Adam Smith’s Rhetorical Art of Character

Abstract

Adam Smith’s rhetoric lectures—first delivered in Edinburgh in 1748 and continued for over a decade in parallel with his teaching of logic and moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow—are widely acknowledged as a signal event in the history of the field of rhetoric, a key development in what has come to be known as the “new rhetoric” so much associated with the Scottish eighteenth century and subsequent figures such as Hugh Blair and George Campbell. Though Smith never published his lectures (burned at his instruction at his death, they were recovered in the form of student notes in 1958), it was he, more than any other English-speaking thinker, who instigated a decisively new approach to conceptualizing rhetoric and linguistic criticism, which in turn contributed substantially to the rise of modern literary and communication studies.¹ This is all the more remarkable in that Smith, though clearly aware of the rhetorical tradition he was working within (and in some measure against), did not offer a typically preceptive art of rhetoric in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (LRBL).² Although the lectures contain some prescriptive guidance, LRBL lacks any extensive treatment of (and in some cases explicitly spurns) the practical and systematic instruction— heuristic and argumentative topoi, taxonomies of arrangement, a catalog of figural devices—that one might expect if Smith’s primary objective had been simply to help his listeners acquire skill at generating persuasive speeches and writings.