Notes
Notes Chapter 1. Smith and the Problem of Propriety 1. In his critique of the modern reliance on a radically subjectivized idea of reason, Max Horkheimer similarly saw that “[i]f tradition, so often denounced in modern and scientific and political history, is now invoked as the measure of any ethical or religious truth, thus truth has already been affected and must suffer from a lack of authenticity no less acutely than the principle that is supposed to justify it. . . . The very fact that tradition has to be invoked today shows that it has lost its hold on people”; Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (NewYork: Continuum: 1947), 33–34. 2. Lanham specifically cites Richard Harvey Brown’s concept of reason as“isomorphic with the ‘decorum’ of classical rhetoric”; Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 46. See Richard Harvey Brown,“Reason as Rhetorical: On Relations among Epistemology, Discourse, and Practice,” in John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald M. McCloskey, eds., The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 3. For an important revision of the older interpretation of nineteenth-century rhetoric,see Nan Johnson,Nineteenth Century Rhetoric in North America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). 4. See Gregory Clark and Michael Halloran, eds., Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth Century America:Transformations in theTheory and Practice of Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). 5. See Henry Hamilton, An Economic History of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963); also R. H. Campbell, Scotland since 1707:The Rise of an Industrial Society (NewYork: Barnes and Noble, 1965). 6. These questions involve at least several key issues: the extent to which the Scottish Enlightenment had deeper origins in the seventeenth century: see David Allen, Virtue, Learning, and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Learning in Early Modern History (Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press,1990);to what extent it was a construct of late eighteenth,nineteenth and twentieth-century historiography:see PaulWood’s “Introduction: Dugald Stewart and the Invention of ‘the Scottish Enlightenment,’” in Paul Wood, ed., The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000); its relation to enlightened thought in England and France: see Roy Porter, Creation of the ModernWorld:The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (NewYork:W.W. Norton, 2001), especially 1–23; and the diversity of views the Scottish Enlightenment accommodated:see Dwyer,The Age of the Passions:An Interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment Culture (East Linton:Tuckwell, 1998), especially 1–12. 7. Hume’s term is from the introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature (1739); Kames’s from his Loose Hints upon Education, Chiefly Concerning The Culture of the Heart (1781). 8. On Moderatism,see Richard Sher,Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 9. The leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment were male,but women were not without influence,especially in education;see Rosemarie Zagarri,“Morals,Manners,and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44:2 (1992): 192–215. 10. Quoted in J. F. Bell,“Adam Smith, Clubman,” in John Cunningham Wood, Adam Smith: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 1:97. 11. See Hiroshi Mizuta, Adam Smith’s Library:A Catalogue (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000). Chapter 2. Smith and Propriety in the ClassicalTradition 1. Pohlenz, in his pioneering study of to prepon, argues that “Die ganzeTheorie wurzelt in derTiefe des griechischen Geistes,in seinem Gefallen anWohlgeformtheit un Proportionalit ät der sinnlichen Ersheinung,aber auch an der Harmonie von Erscheinung und Wesen, von Darstellungsform und Inhalt, von Einzelgeste und Gesamthaltung”; Max Pohlenz, “Tò Prépon: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des griechischen Geistes,” Nachrichten von der Gesselschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Philologisch-historische Klasse 1 (1933),53.Pohlenz sees a direct connection between the earliest and later uses of the term: prepein, the verb first designating the falling of the eyes on some external appearance, later came to denote the characteristic outline of one’s visible features, then eventually developed its normative aspect as to prepon,which referred to the sense of“fitness” between a person’s appearance, manner, and habits. 2. See also Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind:The Literary Analysis of Experience and its Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 130.Through an Aristotelian analysis,Trimpi presents stylistic decorum as involving the balanced discursive relation between conveying knowledge of a subject “in itself” with expression of emotion commensurate to the experience of that object (that is, knowledge...
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