Robert Burns and Adam Smith
20 January 2009 at 11:31 pm Peter G. Klein 2 comments
| Peter Klein |
I’m sure you’re all busy this week preparing your Burns Supper. I’ll be celebrating on Sunday, of course, the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth (this Burns, not this one). To honor the occasion Gavin Kennedy has written about the influence on Burns of Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments Burns knew well. Reflecting on the famous lines from Burns’s “Poem About a Louse” — O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us! — Gavin notes that
Burns’s poem is a way into Smith’s “impartial spectator.” Both men would have agreed that “to see oursels as ithers see us” expresses their different perspectives; Burns, pessimistically, reminding us of human frailty and its consequences, and Smith, optimistically, mapping how humans develop and maintain their moral senses. Smith, contrary to the poet’s assertion, says we do have the power “to see oursels as ithers see us” and he explains how. We have this power, if we wish to use it, from what we may crudely describe as akin to a conscience (though it was much more) in a weak resistance to self-deceit.
Smith is explicit and his stance inspired Burns’s verse:
. . . self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable. We could not otherwise endure the sight. (TMS III.4.6)
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Classical Liberalism, People.
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1.
Rafe Champion | 21 January 2009 at 4:26 am
Did Burns pick up the theory of unintended conseqences from Smith or did he invent it himself?
http://www.bartleby.com/59/3/bestlaidplan.html
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.”
2.
Rafe Champion | 21 January 2009 at 4:55 am
If you google “Robert Burns”+”Adam Smith” this blog is the first entry that comes up!
This comes up as well.
http://www2.gol.com/users/lodge1/history-e/papers/terasawa.html
It reports that both Burns and Smith were Masons and Burns was boosted by the Masons in Edinburgh, especially by the members of a lunch club (the Oysters Club) which was hosted by Smith, (though he never met Burns). They almost met through the agency of a mutual female friend.
“Mrs. Frances Anna Wallace Dunlop…became a patroness for Burns. She was the person who advised Burns to visit Smith in March 1787 in her letter, and Burns visited his home, however just one day before his visit, Smith already left Edinburgh to London for the medical treatment of his stomach, and Burns lost this only chance and could never had met him. Without the existence of Adam Smith, there came no success for Robert Burns as a poet and no chance to become “The Bard of Ayrshire” or “Scotland’s Favorite Son”.”