Adam Smith on Education as a Means to Political Judgment

Introduction

Even the most zealous interpreters of Adam Smith as an advocate of free markets and commercial progress have long acknowledged his support for education, paid for, in part, at the “publick expence.” ¹ Without an affordable and broadly accessible system of public instruction, Smith gloomily predicted that “all the nobler parts of the human character may be, in great measure, obliterated and extinguished in the great body of the people” (WN, V.i.f. 5). Yet the comparatively little scholarship on Smith’s educational philosophy never fully articulates his defense of public education, often framing it as a corrective to economic and moral problems generated by the market while ignoring its political importance. Those scholars who do address Smith’s views on the political consequences of an educated citizenry often read him as preferring education to religion as a kind of opiate for the masses.

In contrast, we argue here that Smith saw public education as a vital tool for developing sound political judgment. A compulsory education affords citizens opportunities to sympathize with others that might have otherwise been foreclosed in market societies while also teaching them to develop a healthy skepticism of the rhetorical efforts of others. As such, this paper argues that Smith’s major works offer a strong defense of public education as a means to improve key components of competent political judgment rather than a mere program “needed to offset the social costs of the division of labor” (Skinner 1995, 83). We also suggest that, in Smith, one can discover a challenge to market-based proposals for educational reform that often frame education as a private good whose benefits redound to individuals, not communities.

Smith offered at least three justifications for public education. First, he argued that a compulsory—if rudimentary—system of instruction was necessary to offset the intellectual degradations occasioned by the division of labor. “For a very small expence,” he wrote, “the publick can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education” which many “simple and uniform” working conditions failed to stimulate (WN, V.i.f. 54). Second, he suggested that broad access to a range of humanistic disciplines, such as “geometry and mechaniks,” “science and philosophy,” and “painting, poetry, [and] musick,” could help individuals cultivate the capacity for moral judgment, self-criticism, and “self-command,” which he claimed elsewhere were necessary for attaining human happiness and virtue (WN, V.i.g.13–14). Third, Smith emphasized the value of education for citizenship by safeguarding individuals against the “delusions of enthusiasm and superstition” and preparing people to see through “the interested complaints of faction and sedition”—or what, taken together with a developed sympathy, might be called the capacity for political judgment (WN, V.i.f. 61; also see Oprea 2022, 18–31). We argue that this ability to discern competing interests in political proposals, and to reflect upon them calmly, comprises a significant part of political judgment according to Smith. Understanding his defense of public education can also help explain why Smith so strongly supported the “study of politics” and “political disquisitions” as means to promote the happiness of citizens.

In what follows, we explain Smith’s educational philosophy and its bearing on political judgment. We proceed in three parts. We begin by reviewing the existing scholarship on Smith’s philosophy of education, which largely views Smith’s arguments for public instruction as a corrective for market ills. Those few scholars who do suggest Smith’s proposals might have had a broader aim miss—or misinterpret—its political importance entirely. In the second section, we begin to explain why this might matter, developing the “problem of political judgment.” We analyze Smith’s cautious criticism of commercial society to demonstrate how commerce threatened citizen’s capacity for political judgment, especially in free governments. Smith himself preferred something like constitutional monarchy or a “happy mixture” of monarchy with republican constraints to democracy, ² but he nevertheless articulated why compromising individual decision-making skills posed such a risk to the stability and duration of the latter (see Elazar 2021). In the final section, we the develop and defend our interpretation of Smith’s threefold argument for compulsory though limited education in commercial societies, defrayed in part at the public expense. We demonstrate that Smith held public education was the necessary means to enable citizens to resist indoctrination and to be considered as subjects of sympathy, both critical components of good political judgment. We conclude by offering some suggestions about how Smith’s educational philosophy might inform contemporary educational policy research that typically views the free market and liberal education as being in deep tension.

Section One: Smith’s Views on Education

The existing scholarship on Smith’s philosophy of education offers conflicting accounts of why he thought education was important and how education fit into his broader vision of a free society. Jacob Viner first articulated the now-standard interpretation that Smith viewed public education as a “check” on “the evil effects of the standards, mentality, and character of the working classes” (Viner 1927, 227–228). He concludes that Smith’s advocacy for public education was aimed at counterbalancing the psychological distortions wrought by “the division of labor and the inequality in the distribution of wealth” (Viner 1927, 228). This assessment is echoed by E. G. West, among others, who claims that Smith saw “education [as] the necessary antidote to the culturally un-promising environment of the division of labour” (West 1964, 10). These scholars thus held that Smith primarily viewed education as a corrective to intellectual deficiencies generated by the market; moreover, they suggest that Smith’s recommendations were for a rudimentary education, encompassing little more than basic literacy and numeracy. They say little about the political importance of public education for Smith, except as a method of preserving the stability of the market order and achieving a measure of distributive justice for the poor in the process (West 1964, 17; also see Muller 1993).

