Thammasat University students interested in economics, literature, sociology, European history, the United Kingdom, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 24 January Zoom webinar about how the economist Adam Smith influenced the poet Robert Burns.
The event, on Tuesday, 24 January 2023 at 5pm Bangkok time, is organized by the University of Glasgow, Scotland, the United Kingdom.
The TU Library collection includes many books by and about Adam Smith and Robert Burns.
The event is intended to celebrate the 300th birthday of Adam Smith, which is in June 2023.
Students are invited to register at this link.
Adam Smith was a Scottish economist and philosopher who pioneered thinking in political economics. He has been called the Father of Economics and the Father of Capitalism. His most famous books are The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).
He was the first in the modern era to treat economics as a comprehensive system and academic field of study. Smith explained the distribution of wealth and power by natural, political, social, economic and technological factors.
Robert Burns is considered the national poet of Scotland. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot by the Scottish public in a vote organized by Scottish television channel STV.
In addition to writing his own works, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them.
Here are some observations by and about Smith and Burns from books, most of which are available at the TU Library:
Society and conversation, therefore, are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity, if, at any time, it has unfortunately lost it; as well as the best preservatives of that equal and happy temper, which is so necessary to self-satisfaction and enjoyment. Men of retirement and speculation, who are apt to sit brooding at home over either grief or resentment, though they may often have more humanity, more generosity, and a nicer sense of honour, yet seldom possess that equality of temper which is so common among men of the world.
- Section I, Chap. III., The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind.
- Section II, Chap. III., The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.
- Section III, Chap. II., The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations of Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing boats upon the rivers and the canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship. Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries.
China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.
- Chapter XI, Part III, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
Quotes about Adam Smith
He’s pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.
- Noam Chomsky (1995) Class Warfare, pp. 19-23
Even today — in blithe disregard of his actual philosophy — Smith is generally regarded as a conservative economist, whereas in fact, he was more avowedly hostile to the motives of businessmen than most New Deal economists.
- Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, Chapter III
The global reach of Smith’s moral and political reasoning is quite a distinctive feature of his thought, but it is strongly supplemented by his belief that all human beings are born with similar potential and, most importantly for policymaking, that the inequalities in the world reflect socially generated, rather than natural, disparities.
There is a vision here that has a remarkably current ring. The continuing global relevance of Smith’s ideas is quite astonishing, and it is a tribute to the power of his mind that this global vision is so forcefully presented by someone who, a quarter of a millennium ago, lived most of his life in considerable seclusion in a tiny coastal Scottish town. Smith’s analyses and explorations are of critical importance for any society in the world in which issues of morals, politics and economics receive attention. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a global manifesto of profound significance to the interdependent world in which we live.
- Amartya Sen, “The economist manifesto”, New Statesman (23 April 2010)
Smith distinguishes with great sophistication the different kinds of reasons people have in taking an interest in the lives of others, separating out sympathy, generosity, public spirit and other motivations. Even though he acknowledged the role of mental attitudes and predispositions, he went on to discuss how reasoning, which is at the heart of rationality, must have a big role in preventing us from being – consciously or unconsciously – too self-centred, or thoughtlessly uncaring.
- Amartya Sen, “Values and Justice”, Journal of Economic Methodology, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2012, 101–108.
Robert Burns:
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union.
- To a Mouse (1785)
When Nature her great masterpiece designed,
And framed her last, best work, the human mind,
Her eye intent on all the wondrous plan,
She formed of various stuff the various Man.
- To Robert Graham (1791)
Suspense is worse than disappointment.
- Letter to Thomas Sloan, (1791)
Quote about Robert Burns:
He has given voice to all the experiences of common life; he has endeared the farm-house and cottage, patches and poverty, beans and barley; ale, the poor man’s wine; hardship, the fear of debt, the dear society of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few, and finding amends for want and obscurity in books and thought. … And, as he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity, so had he the language of low life. He grew up in a rural district, speaking a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and he has made that Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the only example in history of a language made classic by the genius of a single man.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, speech to the Boston Burns Club (1859)
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)