Adam Smith's Patronage Network. Some evidence from the first ten letters.
As regular readers may recall I have gotten interested in the way Montesquieu, Hume, and Adam Smith view the system of patronage (or clientelism or corruption) that was a feature of Eighteenth-century government and administration. And so recently I decided to study their own participation in that system.* And I thought I would start with Adam Smith because Smith himself was also what we would call a professional academic for a non-trivial part of his life. So, it would allow me to compare how he wrote letters for students (and other academics) relative to the other patronage networks and practices. (Reading a forthcoming paper by Salim Rashid with some excerpts of Smith’s letters suggested the idea to me.)
Adam Smith’s Correspondence is a single volume in the Glasgow Edition of his Works; and one can read it through fairly quickly. I read it during my PhD, and probably have consulted it dozens of times each year. But I was still kind of astonished how many letters involve him asking a favor from a patron or well-placed friend or being asked a favor of some sort. In today’s Digression I want to give a sense of this by going through the first ten letters of the Correspondence. That starts in 1740, when Smith was 17 and heading to Oxford. And that ends in 1751, when Smith is already a professor at Glasgow University. (The density of surviving letters from and to Smith picks up later in Smith’s life.)
The first letter in the Correspondence is from William Smith, who was his cousin and legal guardian, and himself the secretary of the Duke of Argyll (a really important soldier-politician—he is the father of the 3rd Duke of Argyll who will dominate Scottish politics and all the patronage networks later in the century). In this first, brief letter Adam Smith thanks his cousin for money to pay for tuition and living expenses at Oxford. The letter is often quoted because Adam Smith complains about the lack of a serious study/work ethic at Oxford, but the whole letter is clearly designed to show gratitude and recognition of William Smith’s meritorious behavior toward Adam Smith.
The next five letters are all from Smith in Oxford to his beloved mom. In at least one letter, Smith is writing from (one of) the Duke of Argyll’s home(s) near Oxford visiting his cousin (and perhaps the Duke); in two letters he asks his mom for money (and stockings). In one letter he provides her information to share with others on scholarship opportunities at Oxford (which would be useful to know in Scotland). In one letter he asks her to be hospitable to a friend from college who was done him some services. So of these five letters to his mom, only two very brief letters are totally unconnected to Smith patronage network and/or apparent exchange of favors.
The seventh letter is Smith resigning the Snell exhibition (his scholarship/bursary). The eight letter is Smith accepting his position as Professor of Logic at Glasgow University. (As the editors of the Correspondence note this letter also hints at Smith’s task of public lecturing in Edinburgh sponsored by some of the most influential public figures of Scotland.) The ninth letter is Smith accepting more teaching responsibilities at Glasgow University (Natural Jurisprudence and Politics) and also trying to get his hand on the teaching materials of the course. (That letter feels incredibly undated.)
And finally, the 10th letter is mostly about faculty appointments and leadership roles at Glasgow University. The letter is rather important because in it Smith is clearly sabotaging or helping to block the appointment of David Hume as a colleague at the University of Glasgow. (This despite the fact that Smith and Hume were friends.) The sending of this letter had been delayed because Smith explicitly notes he was expecting that Henry Home (Kames) would be in town. I don’t want to insist that Smith wanted to consult with Home on the Hume appointment first, but it stands to reason that he did. Because Smith expects that an appointment of Hume might cause public backlash. (And Home would have to help protect the university in that case.) Apparently, according to the editors (who don’t provide evidence) Home was also trying to recruit the recipient (Cullen) to some kind of position in Edinburgh where Cullen could do his experiments.
The tenth letter also has another important sentence: “Be so good as to thank the [University of Glasgow] Principal in my name for his kindness in mentioning me to the Duke [of Argyll]: I waited on him at his levee at Edinburgh, where I was introduced to him by Mr. Lind;7but it seems he had forgot.” This is the 3rd Duke that I mentioned above. So we see here intra-university politics intersecting with the more general patronage network in Scotland. And access to the awareness of the key patron is itself a carefully guarded privilege that is itself part of the intra-university gift economy.
These ten letters are, of course, a very selective sample and undoubtedly have all kinds of survivor biases built into them. We also have good reason to suspect that Smith would have destroyed more personal letters. (He thought their survival was a disaster for Swift’s literary reputation, and Smith had a lot of papers burned on his deathbed.) So, I don’t want to claim that they represent an accurate picture of Smith as a letter writer. But they give more than an oblique glimpse into the role of patronage in Smith’s life.
*I am recruiting a young sociologist interested in networks and elite production, so I may have quantitative data down the road.