Other scholars suggest that Smith’s hopes for public education extended into the moral realm. According to Athol Fitzgibbons, “alienation was a moral problem” for Smith, one “that required a moral response” (Fitzgibbons 1997, 10). Fitzgibbons concludes that Smith thought “everyone who could afford it should be obliged by the state to acquire an education that included science and scientific morals (rather than the Christian ethics and metaphysics that the universities taught)” (ibid). This concern with the moral effects of education is echoed by Alex Thomas and J. R. Weinstein, both of whom suggest that Smith hoped public education would promote greater personal “flourishing,” “rationality,” and, ultimately, “virtue and happiness” (Thomas 2018, 107; Weinstein 2007, 17). These interpreters agree with Viner and West that Smith wanted to counteract the psychological side-effects of the division of labor, but they also contend that his defense of public education was rooted in a broader concern for moral edification in commercial societies. They tether Smith’s defense of education in WN to his concern with virtue and self-command in TMS, but they too remain silent on the political importance of public education for Smith. Moral continence may be a precondition for “social flourishing” according to these scholars, but the aims of public education remain predominantly personal, or apolitical (also see Winch 2000).

Those commentators who do highlight the political worth of education for Smith usually emphasize its value for political or social stability. R. D. Freeman, for example, argues that Smith’s defense of education was eminently political and rooted in the Scottish philosopher’s desire to preserve “the efficient and effective civil government on which laissez-faire depended” (Freeman 1969, 174). In Freeman’s view, Smith believed “the benefits ascribed to free competition were more likely to be realized in an educated society than an ignorant one” (ibid., 186; also see Himmelfarb 2012). For Edward Harpham, Smith’s primary concern was the threat of class warfare or sectarian conflict driven by the loss of the psychological bonds that traditionally tied the different social classes together in commercially developed countries. Harpham claims that, for Smith, “public education [was] not aimed at creating independent citizens in the republican sense of the term,” but at fortifying traditional social hierarchies and using education as a surrogate opiate of the masses, preferable but similar to the role that religion plays among the lower classes (Harpham 1984, 771). In this sense, Smith’s concern with “the entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people” is not simply moral or intellectual problem, but the threat is poses to social cohesiveness (also see Muller 1993).

Finally, a minority of those who have addressed Smith’s views on education outright challenge the idea that Smith supported public education. They complain that previous scholars have unfairly imposed modern distinctions between public and private onto Smith’s assessment of education in The Wealth of Nations, thereby committing interpretive anachronisms out of step with Smith’s own historical moment (Drylie 2016; West 1964). Moreover, they argue that Smith’s belief that educating the public is a valid government concern was tempered by his conviction that most governments are inadequate to the task. “His conclusion,” as the economist David Friedman writes, “is that while it is legitimate for government to subsidize education, it may be much more prudent to leave education entirely private” (Friedman 1993, 1). Friedman further thinks Smith’s sober assessment of the limitations of education, as well as the large gap between educational models available to Smith and to us today, should lead us to be wary of drawing too much support for public education from Smith’s works.

While the existing scholarship is helpful for understanding how education might serve as a corrective to the ills of commercial society, it fails to capture the political importance of Smith’s philosophy of education fully. Most importantly, this scholarship overlooks the significant role Smith gives education as the means to improve what might be called our capacity for political judgment. To explain this role, however, a clear account of Smith’s argument for commercial progress and the problem of political judgment is first needed. As we will see, the psychological damage inflicted by the otherwise beneficial division of labor compromises workers’ economic, moral, and political judgment, and requires remedy.

