EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Adam Smith's stages of history

Anthony Brewer

Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine Smith's four stages theory of history as an account of economic and social development, with an emphasis on the arguments and evidence he used to support it. In his biographical account of Smith's life, his friend Dugald Stewart described Smith’s method as 'conjectural history', initiating a debate which has continued ever since. Stewart meant that Smith used (informed) conjecture to fill the unavoidable gaps in the historical evidence, though hostile commentators have interpreted it as saying that Smith simply ignored the facts. This paper sets Smith's account alongside the evidence available to him to try to establish how much of it is pure speculation, unconstrained by historical evidence, and how much is rather a matter of interpreting evidence which can never be complete, as any historian is bound to do. It emerges that Smith did not (usually) neglect or ride roughshod over the evidence as it was available to him, but rather that evidence about some aspects and periods of history simply did not then exist, leaving much in his account that is indeed pure conjecture. The focus of the paper is on Smith, not on contemporaries or predecessors who argued a similar case. It deals with the substance of Smith's case, not with priority.

Keywords: Adam Smith; history; four stages; conjectural history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2008-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-hpe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/efm/media/workingpapers/w ... pdffiles/dp08601.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:uobdis:08/601

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vicky Jackson ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:bri:uobdis:08/601