Abstract
In a well known passage from his Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D., delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1793, Dugald Stewart wrote:
His acquaintance with the polite literature both of ancient and modern times was extensive; and amidst his various other occupations, he had never neglected to cultivate a taste for the fine arts; — less, it is probable, with a view to the peculiar enjoyments they convey, (though he was by no means without sensibility to their beauties,) than on account of their connection with the general principles of the human mind; to an examination of which they afford the most pleasing of avenues. To those who speculate on this very delicate subject, a comparison of the modes of taste that prevail among different nations, affords a valuable collection of facts; and Mr. Smith, who was always disposed to ascribe to custom and fashion their full share in regulating the opinions of mankind with respect to beauty, may naturally be supposed to have availed himself of every opportunity which a foreign country afforded him of illustrating his former theories.
(E, 305)1
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Notes
John Rae, Life of Adam Smith (London, 1895), p. 98.
[Allan Ramsay, Jr.], ‘A Dialogue on Taste’, The Investigator, CCCXXII, 1755; David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, Four Dissertations, 1757;
Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste, 1759.
James Bonar, A Catalogue of the Library of Adam Smith, 2nd edn (London, 1932). Among the classical authors who wrote on aesthetics Smith owned works by Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Cicero, Longinus, Pliny and Plutarch; he had Quintilian’s Declamationes, but not the Institutio. Of his near contemporaries he owned works by Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, James Harris, Hume; Ramsay’s essay, Kames (edition of 1762), Burke (1782), and Reynolds’s Discourses (1778); Blair’s Rhetoric (1783), and Campbell’s Rhetoric (1776). Of greater significance, in the light of the French sources of his ideas, he owned some works by Batteaux (1764 edition), Boileau (1729) and Bouhours (1693); also Crousaz’s Traité du Beau, some of de Piles, Félibien, d’Alembert, Diderot, Rousseau, Perrault (his Vitruvius) and of course the immensely influential Réflexions by Dubos, in the 1755 edition. He had English translations of Alberti on sculpture, and Italian editions of Bellori (1672), Palladio (1570), Vasari (1674) and Vitruvius (1759). To judge from their date of publication, many of his books on music must have been acquired whilst he was preparing his essay on imitation. Alongside Alexander Malcolm (1721), Rameau (1737), Avison (1752) and John Brown (1763), we find Burney (1789), Chabanon (1779), Chastellux (1765), Lacépède (1785), John Maxwell (1781) Thomas Robertson (1781)
For further comment, see my ‘Hume and the Beginnings of Modern Aesthetics’, in Peter Jones (ed.), The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1989).
See especially Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (London, 1715); and Two Discourses (London, 1719).
For discussion of this point see Peter Jones, ‘On Reading Hume’s History of Liberty’, in N. Capaldi and C. Walton (eds), Studies on Hume’s History (Kluwer, 1989).
Claude Buffier, Traité des premières vérités et de la source de nos jugemerits (Paris, 1724).
Cp. John Brown, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music, 1763.
Charles Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression (London, 1752).
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© 1993 Hiroshi Mizuta and Chuhei Sugiyama
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Jones, P. (1993). The Aesthetics of Adam Smith. In: Mizuta, H., Sugiyama, C. (eds) Adam Smith: International Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22520-0_3
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