Section Two: Commercial Progress and the Problem of Political Judgment

There is little doubt that Smith believed commercial progress led to the collective dumbing-down of civilized society, a phenomenon that merited some sort of educational intervention. As he pithily summarized in a section on the manners of a commercial people in his Lectures on Jurisprudence, “it is remarkable that in every commercial nation the low people are exceedingly stupid” (LJ(B), 369). As we will show in this section, Smith thought an extended division of labor minimized or eliminated workers’ opportunities for creative thought and comparative reasoning, stunting their ability to make good judgments about moral, economic, and, importantly, political matters. To elucidate this problem, we will first briefly recount Smith’s argument in favor of the division of labor before explaining the significant psychological problems it caused, including the “political judgment problem,” as it has recently been described. ³

Smith argued that mental mutilation in commercial societies was chiefly the result of the division of labor, which tended to exaggerate unnatural inequalities of talent, rank, and influence between people (see Herzog 2014; Rasmussen 2016). The best illustration of this tendency occurs when Smith lauds the advantages to be wrought from the establishment of the division of labor while he simultaneously details the immense inequalities it creates. Smith compares the “philosopher” in “civilized society” to the “common street porter,” only to determine that

The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education. … Without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man must have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of life which he wanted. All must have had the same duties to perform, and the same work to do, and there could have been no such difference of employment as could alone give occasion to any great difference in talent (WN, I.ii.4, emphasis added).

Several details in this passage clarify Smith’s understanding of human psychology and its development. First, Smith makes clear that most differences in talent between human beings are not, strictly speaking, natural. They are formed over time in response to historically contingent customs, educational experiences, and habits, including the highly specialized forms of work and association occasioned by the division of labor. The difference between two people occupying vastly different stations in life—the “philosopher” and the “street porter,” to use Smith’s example—is, essentially, arbitrary (see Peart and Levy 2008). The philosopher has no natural claim to genius; his lot in life is largely the result of circumstances beyond his control. Second, for Smith, human beings have a propensity to “truck, barter and exchange,” which he considers earlier in the chapter the “necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech” and “common to all men” (WN, I.ii.2). As Leonidas Montes has shown, this propensity inclines sociable human beings to interact with others and to attempt to persuade them (Montes 2018). Third, Smith suggests that, unlike any other species, human beings can put this propensity to work for their mutual benefit. We can be “of use to one another,” as Smith writes, insofar as we can help each other satisfy our respective needs with our different talents (WN, I.ii.5).

In Smith’s view, the division of labor is justified by the great efficiencies and general opulence to be gained from it, as well as improvements in the well-being of the least well-off. Although it creates and then amplifies unnatural inequalities of talent and wealth, as the example of the philosopher and the street porter clearly illustrates, these inequalities are tolerable in part because, “in a well-governed society … universal opulence extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people” (WN, I.i.10). The average worker acquires “a great quantity of his own work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for; and every other workman being in exactly the same situation … a general plenty diffuses itself through all the ranks of society" (WN, I.i.10). Thus, as Smith argues in an oft-quoted passage, echoing Locke, “the accommodation of a European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king” (WN, I.i.11). Importantly, Smith is not suggesting that the “industrious” peasant is naturally superior to the king, or that the peasant’s needs are automatically satisfied by the division of labor. Rather, he is arguing that, in a well-governed modern society, “it may be true” that the average peasant will be accommodated more cheaply and efficiently with “the assistance and cooperation of many thousands.” Smith’s support for the division of labor, in other words, is rooted in the belief that commercial progress improves the basic accommodations of life, such as “food, cloathing, [and] habitations,” through “all the ranks of society,” but especially for “the lowest ranks of the people,” namely the poor (WN, I.i.11). The division of labor is therefore justified on the basis of mutual and relative utility—that is, because it benefits all, reduces poverty, and ameliorates relative inequality.

Despite its utility, commercial progress is never an unqualified good for all, as Smith acknowledges and a now extensive literature has shown. ⁴ Indeed, commercial progress can become harmful to the working poor when development comes at the expense of their humanity, a possibility Smith takes especially seriously in Book V of WN and in his summary of the effects of commerce on character in the Lectures on Jurisprudence.

Smith is deeply concerned that overspecialization in advanced commercial societies can mentally mutilate laborers, particularly by limiting their judgment. In “civilized” states, he writes, there is often “little variety in the occupations of the greater part of individuals, [and] an almost infinite variety in those of the whole society” (WN, V.i.f. 51). Because workers spend most of their time laboring, the monotony of the labor they perform has significant negative consequences for the way they think. “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations,” Smith explains, “has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur” (WN, V.i.f. 50). Such persons lose their ability to reason. One of the chief causes of the division of labor as Smith outlines in Chapter 1 of WN—specialization—is seen here to be self-defeating. As workers overspecialize, opportunities to exercise their ingenuity are eliminated. They no longer face the kinds of challenges or puzzles that they might use their understanding to solve. As he says elsewhere, the mind of a worker in a highly advanced commercial society is “confined…few ideas pass in his mind but what have an immediate connection with it” (LJ(B), 328). Workers in manufacturing trades with the most extensive division of labor are the worst off, as is the case “when a person’s whole attention is bestowed on the 17^th part of a pin or the 80^th part of a button” (LJ(B), 329). Such labor eliminates the worker’s “opportunity of comparing a number of objects,” which Smith explains is critical for making sound economic judgments about everything from the interdependence of town and country to the natural progress of wealth (WN, III.i). Without comparison, abstraction, or diverse experience, the working poor are left without a capacity to make decisions in their everyday lives.

