THE RAYNAL-SMITH PARADOX
"Penser produit le besoin de communiquer ses pensées" — Helvétius

AM | @agumack

Adam Smith read the Histoire des deux Indes with tremendous intensity. After some years spent at Kirkcaldy working on the Wealth of Nations, he arrived in London in early 1773, anxious to obtain fresh news and analysis on the ongoing conflict with America. It was there that he purchased HDI. Although Raynal is often cited in WN, there is no doubt in my mind that Smith's intellectual debt to the Frenchman is much greater than usually thought — especially with regards to the supply of credit in the colonies. I deal with these issues in chapter 5 of El 'best-seller' que cambió el mundo — and I am now preparing a more detailed paper.

According to a standard cliché, one would expect a British author to proceed cautioulsy, taking great pains to gather 'empirical' evidence, while his or her French counterpart would quickly embrace the abstractions of esprit systématique. Nothing of the sort occurs here. On the one hand, Raynal slams "les spéculateurs qui se laissent entraîner par l'esprit systématique, & qui ne balancent pas à construire une vérité générale de quelques succès particuliers" (HDI 1780, xiii.40, p. 309). On the other hand, Smith admires French authors precisely for their ... esprit systématique! The point is well made by Adam Smith biographer Nicholas Phillipson:

On top of this there was a life-long love of intellectual systems and the esprit systématique he associated with true philosophical thinking and which he had learned to admire as a student at Glasgow studying mathematics, natural science and the Stoics. It was a quality he associated with the French and which he found lacking in the English. As he put it in one of his two contributions to the Edimburgh Review of 1755-6:

'It seems to be the peculiar talent of the French nation, to arrange every subject in that natural and simple order, which carries the attention, without any effort, along with it. The English seem to have employed themselves entirely in inventing, and to have disdained the more inglorious but not less useful labor of arranging and methodizing their discoveries, and express them in the most simple and natural manner'.

If only Raynal (and Diderot) had been less apprehensive of the stigma attached to esprit systématique, the Histoire des deux Indes would stand today as one of the key political economy books of all time.

(*) Nicholas Phillipson. Adam Smith. A Life. London: AllenLane, 2010, p. 4.
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