Even those who do not fall into the error of making Smith the creator of the science,often separate him too broadly fromQuesnay and his followers,and represent the history of modern Economics as consisting of the successive rise and reign ofthree doctrines --the mercantile,the physiocratic,and the Smithian.The last two are,it is true,at variance in some evenimportant respects.But it is evident,and Smith himself felt,that their agreements were much more fundamental than theirdifferences;and,if we regard them as historical forces,they must be considered as working towards identical ends.Theyboth urged society towards the abolition of the previously prevailing industrial policy of European Governments;and theirarguments against that policy rested essentially on the same grounds.Whilst Smith's criticism was more searching andcomplete,he also analysed more correctly than the physiocrats some classes of economic phenomena --in particulardispelling the illusions into which they had fallen with respect to the unproductive nature of manufactures and commerce.
Their school disappeared from the scientific field,not merely because it met with a political check in the person of Turgot,but because,as we have already said,the Wealth of Nations absorbed into itself all that was valuable in their teaching,whilstit continued more effectually the impulse they had given to the necessary work of demolition.
The history of economic opinion in modern times,down to the third decade of the nineteenth century,is,in fact,strictlybipartite.The first stage is filled with the mercantile system which,as we have shown,was rather a practical policy than aspeculative doctrine,and which came into existence as the spontaneous growth of social conditions acting on minds nottrained to scientific habits.The second stage is occupied with the gradual rise and ultimate ascendency of another systemfounded on the idea of the right of the individual to an unimpeded sphere for the exercise of his economic activity.With thelatter,which is best designated as the "system of natural liberty,"we ought to associate the memory of the physiocrats aswell as that of Smith,without,however,maintaining their services to have been equal to his.
The teaching of political economy was in the Scottish universities associated with that of moral philosophy.Smith,as we aretold,conceived the entire subject he had to treat in his public lectures as divisible into four heads,the first of which wasnatural theology,the second ethics,the third jurisprudence;whilst in the fourth "he examined those political regulationswhich are founded upon expediency,and which are calculated to increase the riches,the power,and the prosperity of astate."The last two branches of inquiry are regarded as forming but a single body of doctrine in the well-known passage ofthe Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)in which the author promises to give in another discourse "an account of the generalprinciples of law and government,and of the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods ofsociety,not only in what concerns justice,but in what concerts police,revenue,and arms,and whatever else is the subject oflaw."This shows how little it was Smith's habit to separate (except provisionally),in his conceptions or his researches,theeconomic phenomena of society from all the rest.The words above quoted have,indeed,been not unjustly described ascontaining "an anticipation,wonderful for his period,of general Sociology,both statical and dynamical,an anticipationwhich becomes still more remarkable when we learn from his literary executors that he had formed the plan of a connectedhistory of the liberal sciences and elegant arts,which must have added to the branches of social study already enumerated aview of the intellectual progress of society."Though these large designs were never carried out in their integrity,as indeedat that period they could not have been adequately realised,it has resulted from them that,though economic phenomenaform the special subject of the Wealth of Nations ,Smith yet incorporated into that work much that relates to the other socialaspects,incurring thereby the censure of some of his followers,who insist with pedantic narrowness on the strict isolation ofthe economic domain.