Another critical mental faculty warped by the extended division of labor is sympathy. Smith labels our instinctive though often tragic attempts to imaginatively adopt the perspective of others “sympathy” at the outset of TMS. This propensity provides the bedrock for Smith’s account of human sociability and his virtue ethics. “How selfish soever man may be supposed,” Smith insists, sympathy renders the happiness of others “necessary” for us. ⁵ We also employ sympathy to imagine how impartial observers might judge us, rendering it the means to learn about the moral value of our actions and, thus, how we might become better people. Moreover, adopting the sympathy of others provides sufferers solace and can often be pleasurable for the sympathizer, especially if both parties achieve a harmony of emotions called “mutual sympathy” (TMS, I.i.2; also see Schwarze and Scott 2019). However, our instinctive ability to sympathize with others is limited by our physical, social, and temporal distance from those whose perspectives we seek to adopt and our capacity for abstraction and comparison (TMS, III.3), both of which are worsened in commercial society. If workers are unable to form comparisons and abstractions, they will neither be able to gain the perspectival distance nor the balance needed to realize that “we value ourselves too much and other people too little, and that, by doing so, we render ourselves the proper object of the contempt and indignation of our brethren” (TMS, III.3.5). In an early draft of WN, Smith tells us that the “poor labourer…bears, as it were, upon his shoulders the whole fabric of human society, [and] seems himself to be pressed down below the ground by the weight, and to be buried out of sight in the lowest foundations of the building” (LJ, ED 5–6; TMS, I.i.iii.2.1). Workers’ obscurity leads to a “lack of compassion and companionship,” as Dennis Rasmussen has argued, that significantly reduces their prospects for happiness (Rasmussen 2016, 342–352). The limited opportunities afforded to the working poor in commercial societies to engage in abstraction and comparison and their increasing social isolation thus have significant moral consequences.

But the stultifying effects of the extended division of labor on individual judgment worryingly extend beyond economics and morals. Smith makes clear throughout his corpus that one of the more dire consequences of workers’ participation in monotonous labor is the loss of their capacity for political judgment—not simply their intellectual or moral corruption. By political judgment, we mean the capacity individuals have to make reasonably well-informed decisions about political matters, tempered by a healthy skepticism of those in power. Political judgment helps individuals weigh information about the conduct and utility of their government when considering the limits of political authority and obligation.

Put differently, commercial societies run the risk of compromising the average person’s capacity for political judgment. Smith claims that the extended division of labor renders the common laborer “altogether incapable of judging” matters “of the great and extensive interests of his country” (WN, V.i.f.50). In commercial societies, the “greater part of individuals” are not afforded the educational opportunities to form “the abilities and virtues that state requires” (WN, V.i.f.40). Smith even predicts that, without such a moderate temper, the “entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people” is inevitable in any government (WN, V.i.f.49). Alexandra Oprea nicely refers to this as the “political judgment problem”: the mismatch between the demands faced by ordinary citizens in modern, commercial societies and their inability to meet them on a range of issues (Oprea 2022, 15–21; also see Sagar 2018, 24–28). Alongside their loss of political judgment, workers in commercial society lose their martial virtue or desire to defend their state. The routine nature of their work makes poor laborers indolent, cowardly, and useless to their country during times of war. As Smith explains, “unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he [a worker] is equally incapable of defending his country in war [as he is to judging the great and extensive interests of his country” (WN, V.i.f.49). Without intervention, commercial development seems poised to leave nations open to the threat of external invasion because of how it compromises the political judgment and martial bravery of their citizens. ⁶

Smith originally lays out the problem that good political judgment is needed to solve in a chapter in TMS devoted to the “corruption” of our moral sentiments (TMS, I.iii.3). He identifies ambition, or the spur to action caused by our instinctive desire to worship wealth and power, as the “great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments” (TMS, I.iii.3.1). But Smith’s concern, revealed as the chapter proceeds, is not simply with this psychological quirk leading to indecency or immorality. The respect the public gives to those seeking wealth and power and to those seeking wisdom and virtue is “so very nearly the same” (TMS, I.iii.3.3), even though “the candidates for fortune too frequently abandon the paths of virtue” (TMS, I.iii.3.8). Politicians are wont to abuse this respect and trust, Smith thinks:

In many governments the candidates for the highest stations are above the law; and, if they can attain the object of their ambition, they have no fear of being called to account for the means by which they acquired it. They often endeavor, therefore, not only by fraud and falsehood, the ordinary and vulgar arts of intrigue and cabal; but sometimes by the perpetration of the most enormous crimes, by murder and assassination, by rebellion and civil war, to supplant and destroy those who oppose or stand in the way of their greatness (TMS, I.iii.3.8).

