrate” (WN 5.1.b.2), the “wisdom of the state” (WN 5.1.a.14), and “government” and its “pains” (WN 5.1.f.50) as all that stand between civilization and its collapse, even as the lectures develop a consistently more sober (indeed somber) view of political agency in the face of necessity. Any answer to such questions can only be speculative given the evidence available and in any case requires more extensive discussion than can be provided here. My aim here has instead been to call attention to Smith's striking though underappreciated inquiry into the processes of national decline and fall, and to show that his interest in these runs deeper than the casual dismissal of them seemingly implicit in his much-quoted remark that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation” (CAS 262n3).²⁰ Made in the wake of General Burgoyne's Saratoga defeat, the remark tends to be taken as an effort to persuade a worried correspondent that the British Empire was robust enough to withstand losing a single battle in upstate New York. But while this accurately captures the remark's immediate context, when set in the context of his larger system, as I have sought to do here, it attests to another and darker side of Smith's political vision. In this sense Smith's 1778 remark—and indeed his inquiry into the death of nations more generally—is perhaps best read as an explication of the lesson with which his beloved teacher Hutcheson closed his own masterwork: namely that “states have within them the seeds of death and destruction”—seeds that indeed “have always occasioned the dissolution and death of every body politic” (Hutcheson, 1755, pp. 2:377–378; cf. WN 425n53).²¹