Adam Smith's Sly American Proposal

SOMETIMES A PROPOSAL IS A LESSON IN DISGUISE.

- DANIEL KLEIN

BY THE TIME Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared on March 9, 1776, the American colonies were in a state of revolt and the British authorities were furiously debating what was to be done. Smith’s Wealth of Nations presented two options.

The first option was to let the colonies go. The second was to unify the American colonies with Britain the way Scotland had been united with England. Smith himself was Scottish and, looking back, was very glad of the 1707 Acts of Union, whereby Scotland quit its parliament in Edinburgh and henceforth sent parliamentarians to Westminster. In Wealth of Nations, Smith suggested the same course for the American colonies. He proposed that Americans send parliamentarians to sit as equals in Westminster. Just as Scotland belonged to Great Britain, so now would those erstwhile American colonies which opted in. Smith’s proposal did not specify a new name for the enlarged constitutional state, but Smith foresaw with remarkable accuracy that a new name would, in time, be in order.

But did Smith propose such a union in earnest? There was an outpouring of ironic writing in mid–18th

century Britain, as Wayne C. Booth notes in his 1974 study, A Rhetoric of Irony. Likewise, as Arthur M. Melzer explains in 2014’s Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, writing between the lines was pervasive up to the end of the 18th century.

Smith was no stranger to irony. His first publications in 1755 in the Edinburgh Review contained sly digs and satire. Such devices abounded in his 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Wealth of Nations is more straightforward, but it still has its sly moments and undercurrents.