The absence of any meaningful accountability through the judgment of citizens or through legal punishment allows the most ambitious politicians to enact schemes that are disastrous for political stability and overall well-being. Our inability to form careful judgments of the rich and powerful is, in short, an eminently political problem.

Smith seems most concerned, when he discusses political judgment, about the internal threat posed by powerful groups or individuals who seek to dupe uninformed or ignorant followers. When individuals become incapable of forming reasonable assessments of those in positions of authority because of their stunted capacity to sympathize with others and their limited ability to differentiate between politicians who are respected and those who are respectable, Smith argues that they are much more likely to support sedition. The most threatening groups in this respect are religions that encourage enthusiasm and superstition among their faithful, political factions vying for power, and populist leaders who might use deception to consolidate power. Because “the authority of religion is superior to every other authority,” as Smith says, “the fears which it suggests conquer all other fears. When the authorised teachers of religion propagate through the great body of the people doctrines subversive of the authority of the sovereign, it is by violence only, or by the force of a standing army, that he can maintain his authority” (WN, V.i.g.17). Thus religious sects “frequently occasion the most dreadful disorders” and “the interested complaints of faction and sedition” lead uninformed masses to “wanton or unnecessary opposition to the measures of government” (WN, V.i.f.61).

Smith’s concerns are not simply with how commerce threatens passive obedience but also with how it precludes reasoned judgment about political authority broadly. The rights of citizenship, including the right to have one’s children “educated at the publick expense,” vary greatly (LJ, (B) 87). But even subjects of the most repressive states still need to consider their political obligation. Regardless of the regime in which individuals live, for example, Smith explains that a “right of resistance must undoubtedly be lawful, because no authority is unlimited” (LJ, (B) 94; 434). The wise rather than the rash exercise of such a right requires deliberate judgment about the “absurdity of conduct,” “imprudent conduct,” or “folly and cruelty” of rulers. In governments based on the principle of utility, like democracies, individuals must reason about public utility, as well as recognize political disagreement, to determine their obligations:

It is the sense of public utility, more than of private, which influences men to obedience. It may sometimes be for my interest to disobey, and to wish government overturned. But I am sensible that other men are of a different opinion from me and would not assist me in the enterprize. I therefore submit to it’s [sic] decision for the good of the whole (LJ, (B) 14; 402).

Smith suggests here that such considerations are not wholly rational. Or, as is true with our moral and economic judgment, that political judgments are sentimental judgments too.

Smith’s worry about the inability of the majority to make good political judgments permeates his writings on commercial progress. In TMS, Smith illustrates this danger primarily at the level of individual psychology. “When the happiness or misery of others in no respect depends upon our conduct,” he writes, or “when our interests are altogether separated and detached from [others] … [then] we do not always think it so necessary to restrain, either our natural and, perhaps, improper anxiety about our own affairs, or our natural and, perhaps, equally improper indifference about those other men” (TMS, III.3.7) As a result, as others have pointed out, when inequalities of wealth, talent, and rank become highly exaggerated—a practical inevitability in modern commercial societies—individuals tend to lose both their self-command and their inclination to sympathize with others; they no longer feel inclined to restrain or moderate their behavior, since they no longer measure themselves against the judgment of the entire political community (Rasmussen 2016, 350–351). Moreover, Smith indicates that individuals whose sympathies have been corrupted in this way will often overestimate the happiness of the rich and powerful in unequal societies, thereby compromising their judgment (TMS, I.iii.2). Perhaps the most famous example of this phenomenon in TMS is the “poor man’s son” who wrongfully “admires the condition of the rich” and spends his entire life chasing after “a distant idea of felicity” at the expense of his own true happiness (TMS, IV.i.8).

