Friedrich August von Hayek: Review of Adam Smith as Student and Professor (1938)

Hayek’s review of William Robert Scott’s Adam Smith as Student and Professor (1937) combines admiration for archival discovery with criticism of its scholarly presentation. Scott supplies extensive new evidence about Smith’s first forty years, especially his Glasgow professorship and the development of his economics before his visit to France. Hayek’s central judgment is that this documentary achievement still requires an integrated biography capable of explaining its significance.

The review first maps Scott’s volume: a narrative confined largely to new findings occupies little more than a quarter of the book, followed by documents, correspondence—including nearly fifty unpublished letters by Smith—an early draft of The Wealth of Nations, facsimiles, and appendices. Hayek praises the abundance of evidence but argues that Scott leaves too much of its organization and interpretation to readers already familiar with Rae’s biography.

One has to learn one's way about this volume before one can really appreciate its rich contents.

This criticism concerns the usability of historical evidence, not simply literary style. Announcements of important discoveries send readers searching for inadequately identified documents; some early material appears only in reduced, difficult-to-read facsimile. Better cross-references would make the discoveries accessible without requiring readers to repeat the researcher’s labor.

Hayek then identifies the volume’s principal contribution to intellectual history. Scott tentatively dates the early draft to summer 1763, after the recorded Glasgow lectures but before Smith’s departure for France; the newly discovered Edinburgh material belongs to 1755.

Together with the notes of the Glasgow lectures they give us a surprisingly complete picture of the development of Adam Smith's thought on economics, and correct some of the traditional views, particularly as regards the supposed influence of the physiocrats.

The chronological sequence provides evidence for reassessing how Smith’s economics developed and how much it owed to French encounters. Hayek registers that interpretive consequence without attempting a detailed reconstruction of Smith’s doctrines.

His ensuing corrections reinforce a demand for precision and scholarly completeness. He dates Mirabeau’s conversion to Physiocracy to 1757, questions Scott’s confident identification of Montesquieu as a French author acknowledged by Ferguson when Boisguilbert remains a plausible alternative, and asks why newly available additions to Smith’s library catalogue are not listed. He also regrets the absence of a systematic bibliography: relevant discoveries remain scattered across periodicals, and Jastrow’s discussion of the early draft appears to have escaped Scott’s attention.

The conclusion turns these particular complaints into a methodological claim:

It is in the nature of a publication of historical documents that their significance cannot be adequately explained except by re-writing the history of the subject with which they deal.

For Hayek, establishing sources and rewriting history are complementary tasks. Scott has accomplished the first with exceptional care, but the second remains outstanding. The review therefore closes by treating the volume as an interim report and inviting Scott to produce a revised account of Smith’s whole life. Its enduring concern is the passage from archival accumulation to historical understanding: new documents matter most when their implications are made visible within a reconstructed narrative.