Adam Smith’s Anti-Hegemist Spirit of ’76
February 17, 2026
Working Paper
Abstract
Adam Smith expressed his antipathy to hegemonic domination in The Wealth of Nations and other works. I highlight his rebuke of slavery, his paragraph calling for Britain to relinquish her colonies, his comments on the vanity and amusement of newspaper readers, his condemnation of the East India Company, his paragraph naturalizing multipolarity, and his remark about the real mediocrity of Britain’s circumstances. I close by reflecting on the enduring relevance of the anti-hegemist spirit of ’76.
For we Americans to reflect now in 2026 on our origins in 1776 might be termed a social construction. But, also, it is natural. Nature prompts people to seek meaning. It is natural for people to mutually coordinate on focal points. To reflect now on 1776 is natural because the 250th is a focal anniversary. Nature and convention come together in natural conventions, which are indispensable to societal sustainability. It is natural that a society have conventions for public reflection and discussion.
Another topic for natural convention is peace. In De Jure Belli ac Pacis (“On the Law of War and Peace”), Hugo Grotius (1625) made neighborhood peace—a state in which neither neighbor has initiated any messing with the other’s stuff—an analogy for peace between governments. Alas, at age 63, Grotius died two years before the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. Grotius’s massive three-volume work advanced the understanding of what it meant for rulers to act lawfully when they acted outside their own political realm. Grotius advanced understanding of a higher law, both in war and for war.
In 1776 Americans invoked higher law when they threw off their rulers and embarked on setting up a scheme of government more native and arguably more natural. The year also brought The Wealth of Nations, which continued the Grotian tradition of higher law and suggested that Britain should let the American colonies go.
That American colonial policy advice was of a piece of Adam Smith’s larger thinking. He was pervasively anti-hegemist. By “hegemism” I mean a will to dominate unduly—to bully and exploit—in international affairs. Great powers are, of course, great; their size and power naturally lend them a certain gravity and prominence, and so they throw more weight around. But hegemism goes further, and the term is pejorative; it declares that the hegemist faction seeks not only a degree of regional hegemony but undue hegemony, to a degree that is unjust and often runs to shameful abuse.
In this article, I exposit the anti-hegemism of Adam Smith. The sections that follow touch upon Smith’s civilizationalism, his rebuke of slavery, his paragraph calling for Britain to relinquish her colonies, his comments on the vanity and amusement of newspaper readers, his “Let ’em go” plea on the American conflict, his condemnation of the East India Company, his paragraph naturalizing multipolarity, and his remark about the real mediocrity of Britain’s circumstances. I close by reflecting on the enduring relevance of the anti-hegemist spirit of ’76. I abbreviate Smith’s works as follows: WN = The Wealth of Nations; TMS = The Theory of Moral Sentiments; LJ = Lectures on Jurisprudence; LRBL = Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (citations are page#.paragraph#).
Smith’s Civilizationalism
The word “Nature” is in the title of WN, and the word “naturally” is in the extended title of TMS.[1] Smith knew that man is naturally sociable. Man is naturally concerned for others, for his community. Smith taught that man’s first and longest stage was small “democraticall” bands of hunters (LJ, 201), where the needs of the whole were quite manifest and common knowledge. Man naturally feels obligations to the whole to which he belongs.
As mankind stepped beyond the small, simple society of the band, into larger agglomerations of people, like tribes and then nations, the paradoxes of sociability multiplied. Gods grew bigger, encompassing more humans, until monotheisms encompassed all of humankind, even future generations.
How does man square his duties to those he knows and loves, his kith and kin, with his duties to the largest whole, now all of humankind? How is allegiance to God, a universal, super-knowledgeable, and universally benevolent beholder, possible with man’s puny knowledge, local affections, and “feeble spark of benevolence” (TMS 137.4)? This is the great challenge to man presented by the rise of civilizations. Smith represents an answer. Ever a both/and sort of thinker, Smith’s answer is both civilizationalist and universalist.
The answer that Smith (and others) represents is to grow a civilization with certain social grammars which, once established, will help ensure that individuals tend to advance the good of the whole while they are focusing on advancing parts close to home. Discover and honor good operating systems, good social grammars, and people can coordinate their activities and sentiments. They are “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which” was no part of their intentions (456.9). By no means does “the liberal plan” or “liberal system” work perfectly or guarantee happiness, but the predicament of civilization—in which man’s kith and kin are now affected by myriad human decisions beyond his ken—shows us that we could do a lot worse.
