Religion and Community: Adam Smith on the Virtues of Liberty

Religion and Community: Adam Smith on the Virtues of Liberty CHARLES L. GRISWOLD, JR. The good temper and moderation of contending factions seems to be the most esgential circumstance in the publick morals of a free people. Adam Smith' THE ARCHITECTS of what one might call "classical" or "Enlightenment" liberalism saw themselves as committed to refuting the claims to political sovereignty by organized religion. ~ The arguments against the legitimacy of a statesupported religion, and, in the extreme case, of a religious monopoly, are so integral a part of the Enlightenment's effort to put politics on a stable and just foundation as to constitute one of the controlling themes of the period. Liberal politics requires toleration, or better, liberty of religious belief. And this in turn requires that religious institutions be privatized, as it were, and that just politics be secularized in that legitimate rule is to lie in the consent of the ruled rather than in the laws of God as interpreted by his ministers on earth. Differ- ' Wealth of Nations V.i.f.4o. My references to The Wealth of Nations (WN) are to the two-volume R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1981). 2The list of thinkers in the "classicalliberal" tradition simply reads as the listof key Enlightenment figures: Bayle, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Smith, Voltaire, and Kant, to name a few. Consider the role that religious freedom plays in Kant's "What Is Enlightenment?" essay, for example. I note that in speaking of "liberalism" in this essay I refer to the "classicalliberalism" of the sort roughly shared by the founders of the tradition rather than to the contemporary American credo currently contrasted with "conservatism." In using the term "liberal" to characterize a political regime, I refer to a regime whose institutionsare structured so as to protect in reasonable measure the liberties of speech, assembly, religious belief, and economic transaction. A liberal regime willthus be one which holds that citizens are to be left relatively free to pursue their vision of the good life, within constraints ofjustice. [395] 396 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:3 JULY 1997 ences in religious outlook are to be settled, as Jefferson tells us, by persuasion, not by force, and persuasion is a private matter. The state has no role to play except (to simplify somewhat) that of preventing the use of force by the parties involved. As Jefferson strikingly puts it: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.... Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments [against error in religion]."3 I propose to examine, in the present paper, Adam Smith's arguments for liberal political arrangements with respect to religion in particular. I begin with Smith's critique, in The Wealth of Nations, of state-supported religious monopolies, and his suggestions about political structures that encourage honest piety and honest politics. I shall then turn (in section 2) to the moral psychology of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) in order to examine Smith's analysis of religious sentiments and of their roots in moral psychology. I take it that, for Smith, questions of institutional structure, virtue, and moral psychology are closely connected. Finally, I shall conclude (in section 3) with brief reflections on the question as to whether Smith's "liberal" stance effectively commits him to holding that the state is to remain "neutral" among competing views of the good life, and, if so, whether this is because there is no way to adjudicate such views, there being no knowable standard of the "good person ." While the bulk of the paper is thus an exegesis of Smith, my hope is that these reflections will suggest that Smith has an important contribution to make to current debates about liberalism. Some of what follows has a distinctly empirical cast. This is a reflection not only of Smith's approach to the issues, but of the fact that the issues in this branch of social or political philosophy do in...