Sigmund Feilbogen, Smith und Hume (1890)

Feilbogen’s essay asks why Adam Smith transformed political economy when many of his ideas had already appeared in David Hume and other predecessors. The question concerns how scattered insights become systematic, persuasive, and practically consequential knowledge. Against assessments that diminish Smith by tracing his borrowings, Feilbogen emphasizes demonstration, economic judgment, and the organization of inquiry around production.

The opening distinguishes histories of economic doctrines, economists’ lives, and economic thinking. The third investigates the underlying causes of intellectual change:

Die tiefsten Wurzeln der Wissenschaft, die letzten Ursachen ihres Werdens zu ergründen, ist der Geschichte der Nationalökonomie in ihrer dritten Gestalt vorbehalten.

English translation: To fathom the deepest roots of the science, the ultimate causes of its coming into being, is reserved for the history of political economy in its third form.

This approach places economics within shifting political and intellectual concerns while assigning exceptional thinkers a decisive role in resolving uncertainty. Smith’s enduring authority becomes a historical problem. Feilbogen separates the discovery of individual propositions from the achievement of making them effective:

Durch ihn erst wurde wirksam, was vor ihm schon da war, aber nicht wirkte.

English translation: Only through him did that become effective which was already there before him but had no effect.

Smith’s contribution lies in strengthening arguments and revealing their connections. Feilbogen also distinguishes objective novelty from subjective originality: recognizing and developing an existing insight may require independent intellectual preparation. Retrospective comparison obscures this achievement when it selects only passages in earlier writers that anticipate Smith. Hume provides the crucial test because his widely read essays contained apparently Smithian positions without producing an equivalent transformation of economic thought.

The second section contests claims that Hume founded political economy or supplied a superior economic system. Feilbogen respects his philosophical distinction and humane intentions but denies that philosophical genius guarantees economic competence. Economics demands attention to numerical detail, commercial conduct, and practical constraints. Hume refined discussion without decisively shifting its center from money, trade balances, and circulation toward production and distribution. The persistence of older monetary concerns and resistance to his defense of commerce indicate his limited persuasive effect.

The substantive difficulty is Hume’s tendency to justify economic arrangements through their political and cultural consequences. Commerce receives support because it strengthens states and refines manners, rather than because its productive character has been established. For Feilbogen, trade must instead be understood as indirect production: a less laborious means of satisfying wants. Smith’s emphasis on productive efficiency supplies a specifically economic criterion for judging gains and losses.

The third section examines the organization and argumentative method of Hume’s essays. Feilbogen tentatively connects their agenda with Montesquieu and notes the absence of sustained treatments of labor, capital, wages, rent, and value. He reads most of the economic essays as paired attacks on prevailing prejudices. Their critical force, however, does not consistently establish secure grounds for choosing between policies. Qualifications can restore the positions under criticism: monetary expansion may reassure mercantilists, while the supposed stimulus of taxation to work and saving can justify heavier burdens.

Smith’s arrangement instead establishes a connected argument before introducing qualifications. His tax principles become prominent canons supported by comparative evidence, and his treatment of public finance begins with expenditure. Expository order and evidential density thus belong to scientific achievement, not merely literary presentation.

The final section identifies a positive unity beneath Hume’s apparently fragmented discussions: commitment to refinement and cultural progress. Feilbogen values its humanitarian consequences, especially opposition to slavery and commercial hostility between nations. Yet refinement remains an unstable economic standard because it can authorize conflicting preferences for luxury or moderation, leisure or labor, equality or differentiation.

Smith offers a more determinate organizing principle in the increasing productivity of national labor, conditioned by capital and limited by the market. Analysis of costs, incomes, value, supply, and demand gives that principle explanatory substance. His conceptual legacy consequently extends even to opponents:

Heute noch kann selbst ein Gegner Smiths ohne dessen Grundbegriffe keine nationalökonomische Behauptung formulieren und ohne dessen Hauptgedanken keine begründen.

English translation: Even today not even an opponent of Smith can formulate any proposition in political economy without Smith's fundamental concepts, nor establish any without his principal ideas.

Feilbogen explains disciplinary authority through the organization and demonstration of knowledge, not priority alone. He preserves Hume’s stature as a humane critic of commercial prejudice while crediting Smith with redirecting economics toward production and the improvement of producing classes.