Siegmund Feilbogen, James Steuart und Adam Smith (1889)

Feilbogen’s article defends Adam Smith’s originality through a sustained comparison with James Steuart’s Political Oeconomy. It challenges the replacement of earlier veneration by criticism that reduces Smith’s achievement to borrowed propositions:

Der »Smithianismus« gilt als irrig und abgethan ²); Smith selbst soll fast gar nichts gesagt haben, was nicht schon bei seinen Vorgängern zu finden wäre.

English translation: "Smithianism" is held to be erroneous and disposed of; Smith himself is said to have stated almost nothing that was not already to be found in his predecessors.

Feilbogen locates originality not in priority over every doctrine but in the transformation of economic explanation. Steuart provides a revealing comparison because the circumstances commonly invoked to explain Smith’s success—Scottish origins, French experience, commercial contacts, and prolonged study—apply at least as strongly to him.

Hier sehen wir wirklich einen redlichen und besonnenen Arbeiter von anerkennenswerter, wenn auch nicht phänomenaler Begabung, bei dem überdies alle angeblichen Ursachen von Smith’s Erfolg viel auffallender zutreffen, als bei Smith selbst.

English translation: Here we really see an honest and level-headed worker of commendable, if not phenomenal, talent, in whose case, moreover, all the alleged causes of Smith's success apply far more strikingly than in the case of Smith himself.

The comparison tests the explanatory limits of historical environment. Steuart’s learning and diligence deserve recognition, but they do not produce Smith’s conceptual reconstruction of the field.

The opening section contrasts the architecture of their works. Steuart moves from population and agriculture through commerce, money, credit, and taxation, arranging the visible domains of economic activity. Smith begins with labour and capital, making productive forces and the distribution of their proceeds central to inquiry. His criticism of earlier systems does more than collect valid observations: mercantilist preference for urban production and physiocratic preference for agriculture become partial insights within a broader explanation.

The succeeding sections examine Steuart’s five books. Feilbogen credits his population theory with anticipating Malthus, his agricultural geography with anticipating Thünen, and his treatment of surplus agricultural workers with identifying a counterpart to the industrial reserve army. Yet anticipation alone does not establish equivalent scientific achievement. Steuart’s population reasoning lacks sufficiently tested evidence, while his treatment of agriculture confuses surplus with rent. His sensitivity to customs and social relationships is stronger than his economic analysis, which repeatedly assigns the statesman responsibility for regulating subsistence, population, and employment.

In commerce, this dependence on administration generates conflicting prescriptions. Steuart praises competition but retains guilds, privileges, subsidies, and restrictions. Expanding wants and demand dominate his explanation, while improvements in production receive insufficient attention. More fundamentally, he neither consolidates the concept of capital nor adequately distinguishes wages from entrepreneurial profit. For Feilbogen, these are structural deficiencies: without clear concepts of production and distribution, policy becomes a succession of remedies lacking a coherent foundation.

Money and credit reveal a similar combination of perceptive observation and unresolved premises. Steuart recognizes that bullion holdings and favourable exchange rates need not indicate prosperity, yet continues to overvalue the trade balance. His monetary and banking proposals show how criticism of an inherited error can coexist with its consequences or lead toward an opposite error. Smith’s concepts of capital and production costs supply the positive reconstruction Feilbogen finds missing here. In taxation, Steuart’s confidence in public expenditure becomes especially troubling: prosperity accompanying fiscal expansion cannot itself establish that taxation caused it, and expenditure taxes may burden subsistence and exchange.

The conclusion turns these comparisons into an argument about scientific creativity. Feilbogen values Steuart’s methodological caution and awareness of discrepancies between theory and practice; he even wishes Smith had offered comparable safeguards against doctrinaire application. Nevertheless, caution cannot compensate for inadequate concepts. Smith’s distinctive power lies in explaining large effects through ordinary causes, notably sympathy and the division of labour, and in redirecting economics from an idealized governing intelligence toward productive activity.

Ohne ihn würde sich die Nationalökonomie vielleicht noch lange Zeit auf den Irrwegen bewegt haben, auf welchen wir sie bei Steuart und allen »Kindern seiner Zeit« finden.

English translation: Without him, political economy would perhaps have moved for a long time yet along those false paths on which we find it in Steuart and in all the "children of his time."

This defense remains qualified. Feilbogen condemns Smith’s uncritical glorification of self-interest as a limitation inherited from his age. For an economics confronted by technological change and socialist criticism, fidelity to Smith means renewing his critical synthesis, not repeating his conclusions. Conceptual innovation, empirical testing, and historical self-criticism thus become complementary requirements of economic inquiry.