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Title Pages
University Press Scholarship Online
Edinburgh Scholarship Online
Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics,

Economics
Maria Pia Paganelli, Dennis C. Rasmussen, and Craig Smith
Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9781474422857
Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: September 2018
DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422857.001.0001
Title Pages
Maria Pia Paganelli, Dennis C. Rasmussen, Craig Smith
(p.i) Adam Smith and Rousseau
(p.ii) Edinburgh Studies in Scottish Philosophy
(p.iii) Adam Smith and Rousseau
Series Editor: Gordon Graham
Center for the Study of Scottish Philosophy, Princeton Theological Seminary

Scottish Philosophy Through the Ages
This new series will cover the full range of Scottish philosophy over five centuries – from the
medieval period through the Reformation and Enlightenment periods, to the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
The series will publish innovative studies on major figures and themes. It also aims to stimulate
new work in less intensively studied areas, by a new generation of philosophers and intellectual
historians. The books will combine historical sensitivity and philosophical substance which will
serve to cast new light on the rich intellectual inheritance of Scottish philosophy.
Editorial Advisory Board

Angela Coventry, University of Portland, Oregon
Fonna Forman, University of San Diego
Alison McIntyre, Wellesley College
Alexander Broadie, University of Glasgow
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Title Pages
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Books available
Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics edited by Maria Pia Paganelli, Dennis C.
Rasmussen and Craig Smith
Thomas Reid and the Problem of Secondary Qualities by Christopher A. Shrock
Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment by Ryu Susato
Books forthcoming
Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind by Timothy M. Costelloe
Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society: Moral Science in the Scottish Enlightenment by
Craig Smith
Essays on Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment by Christopher Berry
Eighteenth-Century Scottish Aesthetics: Not Just a Matter of Taste by Rachel Zuckert
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© editorial matter and organisation Maria Pia Paganelli, Dennis C.

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Acknowledgements

Economics

Print ISBN-13: 9781474422857
DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422857.001.0001
(p.vii) Acknowledgements
The genesis of this project was a joint meeting of the International Adam Smith Society and the
Rousseau Association that was designed to foster further work on the intellectual connections
between these two great thinkers. The meeting, held in July 2015 at the University of Glasgow
and supported by a grant from the British Academy/Leverhulme fund, led to a series of highly
productive discussions. The chapters collected in this volume were carefully selected and
developed from the more than fifty papers prepared for the joint meeting.
The editors wish to acknowledge the assistance of the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust,
the International Adam Smith Society, the Rousseau Association, the Centre for the Study of
Scottish Philosophy – in whose publication series this volume appears – and its director
Professor Gordon Graham, and Edinburgh University Press, in particular Carol Macdonald and
Ersev Ersoy. The editors are also grateful for the suggestions of the anonymous reviewers of the
proposal.
Page 1 of 1

Citations and Abbreviations

Economics

Print ISBN-13: 9781474422857
DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422857.001.0001
(p.viii) Citations and Abbreviations

This volume uses the author/date in-text citation style with two exceptions. Scholars of Adam
Smith have adopted a standard citation system to the Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam
Smith, published in hardback by Oxford University Press and in paperback by Liberty Fund
Press, Indianapolis, and we have used this system in citations of Smith throughout the volume.
Details of the standard abbreviations appear below.
For Rousseau, in the absence of a universally agreed standard English translation, we allowed
the authors to select their own preferred translations (or indeed to make their own). In each
case a note is offered to explain the editions and translations used. In several cases the citations
are accompanied by reference to the French-language Œuvres complètes.
AL
The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of
the Ancient Logics and Metaphysics. In EPS (cited by paragraph: page).
AP
the Ancient Physics. In EPS (cited by paragraph: page).
CL
Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages. In LRBL (cited by paragraph:
page).
Corr.
Correspondence of Adam Smith. Edited by E. Mossner and I. Ross (1987) (cited by letter:
page).
ED
Page 1 of 3

Early Draft of Part of the Wealth of Nations. In LJ (cited by paragraph: page). (p.ix)
EPS
Essays on Philosophical Subjects. Edited by W. Wightman, J. Bryce and I. Ross (1982).
ES
Of the External Senses. In EPS (cited by paragraph: page).
HA
Astronomy. In EPS (cited by section. paragraph: page).
IA
Of the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called the Imitative Arts. In EPS
(cited by page).
Letter
Letter to the Edinburgh Review. In EPS (cited by page).
Life
Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D. Dugald Stewart. In EPS (cited by
page).
LJA
Lectures on Jurisprudence 1762/3. Edited by R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein (1978)
(cited by page).
LJB
Lectures on Jurisprudence 1766. Edited by R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein (1978)
(cited by page).
LRBL
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Edited by J. Bryce (1985) (cited by section.
paragraph: page).
TMS
The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by A. L. Macfie and D. D. Raphael (1982) (cited by
part. section. chapter. paragraph: page).
WN
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by R. H. Campbell
and A. S. Skinner (1981) (cited by book. part. chapter. paragraph: page).
Page 2 of 3

Page 3 of 3

Series Editor’s Introduction

Economics

Print ISBN-13: 9781474422857
DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422857.001.0001
(p.x) Series Editor’s Introduction

Gordon Graham
It is widely acknowledged that the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was one of
the most fertile periods in British intellectual history, and that philosophy was the jewel in its
crown. Yet, vibrant though this period was, it occurred within a long history that began with the
creation of the Scottish universities in the fifteenth century. It also stretched into the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries for as long as those universities continued to be a culturally distinctive
and socially connected system of education and inquiry.
While the Scottish Enlightenment remains fertile ground for philosophical and historical
investigation, these other four centuries of philosophy also warrant intellectual exploration. The
purpose of this series is to maintain outstanding scholarly study of great thinkers like David
Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid, alongside sustained exploration of the less familiar figures
who preceded them, and the impressive company of Scottish philosophers, once celebrated, now
neglected, who followed them.
Gordon Graham
Page 1 of 1

Introduction

Economics

Print ISBN-13: 9781474422857
DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422857.001.0001
Introduction
Maria Pia Paganelli
Dennis C. Rasmussen
Craig Smith
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422857.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

The introduction includes details of the biographical, historical, and intellectual context of the
relationship between Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It places the chapters that follow
in the proper intellectual context allowing the reader to immerse themselves in the detailed
arguments of each chapter with a ready sense of the broad parameters of the relationship and
ideas in question. The introduction also provides a brief account of the existing literature on the
relationship between Smith and Rousseau, and ends with an introduction to the chapters, their
main themes, and the relationship between them.
Keywords: Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Commerce, Philosophy, Politics, Economics
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were two of the foremost figures of the European
Enlightenment. They made seminal contributions to moral and political philosophy and shaped
some of the key concepts of modern political economy. For some time there was a popular, if
crude, notion that the two were in some sense opposites or even enemies. This crude reading of
Smith as the advocate of liberalism, commercial society and progress as contrasted to
Rousseau’s advocacy of republicanism, the noble savage and a return to nature invited the
unwary reader to see Smith as the champion of selfishness and progenitor of capitalism, in stark
opposition to Rousseau as the champion of egalitarianism and the intellectual forefather of
socialism. Fortunately the turn towards contextual and textual scholarship in the history of ideas
has put paid to these stereotypes and has allowed the much more complex and rich connection
between these thinkers to emerge. We are no longer dealing with caricatures where these two
Page 1 of 11

Introduction
great thinkers are used as emblems for later intellectual developments, but we are still in the
early stages of the exploration of their relationship. The present volume advances the analysis of
their ideas by exploring a series of shared themes and preoccupations that can be traced in their
writings.
This introduction sets the scene for the collection of essays that follows by briefly describing
some of the biographical and textual elements of the Smith–Rousseau connection, and then
providing a brief sketch of some of the recent scholarly work on the relationship between the
two thinkers.
Page 2 of 11

Introduction
(p.4) Rousseau and Smith: Some Context and Connections

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and Adam Smith (1723–90) were near contemporaries, but
they never corresponded and probably never met one another. It is just possible that they met in
Paris in late December 1765 or early January 1766, but the evidence seems to point against such
a meeting (see Rasmussen 2008: 53–4). They did, however, have many mutual acquaintances and
interlocutors among Europe’s ‘republic of letters’. Smith befriended a number of the leading
philosophes during his stay in Paris in 1766 – Dugald Stewart, Smith’s first biographer, singles
out ‘Turgot, Quesnai, Morellet, Necker, d’Alembert, Helvetius, Marmontel, Madame
Riccoboni’ (Life: 302–3) – and most of these figures knew Rousseau as well. The individual with
the closest links to the two of them, however, was surely David Hume. Hume was Smith’s best
friend for more than a quarter of a century (see Rasmussen 2017), and his quarrel with
Rousseau in 1766 created a considerable stir throughout the European literary world (see
Zaretsky and Scott 2009). This quarrel occasioned a number of comments on Rousseau in the
correspondence between Smith and Hume (see Corr. 90: 110; 93: 112–13; 96: 118; 103: 125;
109: 132; 111: 133–6; 112: 136–7). As might be expected, given the circumstances, these
comments were mostly quite negative in tone. At one point Smith called Rousseau a ‘great …
Rascal’ and a ‘hypocritical Pedant’ (Corr. 93: 112–13).
Rousseau never mentions Smith in any of his surviving letters or other writings, but Smith’s
references to Rousseau were not confined to his correspondence. In fact, one of Smith’s earliest
published works, an anonymous letter to the editors of the Edinburgh Review (1756), included a
substantial review of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). In the letter Smith
urged the Review to extend its ambit beyond Scottish publications and to bring news of the
latest European works to Scottish readers. Smith’s worry that Scotland’s nascent cultural
institutions ran the risk of becoming parochial indicates that he was aware that the intellectual
life of Enlightenment Europe depended on the exchange and circulation of ideas (for analysis,
see Lomonaco 2002). As an example of the sort of works that the Review should discuss, Smith
turned to Rousseau’s Discourse. He began by pointing to some unexpected parallels between
Rousseau and Bernard Mandeville, the notorious defender of commercial vice, and then
translated three (p.5) long passages from the Discourse for the Review’s readers (Letter: 250–4).
This letter demonstrates that Smith was actively engaged with Rousseau’s thought from the
early stages of his career, as he was writing The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). (The letter
is discussed in more detail in a number of the contributions to this volume, particularly those of
Hill, McHugh and Rasmussen.)
While the Letter to the Edinburgh Review was the earliest and most extensive of Smith’s explicit
discussions of Rousseau, it was not the only one. Smith also mentioned ‘the ingenious and
eloquent M. Rousseau of Geneva’ in his Considerations Concerning the First Formation of
Languages (1761), where he attempted to answer a question that Rousseau had raised in the
Discourse on Inequality, that of how general names were first formed (see CL 2: 205). Smith also
commented on Rousseau in a similar context in his lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres at
Glasgow University in 1762–63 (see LRBL i.19: 9–10). Another reference to Rousseau can be
found in Smith’s essay Of the Imitative Arts (1795), in which he discussed Rousseau’s argument
in the Dictionary of Music (1768) that music has the power to imitate sights and events as well
as sounds (see IA: 199–200). We have a record of a further comment by Smith on Rousseau from
Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, a French geologist who visited Edinburgh in 1782. Smith
‘spoke to me of Rousseau with a kind of religious respect’, Saint-Fond reported: ‘“Voltaire,” said
he, “sought to correct the vices and the follies of mankind by laughing at them, and sometimes
even getting angry with them; Rousseau, by the attraction of sentiment, and the force of
Page 3 of 11

