Lectures on Jurisprudence
Adam Smith's 1762-64 Glasgow lectures on natural jurisprudence — reconstructed from student notes
Tradition: Scottish Enlightenment / natural jurisprudence / political economy
Smith's 1762-64 Glasgow lectures on jurisprudence — the missing systematic-philosophical link between Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations
Reconstructed from two sets of student notes (the 1762-63 'Report dated 1766' — discovered by Edwin Cannan in 1895 and published 1896; the 1763-64 'Report of 1762-3' — discovered by John M. Lothian in 1958 and published 1978), Smith's 'Lectures on Jurisprudence' record his Glasgow course on natural jurisprudence given as Professor of Moral Philosophy (1752-64). The Lectures are the systematic-philosophical project that should have produced the never-completed second book Smith promised at the end of the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments' (1759) — Smith's announced plan was to follow TMS with a book on jurisprudence and then a book on political economy; only the third actually appeared (as the 'Wealth of Nations', 1776). The Lectures cover: the four-stages theory of social development (hunting, pastoral, agricultural, commercial — Smith's distinctive contribution to Scottish-Enlightenment historical sociology and the conceptual seed of later stages-of-development theories from Marx to W. W. Rostow); the development of property rights from possession through occupation through accession through prescription; the structure of government (Smith's republican-Aristotelian framework); contract, family, criminal law, and the law of nations; and (in the final lectures) the principles of political economy that would become the Wealth of Nations. The Lectures are the systematic-philosophical missing link in Smith's corpus and the principal source for the philosophical foundations of his later economic work.
Author
Editions cited
- Lectures on Jurisprudence, in the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford University Press / Liberty Fund, 1978)
- Earlier publication of the 1762-63 notes: Edwin Cannan (ed.), Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms (Oxford, 1896)
- Standard scholarly Liberty Fund edition (1982)
- Critical commentary: Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator (Cambridge, 1981); Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade (Belknap/Harvard, 2005)
School Embodiments
Defining Scottish-Enlightenment jurisprudential synthesis.
"The four stages of society — hunting, pastoral, agricultural, commercial." (Lectures on Jurisprudence, 1762-63, Introduction)
Major natural-law jurisprudence in the Grotius-Pufendorf tradition.
"The natural-law tradition supplies the framework." (Lectures on Jurisprudence, methodology)
Foundational classical-liberal political philosophy.
"The free man has the right to his person, his property, and his expectations." (Lectures on Jurisprudence, on rights)
Pre-Wealth-of-Nations statement of political-economic principles.
"The division of labour and the propensity to truck and barter." (Lectures on Jurisprudence, foreshadowing the Wealth of Nations)
Strong historicist-developmental framework.
"Each stage of society generates its own jurisprudence." (Lectures on Jurisprudence, four-stages theory)
Classical political-economic tradition.
Internal Tensions
The systematic-philosophical missing link between Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations. Smith ordered his manuscripts burned at his death (and they were); the Lectures survive only because student note-takers preserved them. They are the principal source for Smith's jurisprudential thought, his historical-sociological views, and the philosophical foundations of his economic work.
I. Time
1762-64 student-note reconstructions (Smith's actual Glasgow lectures had been delivered since 1752; the surviving notes are from his final two years before the move to France).
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II. Space
Glasgow University — Smith's Professorship of Moral Philosophy 1752-64. The intellectual space is the Scottish Enlightenment at its peak (Hume in Edinburgh, William Robertson at Edinburgh, Hutcheson before them at Glasgow, John Millar Smith's successor at Glasgow).
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III. Matter
Student-note reconstructions (~600 pages in the Glasgow Edition). Form is lecture-derived: each lecture covers a specific topic in jurisprudence or political economy.
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IV. Observer
Middle Adam Smith. The observer-philosopher-professor is delivering lectures that he intended to expand into systematic books; his promised jurisprudence book never appeared, so the student-note reconstructions are now our principal source for Smith's jurisprudential thought.
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V. Energy
Scottish-Enlightenment-systematic energies. The four-stages theory is Smith's distinctive contribution to Scottish-Enlightenment historical sociology and the conceptual seed of later stages-of-development theories.
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VI. Information
Two sets of student notes (1762-63 and 1763-64). The two sets overlap significantly but each contains material the other lacks; together they constitute our best reconstruction of Smith's lecture course.
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Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Lectures on Jurisprudence resolves each dilemma
34 resolved positions across 4 dimensions · 23 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.