Thus, Smith morally authorizes each person to focus his efforts on “the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country” (TMS 237.6), because that is where his efforts can be effective. Erik Matson (2022, 2023) calls Smith’s solution “focalism,” because it morally authorizes attending especially to the focal points close to home. Also, Matson (2024a, 2024b) points out that Smith endorses a form of patriotism—the patriotism of partnership—while rejecting the patriotism of national jealousy. Smith spoke of “a blind indiscriminating faculty natural to mankind” to feel resentment against the entirety of another nation, such as France, when it was only certain French governmental elites who have injured us (LJ, 547).
At the end of TMS, Smith, age 36, announced his intention to write two more great works, one concerning “police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else is the object of law,” which he completed in WN, the other concerning “the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society” (TMS 342.37), or natural jurisprudence, which he never completed. Had he written the jurisprudence work, he would have expounded on something which WN presupposes—namely, the establishment of stable, functional government. WN may be seen as a book about domestic policy in a modern European nation-state, or in Great Britain in particular. From the student notes from Smith’s 1763 lectures on jurisprudence we can be confident that the never-written work on natural jurisprudence would have treated the formation of polities in different ages and places in order to exposit general principles for understanding and estimating the diverse manifestations of governmental authority.
From the Lectures on Jurisprudence (LJ), it is clear that Smith saw ownership, law, and government as both natural and conventional. Ownership is rooted in human nature—the soul’s ownership of its person—but societal systems of ownership manifest differently, based on circumstances. The LJ surveys many different times and places, yet uniformity can be perceived amidst the diversity.
In the LJ, Smith exposits four stages of human society: hunters, shepherds, agriculture, and commerce. The sequence is one of societal complexification. The principle of ownership is extended to increasingly separated and distinct objects and jural duties become more specific, just as Smith’s theory of the English language is one of significations becoming more “separated and detached” as the signs for them “split and divide” (LRBL 211, 217). The syntactical work done in a heavily inflected language like Latin is done instead with many small words (notably helping verbs and prepositions), rigidly ordered. Law, like language, has natural features, but history and convention affect its manifestations. Smith ends the language essay by highlighting “the prolixness, constraint, and monotony of modern languages,” features that “constantly confine” our expression (LRBL 226).
Thus, Smith is not chauvinistic about his own civilization. Modern civilization is not in all respects better. Moreover, modern civilizations, modern nations, differ; each has its own intricate constitution grown from its history. The respect Smith shows for each society’s integral intricacy parallels his appreciation, shown in TMS, for the intricacy of the human being, who, like an institution, has built up sensibilities, inclinations, beliefs, purposes, and habits. In TMS (267.2), Smith cites and seems to embrace “the system of Plato,” in which “the soul is considered as something like a little state or republic.” The structure builds up only slowly, but it may crash quite suddenly. Downside hazards in a human life are ever-present and much greater than any upside potentialities (Alshamy and Klein 2024).
Smith’s moral theory has inside of it a significant element of historicity. When Smith lays out four perspectives from which we ponder the propriety of someone’s conduct, one is “the perception of the agreement or disagreement of any action to an established rule” (TMS 327.16). Established rules—expectations, customs, traditions, cultural focal points, conventions—matter. Common experience matters. History plays a role inside of Smith’s moral theory. It is not the only element inside of the theory, of course. As Charles Griswold (2006, 185) notes, for Smith justice “is neither free from historicity nor reducible to it.”
Smith may thus be regarded as civilizationalist: History, heritage, lineage, civilizational norms and referents matter in determining the rightness or wrongness of an action. In TMS (Part V Ch. 2), Smith explains the influence of custom on moral sentiments. It is noticeable also in WN with Smith’s advocacy for a free market in churches. The advocacy is foregrounded with conditions in America, and he mentions Pennsylvania in particular (WN 792–793.8). But does Smith also call for free-market churches in England, which would mean the disestablishment of the Church of England? Smith never hints at the idea. England and Pennsylvania were different places with different histories. Each has different conditions for maintaining social cohesion and stable politics. Each was to some extent its own civilization. Smith’s universal, super-knowledgeable, and universally benevolent impartial spectator tailors his moral judgments to the circumstances and conditions within which the actor acts.
Finally, Smith’s civilizationalism can be understood as an outward extension of Smith’s general preference for local control and local autonomy, reflected not only in his favor for individual liberty but also in his views on public administration. He favors subsidiarity, with financing based on user fees or taxation confined to those who use the facility. Public works, he wrote, “are always better maintained by a local or provincial revenue, under the management of a local and provincial administration” (730.18). Smith opposed that domestic sort of hegemism we call the centralization and consolidation of power.
Odd as it may sound to some, there is a complementarity between Smith’s civilizationalism and Smith’s liberalism. Both reflect a virtuous humility about man’s puniness.