Introduction
conviction, drew the reader into the heart of reason. His Contrat Social will in time avenge him
for all the persecutions he suffered”’ (Saint-Fond 1907: 246). It is also worth noting that Smith
owned many of Rousseau’s works (in French), including the Letter to M. d’Alembert on the
Theater (1758), the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and Rousseau’s replies to his critics, the
Letter on French Music, his comic play Narcisse, his opera Le Devin du village (The Village
Soothsayer), the Encyclopédie entry on Political Economy, and the Discourse on Inequality (all
found in a collection of Rousseau’s Oeuvres diverses from 1760), Julie, or the New Heloïse
(1761), Emile (1762), Letters Written from the Mountain (1764), and a few miscellaneous
volumes from later collections (see Mizuta 2000: 217–18).
Smith never mentions Rousseau by name in either of his books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759) or The Wealth of Nations (p.6) (1776), but this omission is not particularly surprising:
apart from Part VII of the former (‘Of Systems of Moral Philosophy’), Smith rarely named any
contemporaneous philosophers in these works, even the ones with whom he frequently and
clearly engaged, such as Hume. Charles Griswold (1999: 47) suggests that Smith declined to
explicitly name the thinkers with whom he engaged because he was ‘intent on appealing directly
to our everyday experience and reflection’ and wanted to ‘[avoid] the impression that he wishes
to debate another philosopher rather than engage the reflective reader in consideration of a
view that naturally suggests itself’. In any event, there is good reason to believe that Smith had
Rousseau in mind while writing several important passages in his books. Not only do some of his
arguments appear to be directed at Rousseau, but at a few crucial junctures he also came close
to duplicating phrases from Rousseau – phrases that, moreover, appeared in the very passages
that he himself had translated in his Letter to the Edinburgh Review. As it happens, these
paraphrases are found in some of the most famous passages in Smith’s corpus.
The first of Smith’s paraphrases of Rousseau appears in the passage on the ambitious ‘poor
man’s son’ in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The poor man’s son admires the advantages of
the rich – their palaces, carriages, servants and so on – and imagines how much happier he
would be if he were in their situation. Yet in the process of seeking these advantages for himself,
he endures far more toil and anxiety than he would have endured by simply doing without them.
In his attempt to distinguish himself, Smith writes, the poor man’s son is forced to debase
himself: ‘he makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to
those whom he despises’ (TMS IV.1.8: 181). Similarly, in one of the passages from Rousseau’s
Discourse on Inequality that Smith translated for the Edinburgh Review, Rousseau declared that
all too frequently the civilised individual ‘makes his court to the great whom he hates, and to the
rich whom he despises’ (this is Smith’s translation; see Letter: 253). The parallels here are too
clear to miss.
The best-known of Smith’s paraphrases of Rousseau – which is noted by the editors of the
Glasgow Edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments – comes just a few pages later, in the same
paragraph as the only mention of the ‘invisible hand’ in that work. After dilating on the fact that
people spend much of their lives striving for ever-more wealth and material goods, even though
(p.7) these things cannot guarantee true happiness and may even jeopardise it, Smith writes:
And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses
and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted
them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to
Page 4 of 11

Introduction
invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life;
which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of
nature into agreeable and fertile plains …
(TMS IV.1.10: 183)
The last phrase of this quotation resembles another part of Rousseau’s Discourse that Smith
translated for the Edinburgh Review, in which Rousseau said that through the rise of civilisation
‘the vast forests of nature were changed into agreeable plains’ (Smith’s translation; Letter: 252).
As Michael Ignatieff (1986: 191) notes, this ‘choice of words is so close to those of Rousseau …
that it cannot be mere coincidence’.
Still another parallel with Rousseau can be found in the famous ‘butcher, brewer and baker’
passage of The Wealth of Nations. Immediately before giving the example of the butcher, brewer
and baker to prove his point, Smith remarks that it makes little sense for an individual in a
commercial society to appeal to the benevolence of others in order to procure his needs. Instead,
‘he will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them
that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them’ (WN I.ii.2: 26). In
another passage from Rousseau’s Discourse that Smith translated, Rousseau claimed that the
rise of dependence in the modern world requires each individual to ‘endeavour to interest
[others] in his situation, and to make them find, either in reality or appearance, their advantage
in labouring for his’ (Smith’s translation; Letter: 252). Smith did not duplicate Rousseau’s
language here to quite the extent that he did in the two passages from The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, but some of the wording and much of the sentiment echo Rousseau’s.
In these passages, and indeed throughout his corpus, Smith seemed to absorb some elements of
Rousseau’s views while simultaneously reacting against others. This complex blend of influence
and reaction is part of what makes the Smith–Rousseau connection a subject ripe for further
exploration.
Page 5 of 11

Introduction
(p.8) Recent Scholarship on Rousseau and Smith

The scholarly literatures on Rousseau and Smith, taken individually, have long been, in the apt
phrase of Frederick Neuhouser, ‘unsurveyably vast’ (2014: 15). Until fairly recently, however,
these literatures developed on parallel tracks, in almost complete isolation from one another.
Before the boom in Smith studies that was set off by the bicentennial of The Wealth of Nations
and the publication of the Glasgow Edition of Smith’s works in 1976, sustained examinations of
Smith and Rousseau were very few and far between (though see West 1971; Colletti 1972). A
handful of essays on the two appeared in the 1980s and 1990s (see Ignatieff 1986; France 1989;
Berry 1990; Barry 1995; Winch 1996), but the past decade and a half has seen an explosion of
scholarship on various aspects of this connection, including studies on (inter alia) their
assessments of commercial society, Smith’s ‘sympathy’ and Rousseau’s ‘pity’, how they each
envisioned the ‘science of the legislator’, and their respective views of autonomy, civic
republicanism, the division of labour, economics, equality/inequality, human nature, morality/
virtue, philosophy, politics, poverty, progress, self-love and the theatre (see Pack 2000; Larrère
2002; Force 2003; Hurtado 2003; 2004; Berry 2004; Hanley 2006; 2008a; 2008b; 2009: 26–31,
36–42, 95–7, 102–9, 116–22, 137–40, 146, 157, 205; Rasmussen 2006; 2013; Schliesser 2006;
Neuhouser 2008: 230–2, 241–8, 262–3; Spector 2009; Vaughan 2009; Griswold 2010; Phillipson
2010: 145–57; Kukathas 2014; Rathbone 2015; Stimson 2015; Niimura 2016; Nazar forthcoming;
Potkay 2017; Sagar forthcoming; Schwarze and Scott working paper). There are also three book-
length treatments of Smith and Rousseau. Those by Dennis C. Rasmussen (2008) and Istvan
Hont (2015) offer rather different interpretations of these thinkers’ views of human nature and
the virtues and shortcomings of commercial society, while Charles Griswold (2017) constructs a
series of dialogues between Rousseau and Smith on the human self and the problems that it
faces, particularly in the modern world.
To this point much of the literature on the Smith–Rousseau connection has been authored by
scholars who are primarily experts on Smith, and they have tended to use Rousseau as
something of a foil with which to highlight or expose particular aspects of Smith’s outlook. The
present volume includes a number of contributions (p.9) from scholars whose work focuses
primarily on Rousseau and who therefore approach the relationship from the opposite direction.
More broadly, the growing scholarly interest in the Smith–Rousseau connection makes this
volume a timely one, particularly insofar as many of the contributions engage with – and
occasionally challenge – the most recent developments in the field. As Hont notes,
This is a good time to start … reconsidering the apparently opposite systems of Rousseau
and Smith. We cannot but learn from the comparison. Amour-propre, the nation-state, and
commerce are still the bread and butter of modern political theory, while The Wealth of
Nations and The Social Contract are still among the most frequently mentioned books of
modernity. (2015: 132)
Page 6 of 11

Introduction
The Present Volume

This volume brings together an international group of scholars working across the disciplines of
philosophy, economics, political theory, literature and history. Each chapter explores an element
of the moral and/or political philosophy of Rousseau and Smith.
The first section develops the themes of this Introduction with two essays engaging the latest
scholarship on Rousseau and Smith. Ryan Patrick Hanley provides a critical engagement with
one of the most important recent contributions to the topic, Istvan Hont’s posthumously
published Politics in Commercial Society (2015). Hanley considers the acute, and at times
counter-intuitive, arguments that Hont develops in reaction to both the primary texts and the
developing literature on the two thinkers. This is followed by a chapter from Mark Hulliung who
offers a critical and cautionary note in light of the existing work on Rousseau and Smith. We
should, Hulliung argues, be cautious when we compare and contrast two thinkers that we are
not reading a conversation between them that may not, in reality, have taken place. This allows
us to distinguish actual interlocutors from those who are made into interlocutors when their
writings are compared and contrasted. This task of comparative Enlightenment studies provides
another arena in which to consider Smith and Rousseau.
The remaining sections of the book are arranged thematically around key concepts that emerge
from the work of Smith and Rousseau. In the second section, ‘Self-interest and Sympathy’, the
(p.10) essays explore the central tension between self-interest and sentimental sociability that
marks such a significant shared concern of Rousseau and Smith. Christel Fricke continues the
engagement with recent work by considering Ryan Hanley’s and Frederick Neuhouser’s
apparently contrasting attempts to bring Smith and Rousseau together via their views on social
comparison and its place in moral education. The apparent tension between the ideas of amour-
propre and the danger of corruption from paying too much attention to the views of others
creates a space in which to examine the idea of morality emerging from interpersonal
comparison. Mark Hill follows with a chapter which discusses Rousseau and Smith in the context
of a wider eighteenth-century debate. As noted above, Smith’s first mention of Rousseau came in
a review of the Discourse on Inequality, in which Smith compares Rousseau to Mandeville and
situates him within a wider debate about the possibility of virtuous self-interest and its tension
with the idea of socially directed morality. Hill examines Smith’s reading of Rousseau and
suggests an alternative account of Rousseau’s place in the debate on self-interest and morality.
In the final chapter in this section John McHugh continues the examination of Smith’s analysis of
Rousseau in the Letter to the Edinburgh Review. McHugh takes seriously the link between
Rousseau and Mandeville that Smith makes in the letter. With it, he examines Smith’s criticism
of Mandeville in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and reconstructs a Smithian response to
Rousseau around the key issue of the corrupting or morally enhancing role of the desire for
social approval.
The third section, ‘Moral Sentiments and Spectatorship’, continues the theme of interpersonal
comparison but shifts the focus to the cultivation of the moral sentiments and the Smithian idea
of an impartial spectator. Michael Schleeter examines the relationship between sympathy and
virtue in Smith and Rousseau and questions the extent to which each thinker believed that
commerce was in a position to erode sympathy and diminish virtue. He shifts the Rousseauian
focus from the Discourse to Emile to explore the proposals for moral education that develop from
the respective analyses of moral psychology. Tabitha Baker then expands the discussion to
Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloïse, arguing that it is through Rousseau’s fiction that the
complicated relationship between the two thinkers’ ideas can be most evidently sourced. By
Page 7 of 11

