CLIVE E.HILL STEWART, DUGALD (1753–1828)

CLIVE E.HILL STEWART, DUGALD (1753–1828)

Dugald Stewart was the pupil of Adam Ferguson and Thomas Reid, an influential Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and lecturer, and the foremost early interpreter of the

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work of Adam Smith. Stewart was born, largely educated and died in Edinburgh. A student of the Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy, and son of an Edinburgh Professor of Mathematics, Stewart was called to act as a substitute lecturer for his ailing father at the age of 19, and later (1778–9) to substitute for his former teacher Adam Ferguson in delivering an original set of lectures in Moral Philosophy. He was elected Professor of Mathematics in the University of Edinburgh in 1775 at the age of 21, and when Ferguson resigned the chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1785, Stewart succeeded him and continued in that post until his retirement in 1810. In this position, Stewart presented lectures on Moral Philosophy, Principles of Government and, from 1800 onward, Political Economy to a generation of influential thinkers within both Whig and Tory circles. Among an influential coterie of former students, those lectures became legendary.

Dugald Stewart’s classes in Moral Philosophy were attended by many who would go on to become important figures in their own right in nineteenth-century economics and politics, indeed sometimes more important than their instructor himself. Their number included Walter Scott, Francis Horner and FRANCIS JEFFREY, although in his Life of Francis Jeffrey, Henry Cockburn claimed that he could find no direct evidence that Jeffrey was actually enrolled as a student in the Moral Philosophy lectures—a fact Cockburn attributed to the power exercised over the education of the young Jeffrey by his fiercely anti-Whig father. JAMES MILL and James Mackintosh, however, were frequently in attendance. Stewart’s separate series of political economy lectures, beginning in the winter of 1800, were attended over their succeeding eight sessions by approximately 500 students, including SYDNEY SMITH, Henry Cockburn, Francis Horner, Lauderdale, Palmerston, Lord John Russell, HENRY BROUGHAM, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice (3rd Marquis of Lansdowne and grandson of Sir William Petty), Macvey Napier and Francis Jeffrey. James Mackintosh would later seek to immortalize Stewart’s intellectual leadership with the observation that his students ‘were among his best works.’ The impact of Stewart’s thinking on the Edinburgh Review, launched in 1802 by Smith, Jeffrey and Horner, has been recognized also to have been direct and powerful. Indeed, comparing the available record of those who attended Stewart’s lectures in Edinburgh and the authors of the articles in the Edinburgh Review during its first decade of publication reveals that 412 of the 623 articles were written by one or other of them.

While it may be largely unquestioned that Stewart’s lasting reputation lies fundamentally in the transmission of Adam Smith’s economics to the next generation, the direct influence of Stewart’s lectures on Smith’s Wealth of Nations (which were not to be published until mid-century) is more difficult to establish. Certainly he transformed the Smithian legacy even as he transmitted it, both by concentrating on the issue of free trade and by narrowing the focus Smith’s ‘science of the legislator’ to exclude the consideration of the forms of Government from the domain of political economy. This separation of the study of political economy from the study of the theory of Government or new constitutions was an innovative and significant step in the direction of establishing the province of economic science. For Stewart, political economy involved the production of ‘general principles’, which, when carefully applied to particular circumstances, could ‘enlighten and direct the policies of future legislators’ (Life and Writings of Adam Smith, 10:53). He supported this revision of the political economist’s brief in clear and unequivocally political terminology:

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Smith, Quesnay, Turgot, Campomanes, Beccaria, and others, have aimed at the improvement of society,—not by delineating plans of new constitutions, but by enlightening the policy of actual legislators. Such speculations, while they are more essentially and more extensively useful than any others, have no tendency to unhinge established institutions, or to inflame the passions of the multitude.

(Life and Writings of Adam Smith, 10:55–6) Such tendencies to unhinge and inflame were in Stewart’s view more the product of ‘the

mistaken notions concerning Political Liberty which have been so widely disseminated in Europe by the writings of Mr.Locke’ (Collected Works, 8:23) In emphasizing the greater value to political progress and stability of an expedient political economy, Stewart effectively left behind one important version of the natural law and jurisprudence tradition in the Scottish Enlightenment (with its emphasis on confounding patriarchialism and indefeasible hereditary right), and embraced another vision of the constitution as something at once progressive, organic and mechanical.

In his own time, Stewart was recognized as far more than the reformulater of Adam Smith. The influence of his own writings, including the first and second volumes of his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (I:1792; II:1815) and his Outlines of Moral Philosophy (1793) have been linked to the approach or methodology in matters theological, scientific and political economic of the Oxford Noetics—a group of Oxford intellectuals whose membership included Edward Copleston (1776–1849), Richard Whately (1787–1863) and Nassau Senior (1790–1864). Widely read in both Britain and the USA, the Elements conveyed the principles of Common Sense philosophy to a transatlantic audience, and provided what one commentator has called ‘the only systematic epistemological survey of contemporary scientific debates available in Britain before 1830’ (Corsi 1987:97). As such, Stewart’s epistemology, with its rejection of both associationalist psychology and physiological materialism, was taken up in development of JOHN STUART MILL’S writings on the method proper to the conduct of political economy.