Although the political dangers of overspecialization in commercial society are most pronounced among the “inferior ranks of the people,” Smith thinks material progress can corrupt the comfortable, too—especially intellectuals, or “those few who, being attached to no particular occupation themselves, have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people" (WN, V.i.f., 51). Such “leisured” individuals are not at risk of becoming stupefied; to the contrary, their privileged social status exaggerates their intellectual superiority compared to those who labor for a living. But they do run the risk of becoming useless to their fellows. “Unless they happen to be placed in some very particular situations,” Smith explains, “their great abilities, though honourable to themselves, may contribute very little to the good government or happiness of their society” (ibid).

Compulsory public education was the solution to the problem of political judgment for Smith, as we show in the next section. We claim that he believed the “study of politics” could help individuals cultivate a capacity to discern between competing political interests and reflect upon them calmly, an important part of political judgment. Moreover, unlike earlier commentators, we suggest that Smith’s proposals countenanced a curriculum that included a wide range of humanistic disciplines, such as “geometry and mechaniks,” “science and philosophy,” and “painting, poetry, [and] musick” (WN, V.i.g., 12–15). Finally, we put Smith into conversation with literature in the field of education policy.

Section Three: Education as the Means to Political Judgment

Smith’s defense of public education appears in Book V of WN, in the chapter “Of the Expences of the Sovereign or Commonwealth.” He distinguishes between two kinds of public instruction: “education of the youth” and “the instruction of people of all ages,” although he indicates that both are public goods “in the highest degree advantageous to a great society” (WN, V.i.c.1). As we demonstrate below, Smith exhibits a primary concern in this section and in his educational philosophy more generally with the political benefits of education, particularly its ability to develop individuals capable of exercising sympathy and independent thought. This is evident in the education Smith recommends even for poor laborers. We also address Smith’s views on the best way to deliver educational services: although he was highly critical of the publicly endowed universities of his day, he still believed education merited both public investment and oversight. Since Smith’s defense of public education was neither solely nor primarily economic, we show how his views offer a critique of educational discourses, liberal or otherwise, that narrowly defend the benefits of education solely in terms of productive or “useful” knowledge.

Smith offers three justifications for public education throughout Book V of WN. First, echoing concerns enumerated in the previous section about the dangers of commercial progress, he argues that a compulsory—if rudimentary—system of public instruction is necessary to offset the mental mutilation wrought by the division of labor. His proposals appear to be modest, and the curriculum he recommends for “those who are to be bred to the lowest occupations” stresses the most “essential parts of education,” namely the ability to “read, write, and account” (WN, V.i.f.16). Second, he claims that public education can make individuals more respectable, both to themselves and to others. “An instructed and intelligent people,” he explains, “feel themselves each individually more respectable and more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful superiors” (WN, V.i.f.61). Third, Smith emphasizes the political value of education by safeguarding individuals against the “delusions of enthusiasm and superstition” and enabling them to make good political judgments (ibid). This is especially important in “free societies,” he claims, where people “should not be disposed to judge rashly or capriciously” concerning their own government (ibid). Smith worried that, left unchecked, commercial progress not only threatened to benumb the working classes or strain social stability; participation in the extended division of labor also threatened to imperil human beings’ propensity to relate to one another—to sympathize properly and be objects of sympathy—corrupting their capacity for “fellow-feeling,” an essential precondition for political judgment and good citizenship.

It should be unsurprising then—though it is often overlooked—that Smith’s educational prescriptions aim at rectifying these corruptions of sympathy and mental mutilation to form citizens capable of forming sound political judgments. As is his wont, Smith describes the educational practices of ancient republics as an ideal at first. “In all the different republicks of antient Greece,” he explains, “to learn his military exercises, was a necessary part of education imposed by the state upon every free citizen” (WN, V.i.a.12). So, too, “every free citizen was instructed … to humanize the mind, to soften the temper, and to dispose it for performing all the social and moral duties both of public and private life” (WN, V.i.f.39). Education in antiquity therefore tended to develop “the good temper and moderation of contending factions,” which Smith regards as “[an] essential circumstance in the public morals of free people” (WN, V.i.f.40).

