Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750–1830 by Richard Adelman (review)

Is idle contemplation insignificant or worthless compared to other activities, especially bodily ones? Are contemplation, reflection, and other alleged intellectual acts truly acts? Are idle minds completely empty of content and therefore susceptible to invasion by negative forces? It is the relations between an active and a passive mind, between intellectual and physical motion, between labour and repose that Richard Adelman explores in several literary, philosophical, economic, and educational works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750–1830 is more than a mere study of the history of these concepts; it is also an investigation into human creativity and the possibility of moral and political agency. Two of Adelman’s most interesting and intriguing analyses of idleness/activity occur in his discussions of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments, and of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.

Adelman’s discussion of the political economy of Smith provides a broad landscape for thinking about the relation of labour, activity, and work to repose, reflection, and inactivity. He explores a tension internal to Smith’s Wealth of Nations as a means of uncovering Smith’s understanding of human nature. The tension is this: the goal of labour is repose. As Adelman reads Smith, the great advantage of the division of labour—that each worker both contributes to and gets something from the marketplace—is that it enables labourers to work for the sake of repose, rest, and play. And yet when the division of labour creates highly specialized work, the goal of greater productivity entails that the labourer’s task becomes a nearly continuous activity. The way to avoid over-exertion, Smith argues, is to work continuously but moderately. Highly specialized and continuous work makes humans machine-like, uncreative, inflexible, and, as Smith says, “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become” (13). Repose, rest, and play are, therefore, forbidden by the division of labour. Though labour promises a state of inactivity, it delivers a paradox: the more the labourer works, the more impossible repose becomes. This tension arises, Adelman argues, because Smith is working with two incompatible views of human nature—on the one hand, humans have an “inherent propensity ... to exchange one thing for another” (10), and, on the other hand, “repose or the absence of exertion [is] the natural state of the individual” (30). Championing the latter view, Adelman turns to the earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments and finds evidence that this is Smith’s conception of human nature. In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argues that a state of inactivity, understood as reflection on our passions and behaviours, is essential to humans’ moral well-being and development. Adelman argues that both Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments treat repose as “the condition man seems to want to return himself to when under the influence of any passion or activity whatsoever” (30). He concludes that, for Smith, human nature is “most naturally understood in a state of ‘sedateness’ and ‘tranquility’” (30). Adelman argues convincingly for this connection between Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments. An important disanalogy between the idea of repose in the two works, which he does not note, is that the aim of repose in the moral sphere is to enable humans to return to their social labours in better form. We reflect in order to improve as moral beings. But even in the sections of Wealth of Nations where Smith endorses repose as the natural state of the individual, the goal of inactivity is not to enable individuals to return to the world as better labourers. It is to allow for an escape from that part of themselves. Action and repose are essential to the creation of moral beings. But labour and rest are not essential to the creation of labouring beings.

When Adelman turns his attention to Coleridge...