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WorkAdam Smith

Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms

Not a book Smith wrote but student notes from his Glasgow lectures, lost and found — an early draft of the economics that became the *Wealth of Nations*.

by Adam Smith305 passages held

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First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
English

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Overview

This is not a book Smith wrote. What survives are notes taken by students in his jurisprudence course at Glasgow, around 1762 and 1763, where the professor of moral philosophy worked through law, government, policing, revenue and defence — how societies come to hold property, punish, tax and arm themselves. Smith had his own papers burned before he died, so the course would have vanished entirely had a set of student notes not turned up and been published in 1896, edited by Edwin Cannan, more than a century after the fact. Their value is partly that of a rough draft: whole arguments of the Wealth of Nations, still fourteen years off, are already here — the division of labour, the case against restraints on trade, the account of how commerce quietly dissolved feudal dependence. But they are also the fullest surviving trace of the systematic theory of justice Smith worked toward all his life and never managed to finish or publish. In them the economics separates itself out from a wider moral and legal science that was meant to contain it, and that its author could not complete.

Key concepts

What is this text, and how did it survive?

It is not a book Smith wrote but a set of notes taken by students in his jurisprudence course at Glasgow around 1762 and 1763. Smith had his own papers burned before he died, so the course would have vanished entirely had a set of student notes not turned up and been published in 1896, edited by Edwin Cannan, more than a century after the lectures were given.

What do the four subjects — justice, police, revenue and arms — cover?

They are the divisions of the course. Justice covers rights, property and law; police, in the eighteenth-century sense, means the regulation and provisioning of a society — its order, cleanliness and the cheapness of goods; revenue covers taxation and public finance; and arms covers defence. Together they map how a society holds property, keeps order, funds itself and protects itself — the whole business of government.

How do the lectures relate to the Wealth of Nations?

They are its seedbed. Whole arguments of the 1776 masterpiece are already present in draft: the division of labour, the case against restraints on trade, and the account of how commerce dissolved feudal dependence. Here the economics has not yet detached from the wider legal and moral inquiry that houses it, so the lectures show the Wealth of Nations forming inside a broader science before it stood on its own.

What is the science of justice the lectures preserve?

It is Smith's projected natural jurisprudence — a systematic theory explaining, from general principles, how justice, property, punishment and government arise and ought to work. He worked toward it his whole life and never finished or published it. These student notes are the fullest surviving trace of that unrealized project, the moral and legal system the economics was originally meant to be one part of.

How does Smith explain the origin of property?

Smith treats property historically rather than as a fixed natural right. Different forms of ownership arise at different stages of a society's development, changing as its way of subsistence changes, and the rules grow more elaborate as commerce advances. On this view institutions like inheritance, and the decline of feudal tenure and slavery, are explained by the slow pressure of changing material life, not by timeless principle or royal decree.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The science of justice Smith never finished

Can justice be worked out as a system, the way one lays out a science? These notes are the fullest surviving trace of the theory of law Smith pursued all his life and never completed.

Behind the economics runs Smith's real ambition: a systematic theory of justice — a natural jurisprudence explaining how societies come to hold property, punish crime, tax and govern. The lectures work through law and government as a science with principles, not a catalogue of statutes, asking what justice requires rather than what any state happens to command. Smith had his own papers burned before he died, so this theory would have vanished entirely without a set of student notes. What survives is a draft: the fullest record we have of a project its author worked toward for decades and could never bring himself to finish or publish.

  • jurisprudence
  • justice
  • legal history
  • property rights
  • criminal law
  • sovereignty
  • taxation

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Where the Wealth of Nations began

How much of Smith's economics was already in place fourteen years early? Whole arguments of his masterpiece stand here in rough, first form.

Delivered around 1762 and 1763, these lectures already contain arguments the Wealth of Nations would make famous fourteen years later: that dividing labour finely multiplies what a people can produce, that restraints on trade impoverish rather than enrich, and that commerce quietly dissolved feudal dependence by giving lords something to spend their surplus on. Here the economics has not yet separated itself from the wider moral and legal science meant to contain it. Reading them shows the masterpiece taking shape inside a broader inquiry — the pin factory and the case for free exchange emerging from a course on law and government.

  • division of labor
  • commerce
  • mercantilism
  • wealth
  • opulence
  • economic development
  • feudalism
  • labor
  • money

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How societies come to hold property

Is owning things a timeless right, or something history slowly builds? Smith traces property, inheritance, marriage and punishment as institutions that change as a society's way of life changes.

A large part of the lectures is historical: Smith traces how societies come to hold property, pass it on, marry, punish and govern, and how these institutions shift as a people moves from one mode of subsistence to another. Property is not treated as a fixed natural right but as something that takes different forms in different stages of development, tightening as commerce grows. This developmental account — law and economy evolving together — is what lets him explain the decline of feudalism and slavery not by decree but by the slow pressure of changing material life.

  • property
  • property rights
  • inheritance
  • succession
  • feudalism
  • slavery
  • marriage
  • social order
  • republicanism

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Within this work

passages held
305
distinct concepts
642
by passages held, corpus-wide
#242

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “commerce” and “division of labor”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 13 pairings. 95 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
commercedivision of labor7
inheritanceproperty7
division of laboreconomic development4
feudalisminheritance4
commercemoney3
economic developmentmoney2
feudalismproperty2
inheritancesovereignty2
propertysovereignty2
commerceeconomic development1
division of labormoney1
division of laborproperty1
economic developmentfeudalism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments

    Smith kept returning to this book through the years of The Wealth of Nations, and was still revising it in the year he died. Anyone looking for the moral psychology underneath the economics is looking for this.

     EN
  2. 1776 The Wealth of Nations

    The book that founded political economy as a system, and the one for which Smith is now chiefly remembered — though he set as much store by his moral philosophy.

     EN
  3. 1795 Essays on Philosophical Subjects

    Everything else on Smith's shelf he either published himself or delivered from a lecturer's desk. This one was assembled after his death, and it holds what survives of his thinking about how systems of thought get invented and believed.

     EN
  4. 1896 Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms you are here EN
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