Adam Smith's stages of history

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine Smith's four stages theory of history as an account of economic and social development, with an emphasis on the arguments and evidence he used to support it. In his biographical account of Smith's life, his friend Dugald Stewart described Smith’s method as 'conjectural history', initiating a debate which has continued ever since. Stewart meant that Smith used (informed) conjecture to fill the unavoidable gaps in the historical evidence, though hostile commentators have interpreted it as saying that Smith simply ignored the facts. This paper sets Smith's account alongside the evidence available to him to try to establish how much of it is pure speculation, unconstrained by historical evidence, and how much is rather a matter of interpreting evidence which can never be complete, as any historian is bound to do. It emerges that Smith did not (usually) neglect or ride roughshod over the evidence as it was available to him, but rather that evidence about some aspects and periods of history simply did not then exist, leaving much in his account that is indeed pure conjecture. The focus of the paper is on Smith, not on contemporaries or predecessors who argued a similar case. It deals with the substance of Smith's case, not with priority.Adam Smith, history, four stages, conjectural history