Many people consider Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations the first text on modern political economics, and the first popularization of the “invisible hand of the market”. In my education, I was often told what a profound impression it made on the signers of the (US) Declaration of Independence.
However, I’ve come to wonder if my education wasn’t misleading. It may have profoundly impressed many of the signers at some point in their lives, or during the course of the Revolution, it seems unlikely that it could have influenced the choice to declare independence, or the Declaration itself.
Wealth of Nations was published in Edinburgh sometime in 1776. The committee to compose the Declaration was convened on June 11, 1776 ( the decision to declare independence having been already solidly made by then). This is a very narrow window for a book to cross the Atlantic and be widely circulated, even among the small, but geographically separated, subversive leaders. (Travel was not easy in those days; the Consitution gives the newly elected President 6-8 weeks to reach the Capital for inauguration).
Though my search far from concluded, I haven’t yet found any mention of the book in the letters or writings of the Founding Fathers prior to the signing of the Declaration. I did, however, find several mentions of it in subsequent years. This makes me even more suspicious.
It seems probable to me that this book, at best, arrived too late to have changed any minds, and at best have refined and clarified the thinking of the exiting revolutionaries – if it was printed in, say, January or February. It seems quite likely to me that it reached the colonies too late to have had any effect on the Declaration at all, or that its role has been exaggerated in American mythology.
Does anyone here know which month it was published, or have a link to a any New World document or letter thst alludes to it being widely read --or read at all-- in the New World in the first half of 1776?
They go into An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and mention the fifth edition of 1789 mostly. Seems he did a lot of changing and re-writing from first to fifth. You might be able to get more of what you are looking for.
Found it at the cite…
"Editor’s Introduction
by Edwin Cannan
The first edition of the Wealth of Nations was published on the 9th of March,*1 1776, in two volumes quarto, of which the first, containing Books I., II. and III., has 510 pages of text, and the second, containing Books IV. and V., has 587. The title-page describes the author as ‘Adam Smith, LL.D. and F.R.S. Formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow’. There is no preface or index. The whole of the Contents are printed at the beginning of the first volume. The price was £1 16s.*2 "
Thanks! I hoped someone would link a frontispiece, but this is even better.
As for whether I am chasing a non-issue, I said the information I was given might be misleading, and I stand by that. I wanted to clarify it of my own sake. While most don’t say that the book influenced the declaration, what legitimate reason would there be for citing them as “the signers of the Declaration” rather than the “Constitutional Convention” or some other other, more applicable class? Numerous reference works (on-line and hardcopy) imply a causal relationship to this day.
For example, (to cite the first one that came up on Google) About.com’s “Studying the Declaration” site, says, in the first paragraph under "Events Leading to the Declaration: “This idea of a fixed amount of wealth in the world was the target of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith’s work had a profound effect on the American founding fathers and the nation’s economic system.”
These sentences are technically accurate, if parsed very carefully, in a discussion of “merchantilism” (Great Britain’s use of the colonies as a captive source of revenue – a direct cause which is well-nigh undebatable), but putting them directly under the heading Events Leading to the Declaration would make almost any reader assume that WoN had a “profound effect” on the Declaration (when it may have had next to none: The individual legistaltures cast votes for independence starting with North Carolina on April 12, 1776, just a month after WoN was published across the Atlantic, but a year after revolutionary war battles like Concord and Lexington in April, 1775)
I’m not claiming that this is a major issue or a deliberate lie. I called it a bit of “American mythology” because here at the Straight Dope, we have a pretty good awareness of how mythology works in the modern world. It’s not all glurge and hilarious urban legends. It’s in the texts, too.
This certainly doesn’t denigrate either Wealth of Nations or the Declaration. I was trying to clarify a “fact” – and I’d be very surprised if quite a few of us hadn’t recieved the same impression I had (to the extent that we thought of it at all). If there is a political lesson at all, it lies in the motives (in the author or the zeitgeist) that impelled the possibly spurious association, not by the works themselves.