Introduction
examining Smithian themes in Rousseau’s depiction of society and social interaction, Baker
shows how Smithian concerns help (p.11) us to understand the problems addressed by
Rousseau and how these can be most acutely seen in the motif of the eighteenth-century English
landscape garden developed in the novel. Adam Schoene then draws on the complex
autobiographical approach of Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues to examine the notion
of the divided self and self-spectatorship that links Rousseau’s search for self-awareness to
Smith’s notion of conscience as a voice within us that is produced by the socially evolved
impartial spectator. By reading the Dialogues protagonist ‘Rousseau’s’ plea to ‘the Frenchman’
for an unprejudiced witness in discourse with Smith’s conception of the impartial spectator, in
which satisfaction is derived from sympathy with the pleasure or pain of another, we come to see
a shared conviction that justice is crucially dependent on the fair observation of others.
The fourth section, ‘Commercial Society and Justice’, continues the discussion of partiality,
impartiality and justice in commercial society. Charles Griswold explores the intense concern
with appearances and estrangement from one’s true self that are often seen as characteristic of
commercial society. He offers thoughts about what a dialogue between Rousseau and Smith
about these issues might look like and how they shed light on contemporary notions of self-
deception and authenticity. The chapter explores the social and political implications of this
issue as each thinker seeks to deal with the idea of the role of self-deception in social life. Jimena
Hurtado’s chapter moves the discussion to the central social and political virtue of justice. She
seeks to better understand Rousseau’s and Smith’s views of justice by placing them in dialogue
with the traditional typology of justice – commutative, distributive and estimative – that we have
inherited from Aristotle. Using Aristotle’s framework, she furthers our understanding of the
differences and coincidences between Smith and Rousseau, particularly as regards their view of
justice in a commercial society and its relationship to the concept of equality.
In the final section, ‘Politics and Freedom’, Dennis C. Rasmussen reconsiders his earlier reading
of Smith’s reference to Rousseau as embodying ‘the true spirit of a republican carried a little too
far’ (Letter: 251). Rasmussen explores the various senses in which someone could be understood
as a republican in the eighteenth century and engages with those who have taken Smith’s
comment to refer to Rousseau’s ‘positive’ or republican conception of liberty. He then uses
Smith’s reference as a way to reconsider Smith’s and (p.12) Rousseau’s respective conceptions
of liberty. Jason Neidleman continues the focus on politics as he examines the role of the state in
the formation of public opinion in the works of Smith and Rousseau. Both thinkers recognise the
necessity of this endeavour, but both are troubled by its seeming incompatibility with the
principles of personal liberty and popular sovereignty. Neidleman explores both thinkers’
recognition of a legislator’s paradox which leaves them with the task of reconciling political
influence on public opinion with a desire to allow individual liberty. The crucial role of education
and civic virtue for Rousseau sets his strategy for dealing with the paradox apart from Smith’s
more constrained understanding of the need for education and the rule of law. The volume
concludes with a chapter by Neil Saccamano that investigates the problematic status of
international relations in Rousseau and Smith. In particular it considers the implications for
cosmopolitan politics that arise from the thinking of two writers who are so concerned about the
social dimension of moral experience. Is an extended polity possible? Or does the constraint of
particular sympathy or pity preclude so extensive a social order? Saccamano explores ideas of
patriotism and belonging as they emerge from the accounts of sociability in Rousseau and Smith.
Bibliography
Page 8 of 11

Introduction
Bibliography references:
Barry, Norman (1995), ‘Hume, Smith and Rousseau on Freedom’, in Robert Wokler (ed.),
Rousseau and Liberty, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 29–52.
Berry, Christopher J. (1990), ‘Adam Smith: Commerce, Liberty and Modernity’, in Peter Gilmour
(ed.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment, Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 113–32.
Berry, Christopher J. (2004), ‘Smith under Strain’, European Journal of Political Theory, 3, 455–
63.
Colletti, Lucio (1972), ‘Mandeville, Rousseau and Smith’, in From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in
Ideology and Society, trans. J. Merrington and J. White, New York: Monthly Review Press, 195–
218.
Force, Pierre (2003), Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
France, Peter (1989), ‘Rousseau, Adam Smith, and the Education of the Self’, in George Craig
and Margaret M. McGowan (eds), Moy Qui Me Voy: The Writer and Self from Montaigne to
Leiris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 30–51.
(p.13) Griswold, Charles L. (1999), Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Griswold, Charles L. (2010), ‘Smith and Rousseau in Dialogue: Sympathy, Pitié, Spectatorship
and Narrative’, in Vivienne Brown and Samuel Fleischacker (eds), The Philosophy of Adam
Smith, London: Routledge, 59–84.
Griswold, Charles L. (2017), Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith: A Philosophical Encounter,
New York: Routledge.
Hanley, Ryan Patrick (2006), ‘From Geneva to Glasgow: Rousseau and Adam Smith on the
Theater and Commercial Society’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 35, 177–202.
Hanley, Ryan Patrick (2008a), ‘Commerce and Corruption: Rousseau’s Diagnosis and Adam
Smith’s Cure’, European Journal of Political Theory, 7, 137–58.
Hanley, Ryan Patrick (2008b), ‘Enlightened Nation Building: The “Science of the Legislator” in
Adam Smith and Rousseau’, American Journal of Political Science, 52, 219–34.
Hanley, Ryan Patrick (2009), Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hont, Istvan (2015), Politics in Commercial Society, ed. Béla Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hurtado, Jimena (2003), ‘The Risks of an Economic Agent: A Rousseauian Reading of Adam
Smith’, Colombian Economic Journal, 1, 194–220.
Page 9 of 11

Introduction
Hurtado, Jimena (2004), ‘Bernard Mandeville’s Heir: Adam Smith or Jean-Jacques Rousseau on
the Possibility of Economic Analysis’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 11,
1–31.
Ignatieff, Michael (1986), ‘Smith, Rousseau and the Republic of Needs’, in T. C. Smout (ed.),
Scotland and Europe, 1200–1850, Edinburgh: John Donald, 187–206.
Kukathas, Chandran (2014), ‘Das Rousseau Problem: Adam Smith’s Politics and Economics’,
Adam Smith Review, 7, 174–80.
Larrère, Catherine (2002), ‘Adam Smith et Jean-Jacques Rousseau: sympathie et pitié’, Kairos,
20, 73–94.
Lomonaco, Jeffrey (2002), ‘Adam Smith’s “Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review”’,
Journal of the History of Ideas, 63, 659–76.
Mizuta, Hiroshi (ed.) (2000), Adam Smith’s Library: A Catalogue, Oxford: Clarendon.
Nazar, Hina (forthcoming), ‘The Eyes of Others: Rousseau and Adam Smith on Judgment and
Autonomy’, in Thomas Pfau and Vivasvan Soni (p.14) (eds), Judgment & Action: New
Interdisciplinary Essays, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Neuhouser, Frederick (2008), Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive
for Recognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Neuhouser, Frederick (2014), Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality: Reconstructing the Second

Discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Niimura, Satoshi (2016), ‘Adam Smith: Egalitarian or Anti-Egalitarian? His Responses to Hume
and Rousseau’s Critiques of Inequality’, International Journal of Social Economics, 43, 888–903.
Pack, Spencer J. (2000), ‘The Rousseau–Smith Connection: Towards an Understanding of

Professor West’s “Splenetic Smith”’, History of Economic Ideas, 8, 35–62.
Phillipson, Nicholas (2010), Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Potkay, Adam (2017), ‘Pity, Gratitude, and the Poor in Rousseau and Adam Smith’, Studies in
Eighteenth-Century Culture, 46, 162–82.
Rasmussen, Dennis C. (2006), ‘Rousseau’s “Philosophical Chemistry” and the Foundations of

Adam Smith’s Thought’, History of Political Thought, 27, 620–41.
Rasmussen, Dennis C. (2008), The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith’s
Response to Rousseau, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Rasmussen, Dennis C. (2013), ‘Adam Smith and Rousseau: Enlightenment and Counter-
Enlightenment’, in Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli and Craig Smith (eds), The Oxford
Handbook of Adam Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 54–76.
Page 10 of 11

Introduction
Rasmussen, Dennis C. (2017), The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the
Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rathbone, Mark (2015), ‘Love, Money and Madness: Money in the Economic Philosophies of
Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, South African Journal of Philosophy, 3, 39–89.
Sagar, Paul (forthcoming), ‘Smith and Rousseau, after Hume and Mandeville’, Political Theory.
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Moral Economy: Adam Smith Reviews Rousseau.’
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Provocation?’, Journal of Economic Issues, 5, 56–70.
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Zaretsky, Robert, and John T. Scott (2009), The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the
Limits of Human Understanding, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Page 11 of 11

On the Place of Politics in Commercial Society

Economics

Print ISBN-13: 9781474422857
DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422857.001.0001

Ryan Patrick Hanley
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422857.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords

Abstract: Istvan Hont’s book Politics in Commercial Society, the final work of one of the
twentieth century’s great students of Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, presents a
comparative study of the political theories of Smith and Rousseau. For students of the Smith-
Rousseau relationship, it is valuable on two fronts, one methodological and one substantive. Yet
the book is not the magnum opus for which some may have hoped. In light of this, the present
essay has three aims: first, to call attention to the work’s most valuable substantive and
methodological claims; second, to frame the book’s contributions by setting its claims in the
context of recent scholarship; and third, to raise some questions regarding three of the book’s
core theses.
Keywords: Adam Smith, Rousseau, Istvan Hont, commercial society, authority, justice
Politics in Commercial Society (Hont 2015) is remarkable for at least two reasons. First, it is the
final work of one of the twentieth century’s great students of Adam Smith and the Scottish
Enlightenment. Its author, the late Istvan Hont, was a pre-eminent voice in the scholarly debates
on Smith and the Scots for many decades, and through both his consummately erudite published
work and his teaching at Cambridge he did as much as any scholar in recent decades to shape
our understanding of these subjects.
Politics in Commercial Society is also remarkable for a second reason. Its aim is to present a
comparative study of the political theories of Smith and Rousseau – a subject that, as readers of
this volume know well, has become a thriving industry in recent years. Hont himself was long
interested in the Smith–Rousseau connection; his 2015 book owes its genesis to several sets of
Page 1 of 13