Despite their social differences and the distinctly modern features of the political judgment problem we have already articulated, Smith still claims that public education should play a decisive role in addressing the threat commercial progress poses to political judgment. He insists that “for a very small expense the publick can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education,” including how to “read, write, and account” (WN, V.i.f.54). Although apparently modest, Smith’s proposal to have teachers partially paid by the public to instruct poor children in the “elementary parts of geometry and mechanicks” would have been controversial at the time for its insistence on practical—and secular—subjects. In Edinburgh in 1758, for example, only 800 of the 3000 children “fit to go to school” were enrolled in any school, charity or otherwise, according to a report given by a councilman to members of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (S.S.P.C.K.), a society aimed at Anglicizing Scotland after the Act of Union (Law 1965, 59–62). The S.S.P.C.K.’s main aims in reform were in promoting religion rather than in improving student understanding: they sought to ensure that schoolmasters were Presbyterian, teaching the catechism, and insisting students read from the Bible (ibid., 62–63; also see Prunier 2009). Smith’s proposals for the instruction of the poor in parish or district schools, by contrast, would be a “necessary introduction to the most sublime as well as to the most useful sciences” (WN, V.i.f.55). Through this educational scheme, Smith concluded, the laboring poor, whose capacity for political judgment had been so stunted by the extended division of labor, would become “more disposed to examine, and more capable of seeing through” designs made by political and religious factions (WN, V.i.f.61). Smith considers political deliberation so important he even goes so far as to say that “political disquisitions, if just, and reasonable, are of all the works of speculation the most useful,” as even the worst of such texts “serve at least to animate the public passions of men, and rouse them to seek out the means of promoting the happiness of society” (TMS, IV.1.11).

Beyond emphasizing the ability to “read, write, and account” among poor workers, Smith also recommended exposing “all people of middling or more than middling rank and fortune” to “science and philosophy,” which he considers the “great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition” (WN, V.i.g.14). This exposure has the added benefit of preventing religious individuals of higher rank from trying to proselytize the poor (ibid). Similarly, Smith recommends exposure to “painting, poetry, musick, [and] dancing” for pupils in this social rank, because they “easily dissipate … that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse of popular superstition and enthusiasm” (WN V.i.g.15). ⁷

Taken together, Smith therefore appears to recommend something like a system of liberal education, one designed to sharpen critical thinking skills and to enable students, including the working poor, to resist indoctrination—or to cultivate a capacity for political judgment. Critically, Smith does not suggest this sort of education will be economically or commercially productive. To the contrary, elsewhere in WN, Smith ranks “the gravest” and “most frivolous” subjects, including the work of “churchman, lawyers, physicians, [and] men of letters” as being “unproductive of any value” (WN, II.iii.2). So, too, in the outline of Part III of Book V, which broadly covers the just expenses of the sovereign on public works, Smith distinguishes between “works and institutions” designed to “[facilitate] the commerce of society” and those designed to “promote the instruction of the people” (WN, V.i.c.1–2). The political and commercial benefits of public education appear distinct for Smith. Yet he clearly thinks a robust and accessible public education remains useful—even vital—in modern commercial society.

Smith did not think most universities of his day met these broad educational goals, largely because of their curriculum, which he again suggests has been corrupted by the influence of theology. In antiquity, “philosophy was divided into three great branches: physicks, or natural philosophy; ethicks, or moral philosophy; and logick,” an arrangement he considers “perfectly agreeable to the nature of things” (WN, V.i.f.23). In the earliest European universities, however, the spread of Christianity subsumed “Physicks” under “Metaphysicks,” leading to what Smith describes as “gross sophistry … obscurity and uncertainty” (WN, V.i.f.26). As a result, Smith seems to think the curriculum at universities has therefore became less capable of enabling citizens to form political judgments, as he explains in a revealing passage:

The happiness and perfection of a man, considered not only as an individual, but as the member of a family, of a state, and of the great society of mankind, was the object which the ancient moral philosophy proposed to investigate. In that philosophy the duties of human life were treated as subservient to the happiness and perfection of human life. But when moral, as well as natural philosophy, came to be taught only as subservient to theology, the duties of human life were treated as chiefly subservient to the happiness of a life to come. In the antient philosophy the perfection of virtue was represented as necessarily productive, to the person who possessed it, of the most perfect happiness in this life. In the modern philosophy, it was frequently represented as generally, or rather as almost always inconsistent with any degree of happiness in this life; and heaven was to be earned only by penance and mortification, by the austerities and abasement of a monk; not by the liberal, generous, and spirited conduct of a man (WN, V.i.f.30).

Such “alterations,” Smith concludes, “certainly did not render [universities] … more likely either to improve the understanding, or to mend the heart” and clearly point to the need for a curricular overhaul (WN, V.i.f. 32).

