Time to honour our forgotten son

THE first harbingers of the Edinburgh Festival - people leafleting for Fringe productions in obscure venues - are in town. And, as I walk down the High Street to The Scotsman offices, I am waylaid increasingly by flocks of tourists asking directions.

I’m often surprised by what they are seeking. Not the elegant new palace gallery or even the infamous building site at the bottom of the Royal Mile, but, rather fantastically, the grave of a long-dead economist and son of the Scottish Enlightenment. Some, usually earnest young Asians, want to find the former home of this influential historical personage. There is a discreet plaque pointing the way: lazy Edinburgh never having bothered to introduce any systematic signage to mark where its heroes and heroines passed their days. Who are they seeking? A certain Adam Smith, Esq.

Recently has come the news that some devoted intellectual followers of the great man plan to honour him with a statue in the capital’s Royal Mile (Smith is buried in Canongate churchyard). About time, says I. But this begs an intriguing question. Why, in a city replete with statues of the royally obscure, has the citizen who, arguably, most influenced the world we live in, not only been denied visible public honours but had his entire heritage wilfully ignored, to the point where tourists can’t easily find either his grave or his house when they are standing only 30 feet away?

For the uninitiated, Smith, this new tourist attraction, was born in Kirkcaldy in 1723. Kirkcaldy was no backwater. In those days, Fife was rich through smuggling and trade with the Baltic, and its merchant class devoted its wealth to intellectual pursuits as well as a little surreptitious hell-raising. This was a frenzied period of modernisation. Feudalism and tribalism were being dumped in favour of urban capitalism. Thinkers such as Smith intellectualised the process - one that was soon extended to the rest of the globe. If television had existed, he would have had his own chat show.

At 28, Smith was an influential professor at Glasgow University. In 1776, the year of the American Revolution, he moved to London (then the world’s biggest city) and published the book he is famous for, The Wealth of Nations, a manual on how to achieve economic growth through market competition. Two years later, he retreated to Edinburgh where he died in 1790, one of the most influential writers of his day. On a personal note, it was discovered on his death that he had devoted a large part of his fortune to anonymous acts of charity in his adopted home town. He never married and history is silent on his sex life.

At this point, Smith might have been consigned to the history books, mildly famous for having written works no-one reads any longer. I can vouch that this is not the case, as I was made to read The Wealth of Nations at Glasgow University, under the frightening tutelage of his greatest contemporary expositor, Professor Andrew Skinner.

Smith’s intellectual longevity results from his prescience in two areas. He was the first to explain in popular language the rudiments of nascent market capitalism, a form of human activity about to dominate the world, thanks in part to Smith’s brilliant analysis. (In contrast, hardly anybody reads turgid Karl Marx any more.) But there’s much more to him than being the first pro-market economist. He was an important intellectual brick in the Scottish Enlightenment, and - Dr Marx, to the contrary, not withstanding - ideas are what change the world, not economic forces. It was the Scots, especially Smith, who realised a key idea: that men were, indeed, self-interested, but that this self-interest could be channelled to promote social welfare under certain conditions - mainly free exchange, coupled with a rigorous regard for private property rights. The French Enlightenment also believed in the power of self-interest but deemed it inherently bad, and thought a strong political state was needed to civilise mankind.

You could argue, as does the historian Arthur Herman, that the Cold War was a confrontation between the principles of Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, and those of the French Enlightenment, with its collectivist inheritance. The former was embedded in American values and institutions bequeathed by Scots immigrants; the latter was passed on by utopian French socialists, first to Marx in the 19th century, and then to the Stalinist nightmare as to what human improvement was about. With this historical pedigree, why is Smith so forgotten in Edinburgh, the capital of the Scottish Enlightenment? There’s not even a likeness in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Would it be churlish to think it has something to do with Smith’s strong association with Glasgow University (where I learned my economics in the uncomfortable surrounding of the Adam Smith lecture theatre)? Surely, we are beyond such pettiness.

Again, the lack of recognition may be due to a subtle left-wing bias against what he is presumed to have stood for - a bias on the part of Edinburgh councillors and even the Church of Scotland, where they still remember Mrs Thatcher’s sermon on Smith at the 1988 General Assembly. Such naive prejudice misconstrues his powerful moral stance. He believed governments could not make men moral and that even the most well-intentioned prince would be corrupted by power - witness Tony Blair. Equally, he denounced commercial monopoly and the inherent desire of businessmen to cheat customers.

For Smith, the state denied people the right to their own initiative. However, that vital initiative had to be channelled by law and competition. It is the lack of these vital moral ingredients - not a lack of western aid - that condemns Africa and other parts of the developing world to grinding poverty. Because of that, Smith’s teachings are as pertinent as ever - which is why Edinburgh should honour its famous son.

Here’s how. Smith’s Edinburgh home, Panmure House, still exists, just up the road from the new Scottish Parliament building. It is used by Edinburgh’s social work department to help young people. A laudable use, but imagine if Mozart’s house was similarly used. So, why not turn Panmure House into a permanent museum to honour Smith, his work and the Scottish Enlightenment?

Of course, present activities in the house would have to be relocated. However, they deserve a more modern building, and sponsorship funds from around the globe that would be attracted by a project to create an Adam Smith Museum would fund alternative and superior premises for the social work department. If the council would express a willingness in principle to transfer Panmure House to a trust set up to mastermind the project, subject of course to a suitable relocation being found for the social work department, then everything could get under way.

The museum would be another useful visitor attraction in the Royal Mile and could serve as a centre for scholarly research into Smith’s work and influence. And it would do no harm to have the ghost of Mr Smith keeping a weather eye on the goings-on across the way at Holyrood.