lectures on Rousseau and Smith that he delivered between 2009 and 2010 in Oxford, Boston and
Jena.1
As a contribution to the comparative study of Smith and Rousseau, Hont’s book is valuable on
two fronts, one methodological and one substantive. Yet the book, it must be said, is far from the
magnum opus for which some might have hoped. The author’s untimely passing seems to have
rendered it impossible for him to have added any citations to scholarship. The text also makes
several substantive claims that one wonders whether he might not in time have revised or
reworked, or at least provided further evidence to support. In light of this, what follows has
three aims: first, to call attention to the work’s most valuable substantive and methodological
claims; second, to frame it by setting its (p.17) claims in the context of recent scholarship; and
third, to raise some questions regarding three of the book’s core theses.
Hont’s book begins with a striking claim. In its opening sentence we are told that it ‘is about
commercial society and how to understand politics in it’ (1). The methodological significance of
this claim deserves attention. The suggestion is that this is no mere exercise in the study of the
history of political thought as it has been conventionally understood. The study of the history of
political ideas is here being proposed, indeed, less as an end in itself than as a means to better
understanding our political present; hence the claim in the following sentence that the aim of
the work is ‘to tease apart the different sorts of political vision that are currently relevant to us
by using the history of political thought as a guide’ (1). Hont’s claims here are consistent with
his previous work, likewise animated by a deep appreciation of the nature of and limits imposed
by contemporary political and economic realities. But these claims also deserve our attention for
the way in which they distinguish Hont’s approach to the history of political thought from other
approaches, especially those conventionally associated with the university of his employment.
Hont’s masterful grasp of the intellectual context of Smith and Rousseau’s eighteenth-century
world clearly distinguishes him even among the ‘contextualists’ of the Cambridge school. But to
this grasp of context Hont joins a profound sensitivity to real politics today – a sensitivity that
renders his work, to my mind, reminiscent less of the sort of history of political thought done at
Cambridge than that done at Oxford by Isaiah Berlin.2 In any case, what is clear is that Hont
wants us to see Smith and Rousseau ‘not just as authors of dead texts but also as presences in
our contemporary theorizing’ (24).
Hont is particularly concerned to employ the history of political thought to illuminate one
specific aspect of our contemporary political world: namely our idea of the state. Indeed, the
principal substantive aim of the work (which, he tells us, the title of the book is itself meant to
suggest) is to delineate ‘the problems involved in identifying the kind of state that might best
complement a commercial society’ (4). It is this concern that specifically animates Hont’s turn to
Rousseau and Smith. Hont regards the ‘modern representative and commercial republic’ as ‘a
result of a synthesis between the work of Rousseau and the work of Smith’, and ultimately it is
this belief that motivates his efforts to ‘reconstruct the shape of the lost grand-political-theory
projects of (p.18) Rousseau and Smith’, in the hope that fuller appreciation of their
contributions will enable us ‘to pass judgment on this fusion and learn some of the inner secrets
of modern statehood as understood after Hobbes’ (24).
Hont’s efforts on this front ultimately give rise to what is arguably the most valuable substantive
element of the book. In order to uncover the modern state’s origins, Hont turns to a careful
examination of Smith’s ‘history of natural authority’ (67), and in so doing he helpfully illuminates
Smith’s intricate and subtle account of the origins and genealogy of political authority and
Page 2 of 13

government. As he convincingly demonstrates, Smith’s account centres on the emergence of

political authority in the shepherding stage of the stadial evolution of society. Further, in this
stage, wealth constituted ‘the most important source of authority’ (79), insofar as ‘wealth could
create dependency, which was the real source of power’ (80). And it is here that the account
becomes especially penetrating. As Smith went on to demonstrate, contra Rousseau – and as
Hont goes on to show – the same evil that created both inequality and dependence, in time
served to ameliorate the most pernicious aspects of inequality and dependence. Tracing Smith’s
genealogy of political authority in a manner that makes clear how Smith’s stadial theory
parallels the historical account of European economic development in Book III of The Wealth of
Nations, Hont calls attention to the grounds of Smith’s faith that ‘the system of commercial
society had a long-term beneficial tendency, creating more and more equality and material well-
being for the majority’ (53). And here, as Hont makes clear, lies Smith’s key departure from
Rousseau: whereas Rousseau saw the progress of commercial society as inevitably exacerbating
the inequalities to which the birth of private property had given rise, Smith regarded the
progress of commercial society as an engine of the mitigation and amelioration of precisely
those economic inequalities and power asymmetries that so frightened Rousseau.
Hont is, of course, keenly aware how crucial this idea is for our contemporary political moment.
For the most part he does not take this up explicitly, leaving it to others to think through how
Smith and Rousseau might speak to our contemporary inequality debates.3 Instead he focuses on
other aspects of the political implications of commercial progress. One especially interesting
aspect concerns Smith’s analysis of the future political prospects of the commercial state. As
Hont notes, Smith was deeply troubled (p.19) by ‘the loss of military capability in commercial
society’, regarding this as a ‘systematic problem that still had relevance for the moderns’ (82).
Hont also helpfully calls attention to the fact that ‘Smith explained repeatedly’ that ‘there was
an incompatibility between economic development and warfare’, as commercial occupations
‘made the population disinclined to wage war’ (84). As a consequence, the modern state faces a
potential existential crisis as a direct result of its material progress – a theme that shaped
Smith’s ‘republicanism’ and which may also have relevance today.
Ultimately these two claims – that Smith valued commercial society for its capacity to relieve
poverty and spread freedom, and that Smith’s genealogy of the evolution of authority ran
counter to Rousseau’s in its final implications – are among the most valuable claims of Hont’s
book. Versions of them, of course, will already be familiar to readers of his previous work; both
his agenda-setting introduction to his Wealth and Virtue (Hont and Ignatieff 1983) volume as
well as his essay on Smith’s political theory (Hont 2009) anticipate both claims to some degree.
And this fact, again in light of the unfortunate absence of any references to the secondary
literature, may lead readers to wonder how other claims made here situate themselves against
other extant interpretations. It is clear that Hont himself regarded his study as an alternative to
many of these other extant interpretations, and sought to advance an argument that would
compel its audience to sit up and take notice. Thus in the first few pages of the book it is
announced that he seeks ‘to produce parallels and contrasts that are surprising’ (1), to advance
a set of claims regarding the Smith–Rousseau connection that ‘look paradoxical’ on their face
and are likely to appear ‘seemingly radical’ when first encountered, and which the author
himself suspects are likely to be regarded by some as evidence of an ‘apparently perverse
approach’ (2–3).
Page 3 of 13

Hont’s ‘surprising’ or ‘paradoxical’ or ‘radical’ or ‘perverse’ claim is this: that while ‘it is not
unusual to contrast Rousseau and Smith, with the former seen as an enemy of, and the latter as
an apologist for, modernity’, the truth is that ‘many of Smith’s ideas were much closer to
Rousseau’s than is commonly thought’ (1–2). The specific form this claim takes here is that
‘Smith the political economist and Rousseau, political economy’s arch critic, shared moral
foundations’ (21), even as they came to develop ‘different political theories attached to the moral
theory’ (22; cf. 25). It is easy to imagine how radical and surprising such claims must have (p.
20) seemed to those generalist audiences fortunate to have heard these lectures a decade ago.
But scholars familiar with the now-extensive literature on the Smith–Rousseau connection – to
say nothing of the past two decades’ scholarship on each of these thinkers taken independently –
are likely to find these claims far from surprising or radical today.
This fact makes particularly regrettable the absence of references to current scholarship, as it
renders it difficult for the reader to distinguish what may be novel here from what is already
generally known and appreciated. It should be said that even in the absence of citations, Hont
gives evidence of considerable familiarity with (and indeed disdain for) extant interpretations;
thus a reading of Smith is dismissed as ‘an inexplicable howler on the part of some modern
interpreters’ (34), and a reading advanced by ‘some commentators’ on Rousseau is said to have
‘virtually no merit’ (55). One wishes that Hont had had a chance to name names here; however
much the philosophical discourses of Smith and Rousseau’s day may have thrived on the indirect
signalling that leaves targets identifiable only to those in the know, modern scholarship is hardly
advanced by opacity. The absence of citations also renders it difficult for interested scholars to
follow up on how other scholars have discussed these points. It is well beyond the scope of this
essay to provide a comprehensive guide to the extant scholarship on all of the many insights
contained in Hont’s book. But to take a handful of examples from the book’s opening pages,
those intrigued by Hont’s account of ‘The Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem’ (1) will want to read
an essay by Chandran Kukathas (2014). Those who find compelling the claim that the Letter to
the Edinburgh Review ‘offers an important key to a possible new reading of both Rousseau and
Smith’ (2) will do well to read several important studies by Dennis Rasmussen (2006; 2013).
Those drawn to the claim that Rousseau too deserves to be regarded as ‘a theorist of commercial
society’ (2) will want to consult a number of studies of Rousseau’s political economy.4 Those
persuaded by the claim that ‘what Smith wished to say was that their social relations within
their own society became market-governed’ (3) will do well to engage the authoritative study of
this idea by James Otteson (2002). Those interested in how Smith’s conception of commercial
society compares to Hegel’s vision of civil society (5) should consult Lisa Herzog’s book (2013).
Those who want to follow up on the claim that ‘endorsing Hobbes’s key (p.21) argument was
one of the purposes of Rousseau’s second Discourse’ (12) should compare this to, among others,
recent studies of Robin Douglass (2015) and Richard Tuck (2016). Those interested in Smith’s
response to Rousseau’s concept of pity in the opening of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (27ff.)
will want to consult an indispensable study of Charles Griswold’s (2010).5 Those who find
compelling the claim that ‘it is widely – but wrongly – believed that for Rousseau, socially
constructed self-love was a purely negative agency in human history’ (41) will want to consult,
among others, books by Laurence Cooper (1999) and Frederick Neuhouser (2008).
Hont, of course, makes a number of genuinely novel claims, but some readers are likely to find
these contentious, or at least to think that considerable additional evidence would need to be
adduced in order to render them persuasive. Three of the book’s theses deserve particular
notice on this front. First is its characterisation of where Smith is best placed on the continuum
of self-love and sociability. One of Hont’s main theses in the book is that Smith should be seen as
Page 4 of 13

