Lectures on Jurisprudence

Contents

1. Introduction 6 min 10

   Smith defines jurisprudence as the theory of the general principles of law and government and surveys his predecessors: Grotius, whose treatise on war and peace is the most complete system; Hobbes, who made the magistrate’s will the rule of virtue; Pufendorf, who answered him with rights in a state of nature that never existed; and Cocceji. He then divides the subject into four objects of law: justice, police (the cheapness and plenty of goods), revenue, and arms, followed by the law of nations.

2. I.1 Of Justice: Public Jurisprudence 2 h 3 min 159

   Smith classifies rights and injuries, then traces government historically. Obedience rests on authority and utility, not an original contract. Hunters have no regular government; the appropriation of herds creates inequality and government, whose end is to defend the rich from the poor. He follows the rise of Greek and Roman republics, their fall through luxury, mercenaries and ambitious generals, military monarchy, the barbarian invasions, allodial and feudal government, the decline of the nobles through luxury, Tudor absolutism, and the restoration of British liberty through Parliament’s control of revenue. He ends with English courts, juries, treason, citizenship and the limits of the right of resistance.

3. I.2 Of Justice: Domestic Law 1 h 3 min 72

   Domestic law: husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant, guardian and ward. Smith derives marriage from the long dependence of human children, explains the punishment of wives’ infidelity by sympathy with jealousy, and follows divorce and marriage forms from Rome through canon law. He argues that polygamy suits despotism and depopulates. The father’s Roman power softens over time. Slavery, still almost universal, is harsher in rich free societies, where slaveholders make the laws, and is less productive than free labour. In western Europe it ended through the interests of kings and clergy, not Christian sentiment.

4. I.3 Of Justice: Private Law 1 h 27 min 118

   Private law. Property is acquired by occupation, accession, prescription, succession and voluntary transfer, and each title varies with the four stages of hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce. Smith explains succession by the family’s joint labour, primogeniture by feudal insecurity, and wills by sympathy with the dead, and condemns perpetual entails. He treats servitudes, pledges, exclusive privileges and corporations, then contract, quasi-contract and delicts. Punishment rests on the spectator’s sympathy with the sufferer’s resentment, not on utility, which he illustrates through the history of compensation, murder, theft, deodands and the prescription of crimes.

5. II.1 Of Police: Cleanliness and Security 4 min 6

   Smith opens “police”, the regulation of the inferior parts of government, and dismisses cleanliness and security in a few lines. His one argument is that crime depends less on regulation than on dependency. Paris, with its many laws and its crowds of servants turned off by the nobility, is more violent than London, and Edinburgh more than Glasgow. Commerce and manufactures, which make the poor independent and give them better wages, are “the best police for preventing crimes.”

6. II.2 Of Police: Cheapness or Plenty 2 h 18 min 193

   The longest part of the course, and the first draft of the Wealth of Nations. Smith derives opulence from the division of labour (with the first pin factory), traces it to the propensity to barter and the desire to persuade, and limits it by the extent of commerce. He distinguishes natural from market price and condemns taxes, monopolies and bounties that disturb them. He explains money and coinage, attacks the notion that wealth consists in money, and reviews Mun, Gee, Hume, Locke and John Law’s Mississippi scheme. He ends with interest, exchange, and the natural and political obstacles that slowed the progress of opulence.

7. III Of Revenue 29 min 33

   Smith treats public revenue. Early magistrates lived on presents; crown lands are a poor fund for an expensive civilised government. He compares taxes on possessions with taxes on consumption. Land taxes are cheap to collect and equal; excises are unequal but unfelt, and so suit a free people. He praises British collection by commission over French tax-farming. He closes with the funded national debt and explains why stocks fall in war, and how “bulls” and “bears” in Change Alley trade them for future delivery.

8. II.3 Of Police (Resumed): The Influence of Commerce on Manners 11 min 15

   Returning to police, Smith weighs the effects of commerce on manners. Frequent dealing makes merchants honest, since reputation is worth more than any single fraud. But the division of labour narrows workers’ minds, takes children from school to work, and extinguishes martial spirit. The Jacobite rising of 1745, when a few thousand Highlanders marched unopposed into England, serves as proof. He calls these defects worthy of a remedy.

9. IV Of Arms 8 min 6

   A short part on arms. Smith traces military service through the stages of society: everyone fights, then the higher ranks, and finally, in commercial society, the poorest. Discipline replaces honour as soldiers come from the lowest orders. Standing armies become unavoidable. A militia under landed gentlemen would be safest for liberty, while a standing army, paid by the king, may side with him in constitutional disputes.

10. V Of the Laws of Nations 29 min 27

    The course ends with the law of nations, uncertain because no judge stands above states. A just war answers the same injuries as a lawsuit. Smith rejects Hutcheson’s case for punishing whole nations and explains it by the limits of sympathy. He contrasts ancient ferocity with modern humanity toward prisoners and property, explaining much of it by policy. He then sets out the rights of neutrals, and the origin and privileges of resident ambassadors, envoys and consuls, which commerce made necessary.