In a similar vein, Smith suggests the finance and administration of most European universities is outdated and inefficient. Large public endowments have ensured that professors are paid regardless of “their diligence and success in their professions” (WN, V.i.f.45). Degree requirements have led to runaway credentialism, similar to apprenticeships. “The great number of students who, in order to get degrees or to be admitted to exercise certain professions … are obliged to resort to certain societies,” Smith explains, have effectively guaranteed enrollment, regardless of whether the instruction offered at most universities was “worth receiving” (ibid). Such arrangements are quite different from those in ancient Greece, as Smith points out, where education was never directly subsidized by the state and where students were free to choose their “masters” directly (ibid). This was clearly preferable for Smith; “the demand for instruction,” he writes, “produced, what it always produces, a talent for giving it; and the emulation which an unrestrained competition never fails to excite, appears to have brought that talent to a very high degree of perfection” (WN, V.i.f. 46).

Yet, despite his reservations about modern European universities, Smith does not dismiss the benefits of a university education outright. Quite the contrary. “No better method,” he explains elsewhere, “could be fallen upon of spending, with any advantage, the long interval between infancy and that period of life at which men begin to apply in good earnest to the real business of the world,” even though “the greater part of what is taught in schools and universities … does not seem to be the most proper preparation for that business” (WN, V.i.f.35). In fact, Smith approves of the general diffusion of knowledge that universities afford: “The parts of education which are commonly taught in universities, it may, perhaps, be said are not very well taught,” he explains. “But had it not been for those institutions they would not have been commonly taught at all, and both the individual and the publick would have suffered a good deal from the want of those important parts of education” (WN, V.i.f. 18). In short, Smith seems to suggest that, with a better curriculum and better methods of incentivizing an education conducive to political judgment, systems of instruction are clearly a public good “in the highest degree advantageous to a great society” (WN V.i.c 1).

Conclusion

Our reevaluation of Smith’s philosophy of education and related prescriptions has aimed to demonstrate their political goals. We join new, promising work that seeks to explore the political implications of Smith’s educational theory and prescriptions, which contributes to Smith’s recasting as a proper political theorist instead of solely a political economist or moral philosopher (Opera 2022; Sagar 2018, 2021). Although a growing body of literature now agrees that Smith was highly sensitive to the dangers of economic inequality, our project extends this trend into the realm of education and challenges those who would try to invoke Smith to support market-based or vocational prescriptions for education reform.

Indeed, it is hard not to read Smith’ into our own moment. Debates surrounding education still involve familiar issues—access, affordability, curriculum, accountability, and methods of finance—many of which Smith anticipated and commented upon, as we have seen. And yet, how these issues are framed today has changed dramatically, particularly among thinkers who claim Smith as an intellectual predecessor. Economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan, for example, have argued that the awesome power of the state should only be marshalled to promote “competition” and to protect the property rights of individuals from the claims of a majority (see, for example, Hayek 2007; Friedman 1962; and Buchanan and Tullock 1999). In the process, their intellectual frameworks have tended to render everything in the realm of politics—even society itself—epiphenomenal to brute economic self-interest.

As the preceding remarks show, however, what is sometimes called the “neoliberal” approach to education today is markedly different from what Smith outlined in WN. Friedman, for example, claims that “a stable and democratic society is impossible without widespread acceptance of some common set of values and without a minimum degree of literary and knowledge on the part of most citizens” (Friedman 1955, 1). Yet he insists “the three R’s cover most of the ground” (ibid, 8). The much broader curriculum Smith imagined, from “public festivals” to “geometry and mechanics,” disappears from his analysis completely. Similarly, Theodore Schultz, the economist responsible for elaborating the now-well-known “human capital” theory, flattens all of the benefits of education into an investment in more “productive” skills, forgetting the tension Smith foresaw between marketable, useful skills—what he called “dexterity”—and ennobling knowledge and ignoring the argument for a broader liberal education on grounds of humanity or equity (Schultz 1959, 3). Perhaps most significantly, Buchanan, who considered his views deeply indebted to Smith, begins his educational polemic, Academia in Anarchy, by framing education as an exclusively “economic good”; the Smithian emphasis on education as an important political good simply vanishes (Buchanan and Devletoglou 1970, 1). Such misreadings have informed common-sense thinking about the benefits of education across the political spectrum, leading to a much greater emphasis on job skills and tangible returns in the form of higher wages.

And yet, as this paper has shown, this trend stands in stark conflict with Smith’s own views. He clearly favored forms of public education, partially subsidized at the general expense, to broaden a person’s intellectual horizons, facilitate self-command, and prepare individuals to see past manipulative party interests—what we have called a capacity for political judgment. Indeed, these benefits of education, thoroughly non-economic as they may be, constituted the foundations of a healthy liberal society for Smith. His writings therefore offer a potent defense of education as a public good whose benefits redound to communities, not just individuals, as well as an articulation of the importance of humane learning in a moment when education is often defined as little more than a means of producing more valuable laborers.