Smith’s Rebuke of Slavery
History matters, but so does the law of nature. In discussing the influence of custom on moral sentiments, Smith says that when customs “coincide with the natural principles of right and wrong, they heighten the delicacy of our sentiments, and increase our abhorrence for every thing which approaches to evil” (TMS 200.2). In some comparisons, such as whether we live in a refined modern European society or a “barbarous” primitive society, custom will influence what virtuous behavior looks like.
In some cases, the natural principles of right and wrong become “warpt” by custom (200.1). The “the general style of character and behaviour,” however, cannot be pervasively perverted by custom. If it were, the society would itself come undone. It is only “particular usages”—or peculiar institutions—that “produce the greatest perversion of judgment” (209.12).
To illustrate the influence of “different situations of different ages and countries” (204.7), Smith expands on the “heroic and unconquerable firmness” of “[t]he savages in North America.” Smith’s description is engrossing and awe-inspiring. At 957 words, the paragraph is the third longest in the book.
Without a break, the paragraph follows its lengthy description of the North American “savage” by noting, “The same contempt of death and torture prevails among all other savage nations,” and concludes:
There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished. (TMS 206–207.9)
This 1759 passage shows that Smith, though a civilizationalist, could morally condemn some established practices—”particular usages”—of his own society. The final sentence implies a higher lawgiver whose laws justly expose the slavers to the contempt of the vanquished.
The passage also affirms a power in just contempt. In Britain and America, Smith’s words were used to good effect by the anti-slavery movement. Sometimes might makes right, but also right makes might.
The First Motives of Colonizing in America
Smith condemns European imperialism with a broad brush, saying that “the principles which presided over and directed the first project of establishing th[e American] colonies” were “[f]olly and injustice”: “the folly of hunting after gold and silver mines, and the injustice of coveting the possession of a country whose harmless natives, far from having ever injured the people of Europe, had received the first adventurers with every mark of kindness and hospitality” (588.59).
The Paragraph Calling for Britain to Relinquish Her Colonies
One paragraph in WN hovers above all else one may say about Smith’s views on imperialism. In that paragraph (616–617.66), Smith posits that “the pride of every nation” and “the private interest of the governing part of it” always will prevent the nation from “voluntarily giv[ing] up all authority over her colonies.” Even the “most visionary enthusiast” could not hope that such a measure would be adopted.
Yet one soul proposed that Britain do just that. Here is the remainder of the remarkable paragraph:
If it was adopted, however, Great Britain would not only be immediately freed from the whole annual expence of the peace establishment of the [American] colonies, but might settle with them such a treaty of commerce as would effectually secure to her a free trade, more advantageous to the great body of the people, though less so to the merchants, than the monopoly which she at present enjoys. By thus parting good friends, the natural affection of the colonies to the mother country, which, perhaps, our late dissentions have well nigh extinguished, would quickly revive. It might dispose them not only to respect, for whole centuries together, that treaty of commerce which they had concluded with us at parting, but to favour us in war as well as in trade, and, instead of turbulent and factious subjects, to become our most faithful, affectionate, and generous allies; and the same sort of parental affection on the one side, and filial respect on the other, might revive between Great Britain and her colonies, which used to subsist between those of ancient Greece and the mother city from which they descended. (WN 617.66)
Smith’s “Let ‘em Go” Plea on the American Conflict
Up to the 1760s, Britain had largely neglected her colonies in North America. “In every thing, except their foreign trade,” Smith wrote, “the liberty of the English colonists to manage their own affairs their own way is complete” (WN 584.51).
That neglect had led to three great consequences. First, the neglect was salutary (568.7); second, the Americans learned to govern themselves and became accustomed to doing so (584.51); and third, Britain had left itself ill-positioned to ever assert rule over the Americans (621.73).
When Britain realized that she had better start asserting her rule if she were to retain it at all, a conflict began that revealed itself to be fundamental in nature. All of this Smith saw plainly. In the “visionary” paragraph (quoted above), Smith had already suggested that Britain should relinquish her colonies—that is: Let ’em go.
That paragraph admitted, however, that letting them go was never to be. So, in taking up the American disturbances, Smith considers what second-best approach to the situation might be more politically viable. He floats a proposal. But the proposal is really a ruse. He proposes a union with the American colonies, analogous to the union between Scotland and England in 1707, after which the parliament in Edinburgh was shuttered and Scottish parliamentarians traveled to Westminster.