closer to Hobbes than Hutcheson. In advancing this claim, Hont in fact uses some of the
strongest language to be found in the book; in this vein Hutcheson is described as having
offered Smith ‘a doctrinal indoctrination into republican politics and Christian neo-Stoic ethics,
based on a visceral hatred of commercial society’ (17), and Smith, for his part, is said to have
been ‘a dissident pupil of Hutcheson’ (19) and to have ‘rebelled against Hutcheson’ (57). This is,
of course, a very different view of Smith’s ‘never-to-be-forgotten’ teacher and their relationship
than that to which many of us have grown accustomed. But what really matters for Hont is that
in distancing himself from Hutcheson, Smith came closer to Hobbes. And hence we are
strikingly told that Smith ‘portrayed himself as someone who had properly developed the
Hobbesian stream – that is the selfish system … to its proper conclusion’, that The Theory of
Moral Sentiments is best regarded as ‘a treatise in enhanced Hobbism and Epicureanism’ (32),
and that the ultimate goal of Smith and Rousseau alike was to return back ‘to the more pure and
original Hobbesian (or Epicurean) idiom’ (54).
Whether or not this rings true with what some readers may hope to find in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, to be persuasive it would need to be squared with Smith’s forthright critiques of the
selfish system (e.g. TMS VII.ii.4) – which seem, on their face, to read much more like rejections
of this system rather than (p.22) efforts to refine it. Further, to render these claims convincing,
one would need somehow to account for or explain away Smith’s many discussions across The
Theory of Moral Sentiments of such core ideas as the love of praiseworthiness, the pre-eminence
of self-command, and indeed the very idea of virtue itself – ideas that seem only to have grown
ever more significant as Smith revised his book over its several editions, and which would seem
to place Smith squarely within the ‘party of virtue’ from which Hont is concerned to distance
him (32). Take, for example, the reading of TMS III.iii.4 given here. As Hont rightly notes, Smith
here dismisses what he calls the ‘soft power of humanity’ and the ‘feeble spark of benevolence’
as insufficient bulwarks against the sheer force of low self-love; these are indeed, as Hont says,
‘feeble agents’ (37). But what then restrains self-love? Smith’s own claim is that it is rather ‘a
stronger love, a more powerful affection, which generally takes place upon such occasions; the
love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our
characters’ (TMS III.iii.4: 136). It seems difficult to read this as evidence of an allegiance to
Hobbesianism; to do so would require exclusively privileging the concept of ‘superiority’ (and
indeed assuming that the sort of superiority to which Smith here refers is akin to the thymotic
superiority Hobbes describes) in addition to dismissing or reading away Smith’s explicit
invocations of such anti-Hobbesian categories as ‘the love of what is honourable and noble’ and
‘grandeur’ and ‘dignity’. What Hobbes sought to reject as the empty prattling of muddle-headed
Peripatetics and Scholastics are for Smith real concepts that do real work.
Further, to render convincing the claim that Smith is, at the end of the day, best understood as
an enhanced Hobbesian, more would also need to be done to justify the claim that Smith, like
both Rousseau and Hobbes, rejects sociability. This is itself another core thesis of the book;
when Hont refers to the common moral philosophy that formed the shared foundation of Smith’s
and Rousseau’s projects, he has in mind ‘their common denial of the natural sociability and
morality of man’ (48) – hence the claim that Smith and Rousseau both ‘begin their modeling of
the history of morality and government by taking Hobbes’s anti-Aristotelian denial of primary
human sociability as their starting points’ (53). But this point needs to be handled carefully. It is
most certainly the case that Smith does not use the language of natural sociability (p.23) in any
explicit sense, and this is hardly insignificant.6 But it is not clear that the decision not to employ
such language is tantamount to an embrace of Hobbesianism. Again, to make this convincing,
we would need to see how this squares with other prominent and familiar claims in The Theory
Page 5 of 13

of Moral Sentiments. As readers of this volume know very well, Smith’s book begins with the
claim that ‘how selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his
nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him’
– a claim that is difficult to read on its face as anything but a repudiation of Hobbes (TMS I.i.1.1:
9). Thus here again, in order to render persuasive the strong claims being made with regard to
Smith’s ostensible Hobbesianism or Epicureanism, a significantly more extended argument
would need to be given. In the absence of this, and given Smith’s many obvious and clear
borrowings from such diverse schools as Stoicism and Cynicism and Christian moralism, among
so many others, it seems closer to the truth (and admittedly much less surprising and radical) to
say, as others recently have, that Smith’s own system is less an attempt to revive any one school
than an attempt to synthesise elements of multiple schools in the manner of a modern Eclectic.7
For all of these reasons, I find Hont more persuasive at those moments when, rather than
distancing Smith from Hutcheson and aligning him with refined Hobbesian or Epicureanism, he
portrays him as subscribing to the more moderate belief that ‘self-regarding and other-regarding
motives were not in opposition; they could be combined’ (33), and as thinking that the key task
is in fact to define ‘the balance, or the propriety, one can establish between self-regarding and
other-regarding sentiments’ (38).8
A second thesis of the book demanding further scrutiny concerns Smith’s orientation to ‘natural
history’. Hont’s prominent focus on Smith’s use of methods of analysis characteristic of natural
history is an essential component of his project to distance Smith from Hutcheson. And in so
doing, Hont not only means to bring Smith closer to Hobbes, but also closer to Hume. In this
vein, Hont claims that the point of departure for Smith’s ethics lies not simply in an embrace of
‘Hobbes’s anti-Aristotelian denial of primary human sociability’, as noted above; perhaps more to
the point, he says that ‘Smith’s starting point was Hume’s skepticism toward the theories of
Hutcheson’ (41). This matters, it is suggested, not merely because of the way it shaped Smith’s
orientation (p.24) to Hutcheson, but also because of the form and shape it gave to his moral
philosophy. Specifically, Hont says, the consequence of this Humean influence is that The Theory
of Moral Sentiments ‘is best read as a natural or theoretical history of sympathy in the Humean
mold’ (35). This is perhaps the most frequently repeated claim in the book: namely that The
Theory of Moral Sentiments is a ‘natural history of sympathy’ (35, 42, 47, 49, 56), indeed, one
‘modeled on Hume’s natural history of justice’ (49). But this is, at the very least, contentious.
Hont is clearly right to say that Smith hoped to execute a ‘natural history of government’ (49)
akin to Hume’s natural history of justice; what we have of his jurisprudence lectures bears
ample witness to that. But the project of the Lectures on Jurisprudence seems very different
from that of The Theory of Moral Sentiments – indeed so different that we may wish to pause
before too readily accepting the claim that the ‘natural history of government’ that lies at the
heart of the former can be readily analogised to the natural history of sympathy that is said to lie
at the heart of the latter.
Without denying that The Theory of Moral Sentiments tells a developmental story, the story it
tells is one of the development of the sentiments and the character of the individual rather than
the evolutionary development of the needs and wants of the species. Thus, unless it can be
shown that Smith subscribed to some version of the notion that ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny – a claim, I suspect, for which few would wish to argue – the suggestion that The
Theory of Moral Sentiments can be understood as ‘Smith’s conjectural history of the origins of
commercial society through sketching out the mechanisms underlying the rise of the sociable
self’ is at least questionable (35). Hont himself defines history as ‘conceptual sequencing along a
timeline’ (52). If so, it would need to be shown that The Theory of Moral Sentiments in fact offers
Page 6 of 13

an account of sympathy across a timeline of the sort that Hume employs in his natural history of
religion or elsewhere. Yet it is difficult for me to see evidence of such a timeline either in Hont’s
account of The Theory of Moral Sentiments or in the book itself. While reading these claims I
was reminded of an interview that another eminent senior scholar of the history of eighteenth-
century political ideas generously granted me nearly twenty years ago. In the course of
conversation, that scholar asked me if I saw evidence of ‘history’ in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments. I answered ‘no’. Two additional decades of study have led me to rethink many of (p.
25) the positions to which that young student was then attached, but this is not one of them. All
told, Hont’s efforts to distance Smith and his political theory from the sort of ‘analytical political-
legal theory’ with which later liberalism would come to be associated is welcome (75). Yet one
wonders whether turning from ideal theory to historically inflected moral theory is the only
route available, or the one that best captures the route in fact taken in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments.
A third thesis central to Hont’s book that deserves examination concerns its depiction of Smith’s
response to Rousseau’s account of the origin of government. A principal claim of the work as a
whole (and indeed, as noted above, one of its most valuable claims) is that Smith presented ‘an
alternative history of government and law than what Rousseau presented’ (65). The key
substantive claim on this front is that Smith’s account of the sequential emergence of
institutional authority is given in the form of a linear historical progression from executive to
judicial to legislative power. This is said to be ‘the reverse sequence from the one Rousseau
used’ (79), and Hont compellingly argues that in crafting this argument, and specifically with
regard to the emergence of judicial power, Smith was ‘consciously arguing against
Rousseau’ (51). This is an important and original claim, and Hont is right to call attention to it.
Yet the way this claim is developed here has the potential to be misleading. And this matters not
because the truth points in a direction different from Hont’s thesis, but because it obscures the
full force, and indeed the genuinely radical implications, of Hont’s thesis pursued to its
conclusion.
To see this requires reconstructing the way Hont presents the differences of Smith and
Rousseau on this point. The main claim demanding attention is that regarding the two thinkers’
respective orientations to what Hont calls the ‘property first, government second,
sequence’ (69). This, as Hont makes clear with reference to Smith’s own words in his Letter to
the Edinburgh Review, is Rousseau’s position; hence Smith describes both Rousseau and
Mandeville as subscribing to the view that
those laws of justice, which maintain the present inequality among mankind, were
originally the inventions of the cunning and the powerful, in order to maintain or acquire
an unnatural and unjust superiority over the rest of their fellow creatures.
(Letter: 251; quoted by Hont at 21–2)
(p.26) In saying this, Smith clearly had in mind Rousseau’s notorious claim in the Second
Discourse (and perhaps also a parallel claim in Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy) that
the historical social contract that gave rise to government is merely a swindle of the poor by the
rich.9 As Hont notes, Rousseau’s claim is that ‘private property as a legalized system was born of
a confidence trick’ (52), in which the rich ‘duped the poor into believing that the suppression of
violence was in their interest too’ in response to their recognition of the need to quell ‘the
anarchy preceding government’, itself best understood ‘as a conflict between two fundamental
social classes, the “rich” and the “poor”’ (72). As an account of Rousseau’s position on the origin
Page 7 of 13

of government, this seems right. It also captures Smith’s understanding of Rousseau’s views on
the origin of government. But how does it map on to Smith’s own account of the origin of
government?
Hont claims that Rousseau’s and Smith’s accounts are in total opposition on this front.
Commenting on the quotation above in which Smith presents Rousseau’s views, Hont
immediately adds that ‘Smith did not comment, but anybody who reads his works knows that he
disapproved’ (22). He repeats this claim later, even more strongly. At the start of his third
chapter the block quotation above is repeated in full, and followed by the insistence that not only
did Smith ‘disagree’ with this account of government’s origin, but he in fact ‘staked his entire
later oeuvre on his disagreement with this account of the origins of justice’ (49; cf. 69). But
readers of Smith’s oeuvre may be inclined to pause at this point. In fact, so far from rejecting
this claim, Smith forthrightly and directly and repeatedly argued for precisely this claim in his
own name. Indeed, the single most direct statement of the origin of government to be found in
his published works is a restatement of this claim. Thus in Book Five of The Wealth of Nations, in
the course of developing his claim that insofar as ‘the affluence of the few supposes the
indigence of the many’, a means of defence needed to be contrived in preparation for that
moment when ‘the affluence of the rich excited the indignation of the poor’ (WN V.i.b.2: 709).
Herein lies the origin of government:
civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted
for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against
those who have none at all.
(WN V.i.b.12: 715)10
(p.27) The same claim is advanced in the Lectures on Jurisprudence in its account of the
conditions that rendered the establishment of government ‘absolutely necessary’. Thus when
some have great wealth and others nothing, it is necessary that the arm of authority
should be continually stretched forth, and permanent laws or regulations made which may
ascertain the property of the rich from the inroads of the poor, who would otherwise make
incroachments upon it, and settle in what the infringement of this property consists and in
what cases they will be liable to punishment. Laws and government may be considered in
this and in every case a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to
themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise soon be destroyed by the
attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others
to an equality with themselves by open violence.
(LJA: 22–3; cf. LJB: 19–20)
Taken together, Smith’s two most direct statements on government’s origin, so far from
‘disagreeing’ with Rousseau’s property-first, government-second account, are in fact explicit
affirmations of this claim. Hont is not unaware of Smith’s position on this front, and alludes to
the fact that in Smith’s account ‘the state starts with a very great, a brutally great, level of
inequality’ (80). Yet Hont makes no reference to either of these passages, which seem to demand
response if the claim that Smith is rejecting Rousseau’s account of the origin of government is to
be persuasive.
Page 8 of 13

