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INTRODUCTION - Adam Smith, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence Vol. 5 Lectures On Jurisprudence [1762]

Edition used:

Lectures On Jurisprudence, ed. R.. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein, vol. V of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982).

Part of: The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 7 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


INTRODUCTION

The first of the three documents in this Appendix was discovered by Professor W. R. Scott and published by him with annotations and comments, under the title ‘An Early Draft of Part of The Wealth of Nations’, in his Adam Smith as Student and Professor.1 The circumstances of his discovery of ED, and the physical characteristics of the document, are fully described by Scott in this work,2 and only one point needs to be added here. Scott identified the handwriting with that of the College scribe who wrote in 1762 a report of a committee on the powers of the Rector and Principal.3 We can confirm his judgement in that identification, and can add a further identification with a manuscript written in 1759. This is a revision of TMS, intended for inclusion in edition 2, and in the hand of the same amanuensis.4

The other two documents are fragments on the division of labour (FA and FB), which were also discovered by Scott (‘amongst letters which belonged to Adam Smith’)5 and published by him—in facsimile, and without annotations or extensive comments—in Adam Smith as Student and Professor.6 In physical appearance, FA consists of a single folio sheet of four pages (each page measuring 203 × 315 mm.), with the text extending almost, but not quite, to the bottom of the last page. FB consists of a single folio sheet of the same size and format, with the text covering rather more than two and one–half pages. The two documents were evidently written in the same hand, and have the same watermark. This watermark seems to be the same as that found in ED, but the hand is different.

ED, it would appear, represented a preliminary and rather tentative attempt by Smith to translate the ‘economic’ material in his Jurisprudence lectures into book form—an attempt which he probably made at some time shortly before April 1763. The origin of FA and FB is perhaps not quite so certain, but it seems implausible to assign them, as Scott did,7 to Smith’s Edinburgh period. It is much more likely, we feel, that they were in fact written in the 1760s. Our judgement on these matters is based on the argumentation in an article by R. L. Meek and A. S. Skinner, which contains an exhaustive survey of the relationships between ED, FA, FB, LJ(A), LJ(B), and WN, and to which the interested reader is referred.8

The principles adopted in the transcription of ED, FA, and FB are the same (mutatis mutandis) as those adopted above in the case of LJ(A) and LJ(B).

[1 ]Scott, 317–56.

[2 ]Ibid., 317–22.

[3 ]Ibid., 318.

[4 ]It was enclosed by Smith with Letter 40 addressed to Sir Gilbert Elliot, dated 10 Oct. 1759.

[5 ]Scott, 57.

[6 ]Ibid., 379–85.

[7 ]Ibid., 57–9, and see also the captions to the facsimile reproductions on 379–85, each of which begins ‘Very early economic work of Adam Smith, one of the Edinburgh Lectures.’

[8 ]‘The Development of Adam Smith’s Ideas on the Division of Labour’, Economic Journal, lxxxiii (1973).