Although Smith had made it quite clear (WN 619.69; 621.73) that the Atlantic expanse made integrated administration between Britain and the American colonies entirely infeasible, and although he well knew that on both sides of the Atlantic a union would be entirely unacceptable, he ironically feigned belief in its feasibility and mounted arguments for it. Those arguments, however—avoiding civil war and all the savagery it would entail, building a trans-Atlantic alliance and friendship, fiscal continence, and so on—also worked as arguments for simply letting the colonies go. Really, all along, Smith was promoting letting them go. Smith anticipated a protracted war and worked to soften up the hegemists so that they would be willing to quit the war sooner rather than later. Smith’s indirection may have been more effective than if he had argued directly for “Let ’em go!” The indirection also may have made the reception and stature of WN in Britain more assured.
The entire discussion is full of biting remarks, as when Smith suggests that the leading Americans could be enticed by “the great prizes which sometimes come from the wheel of the great state lottery of British politics” (623.75). But the most delightful moment is when Smith points out that the enlarged British state could look forward to the day—a hundred years hence, he estimates—when “the produce of American might exceed that of British taxation” and “[t]he seat of the empire would then naturally remove itself to that part of the empire which contributed most to the general defence and support of the whole” (625–626.79). By anticipating the day when English and Scottish parliamentarians would be the trans-Atlantic travelers, the day when a city like Philadelphia becomes the center while London and Edinburgh become the periphery, Smith turns the tables on his fellow Britons and exposes their vanity.
Smith’s Condemnation of the East India Company
No two characters seem more inconsistent than those of trader and sovereign. If the trading spirit of the English East India company renders them very bad sovereigns; the spirit of sovereignty seems to have rendered them equally bad traders. (WN 819.7)
Smith called for letting the East India Company’s charter expire “upon the expiration of the term” (WN 754–755.30); in fact, in 1793 the charter was renewed for another twenty years, and repeatedly thereafter.
Smith despised the East India Company. He described at length the “plunder,” “malversation,” “profusion,” “embezzlement,” “waste,” and “destruction” of the Company. A number of attributes were combined in the Company:
- exclusive privileges;
- a joint-stock structure with a unitary ownership and residual claimancy (in contrast to “regulated companies;” 733.6), and limited liability and shares traded openly on the market (in contrast to “private copartneries;” WN 740–741.16-17);
- a recognition by Great Britain of authority to act as sovereign over peoples in India;
- the subjection of peoples who not only were of an entirely different civilization but who had no peaceful and procedural way of holding their rulers to account.
As a result, the Company officials “can command obedience only by the military force with which they are accompanied, and their government is therefore necessarily military and despotical” (638.104). As sovereigns, they are the worst:
No other sovereigns ever were, or, from the nature of things, ever could be, so perfectly indifferent about the happiness or misery of their subjects, the improvement or waste of their dominions, the glory or disgrace of their administration; as, from irresistible moral causes, the greater part of the proprietors of such a mercantile company are, and necessarily must be. (WN 752.16)
Smith’s analysis of the grift resonates with analysis of today’s hegemist washing machines. For example, Smith says that a man frequently gets involved in the leadership of the East India Company in order to be able to appoint the chief plunderers, who in turn show their respect for the big guy. “Provided he can enjoy this influence for a few years, and thereby provide for a certain number of his friends, he frequently cares little about the dividend; or even about the value of the stock upon which his vote is founded. About the prosperity of the great empire, in the government of which that vote gives him a share, he seldom cares at all” (WN 752.16).
Smith takes care to say that it is the institutional arrangement that he censures, not the characters of the particular people of the East India Company (641.107). Exclusive companies like the East India Company are “always more or less inconvenient to the countries in which they are established, and destructive to those which have the misfortune to fall under their government” (641.108).
As I am trumpeting Smith’s anti-hegemism, I should note, however, that Smith’s position does not seem to have been that Britain should withdraw from India. Rather, he seems to have favored Britain openly declaring its role as a sovereign power in parts of India, exercising that role responsibly, and separating it clearly from trading interests (755.30, 945–946.91). Smith is frank about the nature of government: “A conquered country in a manner only changes masters” (LJ, 550). Whether Smith’s position on India upsets my characterization of Smith’s posture on hegemism, as I have defined it, is not so easy to say.
Something to read
Smith repeatedly highlights the rapacity of deep-state actors and profiteers. In his lectures, Smith said: “A government is often maintained, not for the nation’s preservation, but its own” (LJ, 547).