This is a doubly a shame, because accounting for them would probably render Hont’s ultimate
argument stronger. His aim, again, is to illuminate Smith’s response to Rousseau’s account of
the progress of the commercial state; where Rousseau sees only a state that is born in inequality
and destined to reify those inequalities, Smith counters that the commercial state is capable of
transcending the worst effects of those inequalities. Yet Smith’s argument on this front only
appears all the more remarkable in the light of the degree to which he shared Rousseau’s
concern that government was born out of property inequalities. Put somewhat differently, where
Rousseau claims that commercial progress reifies political injustice, Smith’s response is that
commercial progress rectifies political injustice – in Hont’s words, ‘commerce created liberty’
insofar as ‘commerce created more equality in wealth than there had been at the beginning of
the accumulation of wealth’ (80). This, (p.28) of course, is a claim that brings us back to the
question of whether Smith believes that economic liberty will supplant political liberty. Joseph
Cropsey – whose pioneering study of Smith’s relationship to Hobbes has not been supplanted by
Hont’s analysis – long ago described Smith as advancing the ‘eclipse’ of political philosophy by
economics.11 Cropsey’s account invites us to wonder whether in fact Smith laid the foundation
for an economics that would in time eclipse not only political philosophy but politics itself. Put in
the terms invited by Hont’s study, the crucial but ultimately unanswered question of this study is
whether in the long run politics in commercial society is ultimately either necessary or possible.
Notes
For helpful comments on this piece, the author is extremely grateful to Sam Fleischacker,
Charles Griswold, Ralph Lerner, Eric Schliesser, John Scott and Craig Smith.
(1.) See Kapossy and Sonenscher (2015: ix and n. 1). Parenthetical citations are to Hont’s text.
(2.) This is meant as a compliment, though no doubt critics of Berlin’s contributions to the
history of ideas are unlikely to see it as such. I elaborate on Berlin’s approach in Hanley
(forthcoming). On Hont’s orientation to the Cambridge school, see Bourke (2016). Bourke also
calls helpful attention to Hont’s presentist intentions for the history of political thought (2016:
11).
(3.) For important studies in this vein, see especially Boucoyannis (2013), Neuhouser (2013) and
Rasmussen (2016). Smith’s and Rousseau’s views on economic inequality each receive chapters
in Williams (forthcoming).
(4.) See most recently Rousselière (2016). I treat much of the previous literature on Rousseau as
political economist in Hanley (2013).
(5.) An expanded version of this argument will appear in Griswold’s Adam Smith and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau: A Philosophical Encounter (forthcoming). For additional helpful background
on how Smith’s claims in this opening chapter relate to Hobbes and Mandeville and especially
Hume, see Fleischacker (2012). These should especially be read alongside Hont’s claim
regarding the ‘generalization of the pity mechanism to every conceivable pattern of
morality’ (20).
(6.) The implications of this point promise to be helpfully developed in Griswold’s Smith and
Rousseau: A Philosophical Encounter.
(7.) On this claim, see e.g. Garrett and Hanley (2015: 278) and the works there cited.
Page 9 of 13

(8.) Hont himself locates Rousseau and Smith ‘in the middle of a moral and economic spectrum’,
but his spectrum’s poles are ancient Cynicism and modern Epicureanism (91).
(9.) I address Smith’s possible access to and engagement with Rousseau’s political economy
essay in Hanley (2016).
(10.) For helpful commentary on this passage, see Pack and Schliesser (2006).
(11.) Smith’s relationship to Hobbes is a principal theme of Cropsey’s Polity and Economy: An
Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (1957). The quotation is from Cropsey (1987:
635).
Bibliography
Bibliography references:
Boucoyannis, Deborah (2013), ‘The Equalizing Hand: Why Adam Smith Thought the Market
Should Produce Wealth Without Steep Inequality’, Perspectives on Politics, 11, 1051–71.
Bourke, Richard (2016), ‘Revising the Cambridge School: Republicanism Revisited’, Political
Theory (doi: 10.1177/0090591716672231; last accessed 3 December 2016).
Cooper, Laurence (1999), Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life, University Park:
Penn State University Press.
Cropsey, Joseph (1957), Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith,
The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Cropsey, Joseph (1987), ‘Adam Smith’, in J. Cropsey and L. Strauss (eds), History of Political
Philosophy, 3rd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 607–30.
Douglass, Robin (2015), Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free Will and the Passions, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Fleischacker, Samuel (2012), ‘Sympathy in Hume and Smith: A Contrast, Critique, and
Reconstruction’, in Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdall (eds), Intersubjectivity and Objectivity
in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 273–311.
Garrett, Aaron, and Ryan Hanley (2015), ‘Adam Smith: History and Impartiality’, in A. Garrett
and J. A. Harris (eds), Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century, vol. 1: Morals, Politics, Art,
Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 239–82.
Griswold, Charles (2010), ‘Smith and Rousseau in Dialogue: Sympathy, Pitié, Spectatorship and
Narrative’, Adam Smith Review, 5, 59–84.
(p.30) Griswold, Charles (forthcoming), Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A

Philosophical Encounter, London: Routledge.
Hanley, Ryan Patrick (2013), ‘Political Economy and Individual Liberty’, in Eve Grace and
Christopher Kelly (eds), The Challenge of Rousseau, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
34–56.
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Another random document with
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fool’s pointed cap—these men are called “shahtirs;” then grooms
mounted, leading the handsomest horses of the prince’s stud with
gold and jewelled harness and a Cashmere shawl spread over each
saddle; then the “mir-achor” (literally, lord of the manger), or master
of the horse—a coarse, heavy fellow, the prince’s maternal uncle (his
mother, they say, was a peasant girl who struck the king’s eye while
washing linen at a village stream)—the mir-achor riding a big and
valuable animal; then the prince himself, on a handsome iron-grey,
the tail of which is dyed red (a royal custom permitted only to the
sons of the king besides the Shah himself), clad in his best—a
handsome shawl-coat of great value and trimmed with sable, an
under dress of blue satin embroidered in silver, gold, and coloured
thread, a gold belt having a rosette of diamonds with a huge central
emerald, the thing being four inches in diameter, and wearing his
various decorations and the portrait of the Shah set in brilliants. His
black cloth hat is fiercely cocked, and he smiles at the acclamations
of the people, and is evidently delighted at his apparent popularity.
After him come the two rival magnates of Shiraz, the Kawam and
Muschir (the minister of the young prince); then the two secretaries,
the hakim-bashi, and myself; then the principal people of Shiraz and
the prince’s attendants, all on horseback; then some merchants on
mules; then a shouting crowd which follows the procession. Soldiers
lined the road, and a battery of artillery is drawn up to fire one
hundred and one guns when the royal dress of honour is donned.
We ride to about a mile and a half from the town on the Ispahan
road. Half-a-dozen horsemen station themselves at distances of one
hundred yards along the post-road in the direction whence the king’s
messenger must come. In a few moments a gun is fired by one of
these, then another as he perceives the messenger’s arrival, and we
see three men, one bearing a bundle, advancing at full gallop. A
letter is handed to the prince, it is the royal firman; he raises it to his
head and hands it to the Muschir, the principal official present; the
messenger rides at the prince’s side, who asks him the news of
Teheran.
We all ride slowly back towards the town, and so enter the “Bagh-
i-No” (new garden), a Government garden where the dress of honour
is to be publicly put on.
The prince invites me into an inner room, and I am given coffee.
He then tells me that he has requested the Order of the Lion and
Sun to be conferred on me, for which I express my gratitude; and the
hakim-bashi, who is also to get it, does the same.
The doctor and I enter the big open verandah, or talár, and are
given a prominent place among the grandees there, a few priests
and officials also being honoured with places, as are the chief
merchant and some others. Vases of roses and common flowers are
placed at intervals along the front of the talár, beyond this is the big
tank, round which are crowded the merchants, tradesmen, and
populace of Shiraz, an orderly crowd. The Muschir who presides is
affable, and regales us with sweetmeats, pipes, and sherbet.
The prince enters, followed by the bearer of the kalāat. We all
stand up, the royal firman or order is read by the Muschir. The
kalāat, a Cashmere shawl-coat worth some eighty pounds, and
trimmed with rich furs, having a string of big pearls and a bored but
uncut emerald attached to the top button, is put on by the prince
amid acclamations, being handed to him by the bearer. Then a
jewelled wand or rod of office some four feet long is handed by the
Muschir to the Kawam, or mayor of Shiraz; he bows, more
acclamations—this is his kalāat. Then the star (having a centre
enamelled on gold of the Lion and Sun) is affixed to the breasts of
the hakim-bashi and myself; and now we all rush for our horses, and
the mob rush for the flower-vases, which are mostly smashed in the
struggle.
We return to the town in procession as we came. On nearing the
bridge, the Jews, as is customary, behead a little ox at the feet of the
prince, and their chief man runs with the bleeding head by the
prince’s side till driven off by the farrashes or stick-men; then glass
jars of sweetmeats were smashed by the tradesmen under the feet
of the royal horse, and amidst shouts, dust, and the reports of the
cannon, we enter the town, and I, popping my star in my pocket,
canter off to my own house. I have never worn it since, but I could
not refuse it, as it was meant in kindness, and I did not wish to
offend.
CHAPTER XXIV.
I FALL INTO THE HANDS OF BRIGANDS.
A call to a patient—Start on post-horses—No horses—I carry a lantern—The