How is the sham passed off to the public? One answer is the pride of national jealousy, which we have noted. Another aspect relates to Smith’s teaching in TMS about how passive sentiments tend to be “so sordid and so selfish” (TMS 137.4). Like viewers of Netflix today, the public consumed newspaper reports as entertainment. Smith writes of the public’s vanity and dissipation:
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war. (WN 920.37)
Smith Naturalizes Multipolarity
The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. (WN 626.80)
That is the first sentence of a profound and prophetic paragraph. The sentence refers to Columbus’s discovery in 1492 and Vasco de Gama’s discovery of the Cape of Good Hope in 1497–1498. Those events brought the then-exceptionally prodigious and dynamic peoples of Europe into contact with other peoples around the world.
Their [that is, the two events’] consequences have already been very great: but, in the short period of between two and three centuries which has elapsed since these discoveries were made, it is impossible that the whole extent of their consequences can have been seen. What benefits, or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from those great events, no human wisdom can foresee. (WN 626.80)
The connections have been double-edged. Smith elaborates some direct positives: “By uniting, in some measure, the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one another’s wants, to increase one another’s enjoyments, and to encourage one another’s industry, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial.” Voluntary association generates mutual gains.
Turning to the negative, Smith writes “To the natives, however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned.” The natives have been dominated, pushed aside, and exploited by well-armed and intricately “civilized” Europeans.
But things that start badly might take a turn for the better. Smith now takes a hopeful turn: “These misfortunes, however, seem to have arisen rather from accident than from any thing in the nature of those events themselves.” Smith means here the accident of history: “At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries.” There was a vast asymmetry in technology, science, and wealth. That asymmetry gave rise to a dominance by European powers and eventually an ascendance of Britain as the great colonial power.
In the 20th century, that position consciously passed to the United States, which became dominant and, after 1991, even unipolar. Now, in 2026, the unipolar moment falls to multipolarity once more.
Smith saw ahead, into our present. The next sentence from the 1776 paragraph reads: “Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another” (WN 626.80).
Smith thus seems to suggest a more even balance of power as the most remote effects of connection and communication defy hegemist vanities. The final sentence of the paragraph reads: “But nothing seems more likely to establish this equality of force than that mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts of improvements which an extensive commerce from all countries to all countries naturally, or rather necessarily, carries along with it.”
An armed society is a polite society. Smith, by analogy, suggests that an international cosmos of armed and intricately civilized nations will be a polite international cosmos. Connection, commerce, and communication bring not only mutual gains like food and clothing. They also diffuse the ingredients—moral, intellectual, cultural, and material—that give a people “force.” This balance of force shall, he says, “by inspiring mutual fear… overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another.” Smith would encourage rulers to sustain the patriotism of their own intricately civilized people and, using extensive commerce, tourism, and diplomacy, to maintain a balance of power among nations. Smith reiterates the Grotian approach to advancing peace among members of the global neighborhood.
The Real Mediocrity of Her Circumstances
Smith speaks of empire as a big lie used to amuse and bedazzle:
The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine. (WN 946–947.92)
Smith ends WN on a note as critical of modern hegemism as it is of perennial human hubris:
[I]t is surely time that Great Britain should free herself from the expence of defending those provinces in time of war, and of supporting any part of their civil or military establishments in time of peace, and endeavour to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances. (WN 947.92)
2026 and the Anti-Hegemist Spirit of ’76
In Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, Irving Kristol wrote:
A great power is ‘imperial’ because what it does not do is just as significant, and just as consequential, as what it does. Which is to say, a great power does not have the range of freedom of action—derived from the freedom of inaction—that a small power possesses. (Kristol 1995, 75–76)
In its sphere of influence, a great power is bound to be enmeshed in “But you started it!” conflicts. Once things go off the path of peace, the rules for restitution and retribution are bound to grow blurry. A great power is bound to be regarded by some as imperialistic. It is bound to be regarded by some as a regional hegemon.
Our review of Smith’s anti-hegemist views suggests that in 2026 Smith would say that what the world needs now is:
- multilateral acceptance of multipolarity,
- a great-powers modus vivendi of diplomacy based on such acceptance of multipolarity; a calm or even mutually-gainful coexistence,
- a striving by each great power to not be a regional hegemon, albeit a big fish.
Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation, wrote:
Anti-imperialism was initiated by Adam Smith, who thereby not only anticipated the American Revolution but also the Little England movement of the following century. (Polanyi 1944, 212)
In 2026, Smith would tell rulers across the gamut of powers to accommodate their future views and designs to the real mediocrity of their circumstances.
Notes
[1] From the fourth edition (1774), TMS’s full title became: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, or An Essay towards an Analysis of the Principles by which Men naturally judge concerning the Conduct and Character, first of their Neighbors, and afterwards of themselves.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Michaela Loughran for valuable copy editing.