Bakhtiaris—Fall among thieves—They strip me—And march me off—Mode of
disguise of thieves—Attacked by footmen—Division of spoils—Fate of a priest
—Valuing my kit—Ignorance of my captors—A welcome sight—My escape—I
get a horse—Reach Yezdikhast—Old women get thorns out of my feet—Want
of hospitality of head-man of Yezdikhast—Arrive at Kūmishah—Kindness of a
postmaster—More robbers—Avoid them—Am repaid for my lost kit—Fate of
my robbers.
The roads are not safe, and at night are dangerous; but with a
man ill at the one end of the division, two hundred and fifty miles off,
and the doctor at the other, the only thing for the doctor to do is to go
to his patient as fast as possible.
Had I been going to march, I should have applied to the Persian
authorities for a strong guard, and it would have been provided, but
in posting this is impossible. It was the height of the famine time; in
place of six or eight horses in each post-house, all well up to their
work, two or three was the maximum, and these mere living
skeletons, and I knew that at some stages all had died. I had never
been looted, and, trusting to my luck, I sent for horses; but I felt that
looting was likely. I took no gold watch, but only an aluminium one,
and as little money as possible. Beyond my clothes I had nothing
valuable save a case of instruments belonging to Government, that I
required at Ispahan.
By this time I had begun to pique myself on the rate I could get
over the ground “en chuppar;” and I had established a rule in my
own mind that there were two ways of posting, and two only: going
when there was light; and going as long as horses were to be had,
day and night. Anything else was of little use, as one could not go
faster than the latter mode, and if one wanted to go more slowly than
the former, one might as well march. In the famine time nothing but
water and firing was to be got, and so the journey was naturally a
thing to be got over as soon as possible: also in this particular
instance I was going to see a patient, and so was bound to be smart.
Off I went about noon from Shiraz at a sharp canter, preceded by
my servant and followed by the guide, for one has to separate them
or they lose time in chattering. The servant yelled, whipped, jobbled
his horse with his sharp native stirrups, and generally behaved as a
lunatic. On emerging from the town he exhorted me frequently to
come on, and took as much out of himself and his horse as possible.
When we got to Zergūn, six farsakhs, we had done it, over the good
road on the plain, under the two hours and a half. The next stage to
Seidoon is over a sandy plain, which, in wet weather, is a very bad
road indeed, and rough causeways have to be gone over to keep out
of the morasses. But we had had no rain for two years, and all the
way it was good going. We reached Seidoon half-an-hour after
sunset, and here my man began to suggest that we should stop to
sleep. I made him understand that as long as I could find horses I
was bound to go on; but he seemed to fail to see that that rule
applied to him.
On we went still, having kept to our two farsakhs (or eight miles)
an hour, including stoppages, and reached Kawamabad at nine at
night; here the road was less level, and my man would lag behind.
The moon was high, and the scenery is very pretty—long
stretches of what in other times is turf and plenty of big trees.
At about six a.m. we got to Moorghāb. Here we had to feed the
horses, which caused a delay of an hour and a half, and it was
eleven before we reached Dehbeed, having done very badly thirty
farsakhs in twenty-three hours. These two severe stages on
famished animals had destroyed all chance of a quick journey. We
had walked the greater part of the last stage, which, with the one we
had done before it, are two of the longest in this part of Persia, being
each a good twenty-seven miles, though called six farsakhs. From
Dehbeed we cantered over an undulating plain to Khonakhora; the
going was good, but the poor beasts constantly fell from weakness,
and I could not spare them. Again at Khonakhora there were no
horses, and I had to stop two hours to rest the old ones, not getting
to Sūrmeh till two hours after midnight, and having to walk and drive
the wretched beasts the greater part of the way. Here my man was
unable to go any further, the walking of the last stage had been too
much for him: there was nothing for it but to leave him to come on as
he pleased, and that thoroughly suited him.
At dawn I reached Abadeh, the parting with the servant and
consequent wrangle having taken up nearly an hour. I hardly knew
the place; generally the approach to Abadeh is through smiling
gardens and vineyards, and heavy crops are grown in the
neighbourhood; now nothing. The people besieged me in the
chupperkhana for money. I was able to get two broken-down horses;
my own fell seven times in the first hour from weakness, and the
distance to Shūrgistan—over, happily, a good and level road—is six
farsakhs, a good twenty-four miles; it was two in the afternoon before
I could leave Shūrgistan, and, as usual, there were no horses.
I was told at this place that the road was very dangerous, but
confident in my being a European, and being also armed, I did not
think there was much to fear. We crawled into Yezdikhast over an
undulating fairly good road at sunset, the horses both lying down on
entering the courtyard; they had come the thirteen farsakhs in twelve
hours, but were so weak that I doubted being able to start before
morning, but the information I had at Abadeh by wire made me
desirous of pushing on; my patient’s state was critical, and at eleven
p.m., finding that the horses could stand, I started.
Yezdikhast is situated in a valley through which runs a small river,
and on each side are precipitous cliffs and a bad road, unpleasant to
scramble up or down by day, and dangerous on a dark night. The
town itself is built on a perpendicular island-like cliff, which stands in
the middle of the deep ravine thus formed; it presents a sufficiently
striking appearance as viewed from either the cliffs or the valley,
impregnable to attack save from artillery; the perpendicular cliff on
which it is perched shows up a bright yellow, against what is
generally a verdant valley, teeming with corn and grass, though just
at the time I was travelling quite bare, save just by the river. There is
only one small entrance to the town at one end of the razor-backed
cliff; this is a doorway just big enough to admit a horseman stooping
in his saddle, or a loaded mule. This doorway is reached by a small
bridge of a few poles, which can be knocked away at once: the cliff,
which appears to be of sandstone, is honeycombed with
underground granaries and shelters for sheep and goats, as are the
cliffs on either side. On one side of the town, in the ravine, is the
caravanserai; on the other the chupperkhana or post-house.
The night was pitch dark, the guide couldn’t even see the road,
and I had to light my road lantern to enable us to get out of the
ravine up the rocky track that leads to the high-road; when we did
get on the road it was so dark, that I was unfortunately still obliged to
keep my light burning, to enable us to keep on the track. And to this I
suppose I owe my subsequent misfortunes.
I was coming now to a notorious “doz-gah,” or robbing place,
Aminabad. Here is a magnificent caravanserai; but no one can live
here, for, being the frontier of two provinces, one ruled by the
Governor of Shiraz, the other by that of Ispahan, it was a sort of
debatable land. A few hours’ march, too, brings one to the Bakhtiari
country, governed by Houssein Kūli Khan,[22] who ruled with a rod of
iron the turbulent tribes of these wild men. All wanderers, they are a
brave and untamable people, their customs quite different from the
inhabitants of the towns, upon whom they look with contempt. They
are practically independent, merely furnishing a large contingent of
irregular cavalry. The illustration gives a good idea of the tent-life of
the wandering tribes of Persia. The tents are very portable,
impervious to rain, wind, and sun, and are woven by the women from
the hair of the black goats. They are very durable.
The Shah is here of little authority, the whole government being
vested in Houssein Kūli Khan, whose eldest son remains with the
king in honourable captivity in Teheran as hostage for his father’s
good conduct.
Several times have villagers been placed in the Aminabad
caravanserai, that the place might not be without inhabitants; but it is
always looted, the ryots beaten or murdered; even in peaceful times
the muleteers hurry past the caravanserai, and make the best of
their way to Yezdikhast.
TENT LIFE.—WANDERING TRIBES.
The country here on the least pretext becomes disturbed, and

robberies and murders in disturbed times are frequent. The last time
I passed it, in 1878, I was riding on in front of the caravan, and
looked into the huge courtyard out of curiosity; and though the
country was very peaceful indeed, there lay the festering body of a
murdered man. A few mud walls run along the road, making
convenient ambush, and a ruined watch-tower marks the exact
frontier line.
My lighted lantern had doubtless put the robbers of the
neighbourhood on the qui vive, but I could not have got out of the
Yezdikhast valley without it, and I hoped by travelling at an unusual
hour (midnight) in the pitchy darkness to slip by unperceived. I had
reckoned without my host. As I passed at a slow amble, making as
little noise as possible, and flattering myself that no one could see
us, I was challenged.
“Who are you?”
I promptly replied: “Be off; I am a European.”
“Stand!” said a voice; and I saw a black object in the shadow of
the wall. I drew my revolver and placed it on full cock; I stuck my
spurs into my wretched horse; but the presence of other beasts was
enough for him; he merely swayed with weakness, but did not
budge. The black object now rapidly approached, and resolved itself
into five horsemen, who surrounded me, and, prodding me with the
muzzles of their guns, ordered me to dismount in a series of hoarse
whispers.
My thieves were well mounted and well armed; the odds were too
great for a fight. I couldn’t run away, and the guide had disappeared,
having slipped off his horse and run. I used strong language and
tried to brazen it out, but it was of no use.
I was lugged off my horse, and several blows were struck at my
head, but my topi[23] kept them off. My assailants now stripped me
so rapidly as to show they were adepts in the matter. They were
evidently in a great hurry. I put my revolver on half-cock and dropped
it, thinking that I should be stripped and left; but I had reckoned
again without my host. When they had stripped me to my breeches
and shirt, one fellow seized the pocket in which was my money, and
with one slash of his knife removed it, slitting the leg of my pants to
the knee. As another man was dragging off my shirt, he remarked
that it was silk, the fineness of the linen deceiving his touch. I was
now ordered to come along, and there being no option, did so; but I
felt the cold to my naked back, and asked them for a covering,
purposely in broken Persian, thinking that if they did not know I was
au fait at the language, I might the better get at their intentions. One
man, the chief, ordered one of the village felt greatcoats to be flung
to me. I gladly wrapped myself in it, and picking up my revolver,
concealed it in the sleeve, trusting to have a chance of perhaps
selling my life dearly, or ending it if any indignity were offered me. I
had not gone many yards, when the thorns began to enter my feet,
and render walking painful. I now requested to be put on a horse, but
the only reply was an order to come on at once, which was repeated,
and a gun put to my head. But I was desperate. I foresaw that if I
walked I should be lamed for months, and certainly in no condition to
escape. The chief now rode up, and I appealed to him in very broken
Persian. He ordered me to be put on one of the post-horses, and to
come on at once, adding significantly, “If you don’t, we shall kill you
here.” I felt that there would be no chance to escape at present, but
that I might possibly have a future opportunity. We now left the road,
and pushed on in the direction of the Bakhtiari country. I was glad to
see that the two post-horses lagged considerably and delayed us
much. I found, too, that there was a mule loaded with grain that
these gentry had stolen, which was driven by two men armed with
iron-headed bludgeons. Our party was now nine—the five horsemen,
well armed and mounted; the two footmen; the guide, who had been
secured, and whose hands were tied behind his back; and myself.
By this time I calculated that it was about two a.m. I could see better,
now we were on the open plain.
The head of our captors was addressed as Lutf Ali Khan. He kept
ahead, and avoided all intercourse with me. His head and face were
carefully covered with a long strip of calico, which was wound round
and round his head as a disguise. What little I could see of his face
was blackened with charcoal.
As dawn approached I was able to make out these details, and to
take my bearings to find the road again should I succeed in getting
away. The robbers were all well mounted, and their horses were fat
and in good condition. I noted the particulars of each man, but the
chief gave me no chance to recognize him.
At dawn, as we passed under a high cliff, we heard shots fired,
and bullets began to fly about our heads. The horsemen returned the
fire, which came from some twenty footmen who were perched in
coigns of vantage and under shelter, on the top and face of the cliff.
It was now daylight, and the pleasures of being shot at were not
increased when I saw that the practice was good, for one of the
horsemen now lost a finger. A good deal of shouting took place, but
as it was in Turkish, I could not make out its purport. At last they
seemed to come to some sort of understanding, for the firing ceased,
and the footmen came down from the cliff into the plain. These men
were evidently also Bakhtiaris, and were led by a small old man clad
in white; he wore zangāl, a kind of leather legging, and had a long,
red-dyed beard, and a tall felt hat. From what I overheard, I found
out that the second party had outnumbered the first, and that my
spoils were to be divided. The difficulty seemed to be about myself.
The head of the footmen said: “You have looted this Feringhi; with
this we have nothing to do. We loot not him, but you.”
The man who had lost his finger now came to have it dressed,
which I did as well as I could for him. Instead of being grateful, he
merely, in most expressive pantomime, drew his finger across his
throat. Upon the principle that dead men tell no tales, it was
undoubtedly their intention to put me out of the way. And had we not
met the second gang, it would have probably been done where we
were, a lonely place, safe from all interruption; but there were now
too many witnesses to the fact of my having been carried off. We
continued our march, accompanied by the footmen, about thirty men,
including ourselves. I found out afterwards that the men who had
looted me had only the day before robbed a Syud, or descendant of
the prophet, a moollah (or priest), and after stripping him, as he was
a holy man, and they did not like to kill him in cold blood, they laid
him on the ground, piled big stones on him so that he could not stir,
and left him to die in the desert of hunger and thirst. His body was
found half eaten by jackals, and the men confessed the fact when
they had no further reason for denying it. So had there been no
second party arriving, I should have fared ill. At about nine a.m. we
halted. I was placed in charge of the two footmen armed with iron-
headed staves; and the guide, whose hands had remained bound,
with the two post-horses and the load of grain, remained guarded by
them. The rest of the horsemen and the footmen retired to some
three hundred yards off, and commenced to unpack my saddle-bags.
I was now quite unarmed, for when the reinforcement came up, I felt
that to get away by any act of violence was impossible; and as the
finding of the revolver on me would probably cost me my life, I
dropped it when I had an opportunity of doing so unperceived.
Several times men came to me from the anxious throng that
surrounded my kit and asked me the value or use of the divers
objects. To the latter I did not attempt to respond, but I satisfied them
as to the former by putting high values on everything, thinking
thereby to increase my own importance. I told them my aluminium
watch was worth forty pounds, and, as it was very massive, they
believed it. My guards insisted on cutting off the brass buttons from
my riding breeches, saying to each other that they were gold. The
thieves argued and shouted a good deal over the spoil, and one of
my guards joined the excited circle formed round my kit, while the
other manifested the greatest interest in their proceedings.
The post-boy by a nod now drew my attention to the distant ridges,
and, to my delight, I saw a large party of horsemen pricking across
the plain in our direction. On they came, but slowly, apparently not
seeing us. They got within some five hundred yards undetected by
the robbers or my guard, who were intent on the booty; and then,
instead of making a charge and taking the robbers unawares, they
commenced firing. This, of course, disclosed their presence, and my
delight was great when I saw that they were irregular cavalry. The
robbers, however, showed no sign of retreating; they returned the
fire briskly, and the rescuers were much more in fear of them than
they were of the cavalry.
“Bring along the Feringhi,” shouted several, and firing became
brisk and promiscuous.
“Help me up with the load of grain on to the mule,” shouted my
sole remaining guard in choice Persian, which till now he had not
used: the other fellow had joined the rest of the robbers.
I pretended to comply, and affected to be unable to even move it.
With a curse he drew his knife and cut the bonds of the post-boy,
and ordered him to assist him, placing his iron-headed stick on the
ground. They struggled with the load, and I did a not very brave
thing, but it was my only means of getting away—I seized the
bludgeon and stunned my guard with it, and then the guide and I ran,
under a brisk fire, for the cavalry. These men were now in retreat,
and I was adjured by them to come along; but I could run no more,
my stockinged feet being my only protection against the thorns; my
feet were full of them, and I was now dead lame.
“Give me a horse,” I said.
“Run, sahib, they are on us,” said they.
I could not, however, and I replied, “I’m going back to the robbers,”
and sat down. This was too much, and one of them dismounted and
gave me his horse, running by my side. I now saw that we were
rapidly moving off, pursued by the robbers; vague shooting out of all
range was going on in every direction; and also as far as the eye
could reach, isolated footmen with guns and sticks could be seen
making the best of their way to the fight. Fortunately, we were
mounted, for I could see two hundred men at least—they were
Bakhtiaris. Discretion was decidedly the better part of valour. After
some three hours’ cantering, we reached Yezdikhast at noon, and I
was carried from my horse into a house; my feet, full of thorns, I was
unable to put to the ground; my head, used to the protection of a
sola topi, was covered only by a small pot hat of nammad, to the
edge of which, when he gave it me, finding it did not fit, a friendly
highwayman had given a gash with his knife, which enabled me to
get it on. As he handed it to me, he made a significant gesture with
his knife across his throat—a cheerful joke these men were prone to.
I felt really ill after the excitement and exposure; for, though the
nights were cold, the sun in the morning was very strong, and my
feet were very painful and swollen; I could not walk.
Two old women now busied themselves in extracting the thorns
from my feet, and they had three hours’ work. My feet were not right
for a couple of months, and many thorns remained in. There were no
horses in the post-house. I had no clothes and no money, and I was
anxious to get on. A nice position!
And now came a curious episode of want of hospitality on the part
of the khedkhoda (head-man of the village). Although he had led the
horsemen who rescued me, and might naturally expect a handsome
present, he would not lend or sell me a rag, nor would he give me
any refreshment, though he knew me perfectly well, and was quite
aware of my solvency. Neither could I get any food from him. So
there was nothing for it but to have myself carried to the
chupperkhana, and get what I could from the postmaster, a poor
villager. I did get some clothes from him, but they were not over-
clean, and I then persuaded him to give me credit for a dinner and
my horse hire, and succeeded, after some wrangle, in a promise of
both.
At a couple of hours after sunset, the khedkhoda sent me by a boy
the leg of a fowl and a little rice; this I sent away, saying that he knew
that was not the way to send me a dinner, and that I should report
his conduct. I got some fried eggs and bread from the postmaster,
and a few moments after a handsome Persian dinner was sent by
the khedkhoda, who had become alarmed. He arrived himself, and
smilingly motioned me to set to. I was so enraged at his treatment,
that I emptied the dinner—rice, fowls, roast lamb, and melted grease
—into his face, and threw the big copper tray after him, and he
retreated humbled.
At dawn I started, accompanied by six guards, and passed the
spot where I was looted thirty hours before. My guards did not leave
me till I got to Maxsūd Beg, which is out of the dangerous part of the
country, and I got to Kūmishah, where my patient was, without
further adventure, in the afternoon; but I was compelled to ride with
my feet out of the stirrup-irons, as I could not bear them to be
touched, and they were much swollen. Here I was able to attend to
my patient, who was in a sufficiently critical condition; however, I was
in time, and he recovered.
In contradistinction to my treatment at Yezdikhast, the post-house
keeper at Kūmishah lent me a brand-new suit of clothes, and
provided me with food during my stay in Kūmishah; my patient was
too ill for me to be his guest, and his servants had deserted him; this
postmaster lent me also four pounds in silver. My friends in Ispahan
sent me clothes, and on my patient’s convalescence I rode in there
after five days.
As I came near Marg and approached a narrow pass called the
Orcheeni, the gholam of the telegraph with whom I was riding
pointed out, on the face of the cliff at the part where the road
narrows, some dozen men with guns, crouched behind boulders and
rocks.
“They are stopping the way, sahib; there are probably more in the
pass, and if once we go in we shall be caught.”
Vacuus viator is all very well, but even though I had nothing left to
be looted of, if I sang, I preferred not to do so coram latrone, so we
turned off to the right by a camel road that also leads to Marg,
keeping on quietly till we were detected, for at first the thieves could
not see that we had left the road; but as soon as they did, they
rushed out to cut us off; the distance was the same for both, but we
were mounted, and we screwed a canter out of our steeds and got
safely away. I met with no further adventure on that journey to
Ispahan, but my experience of Oriental brigands is not a pleasant
one. Of course it is much pleasanter to pose as a hero; but with my
revolver, had I fired on being surrounded, I should have been blown
out of my saddle.
Captain Pierson, then acting director, wished to send in a claim for
compensation to the Persian Government, but this was not done.
Had I been a Russian subject it would have been otherwise. The
value of all my kit was, however, repaid to me.
Nothing more at the time was heard of the robbers; no effort was
made to arrest them. The country was at that time demoralised by
the terrible famine, but afterwards four of my thieves fell into the
hands of the king’s uncle, the present Governor of Shiraz; he is a
severe man, and they (including Lutf Ali) were built up alive in brick
pillars on the high-road just outside Abadeh, and left to die gradually,
perishing as their victim the Syud did. The pillars and bones may be
seen on the roadside, and, like our old gibbets, are a terror to evil-
doers.
CHAPTER XXV.
SHIRAZ.
The Muschir—His policy and wealth—His struggle with the king’s uncle—He is
bastinadoed—His banishment to Kerbela—The Kawam—Mirza Naim—Siege
of Zinjan—Cruelties to Mirza Naim—Reply to an author’s statement—
Cashmere shawls—Anecdote—Garden of Dilgoosha—Warm spring—“Sau-
Sau-Rac”—The Well of Death—Execution—Wife-killing—Tomb of Rich—
Tomb of Hafiz—Tomb of Saadi—A moral tale—Omens—Incident at tomb of
Hafiz.
The two principal men of Shiraz are the Kawam,[24] the calamter
or mayor of the town, in whose family the dignity has been for some
generations hereditary; and the Muschir,[25] an aged official who has
held all the offices of the province of Fars: he has farmed the
customs, collected the revenue, been the minister (really responsible
Governor) of the young prince during his nonage, he has even been
Governor himself; rising from a small official, Abol Hassan Khan has
succeeded in enriching himself and at the same time making many
friends and dependants; his rivals have generally gradually
succumbed to his vigorous policy, and the free system of bribery at
Teheran adopted by the Muschir has generally removed them from
his path; when that has failed he has not scrupled to have recourse
to other measures. Careful to allow himself to be looted, at times
nearly ruined, by the powerful king’s uncle, the Hissam-u-Sultaneh,
he has always thus secured a friend at court, and while feathering
his own nest during the governorship of the Zil-es-Sultan, he has
always satisfied the young prince by large subsidies. Having several
daughters, all ladies of mature age and all married save the favourite
child—for whom he obtained the title of Lika-ul-Molk—on the
Muschir’s death, the Governor of Shiraz, whoever he may happen to
be, will have a gigantic prize. After fifty years of successful official life
the savings of the old man must be enormous; besides his own
estates, which are very large, he inherited the entire property of his
brother, a very wealthy man, and much of that of his son-in-law, the
late Governor of Fussa. In 1879 and 1880, however, came an evil
day for him. Khosro Mirza, the Motummad-ul-Molk and uncle of the
king, was made Governor of Fars. This powerful and politic prince
had on a previous occasion been compelled to leave Shiraz, and
was subsequently deprived of his governorship by the successful
intrigues of the Muschir, whose son-in-law, specially kept at Teheran
for the purpose of having access to the royal ear, had administered
on the Muschir’s behalf bribes to the king, to such an amount as to
induce the Shah to deprive his uncle of his governorship, and to
appoint a man of straw, thus giving the real power into the hands of
the Muschir. And now came the day of reckoning. The Muschir
became, as it were, a prisoner in his own house. The Kawam, his
wealthy and ancient rival, was at once taken into the Governor’s
favour, and titles of honour and local governorships conferred on his
son, a youth long supposed to be an idiot, but who now showed a
capacity for Persian political life which astonished even his own
people. The hungry sons of the Motummad, despatched into the
richest governorships of the province, proceeded to fleece the
dependants of the Muschir. And to be a dependant, friend, or
adherent of the old man became a crime.
Mirza Mahomoud, the secretary of the Muschir, was arrested, his
house and property arbitrarily confiscated, and his accumulations
wrung from him as the price of his life. And at last the Governor
seized the Muschir himself, and actually administered a severe
bastinado to his enemy, now an old man of seventy-five: the
Muschir’s life was also attempted by poison. All that could be
confiscated was taken, the ready cash and jewels to an enormous
amount became the property of the Motummad-ul-Molk (the king’s
uncle) and his sons, while claims were made against the Muschir for
great amounts.
But though Khosro Mirza hungered for the old man’s life, he had
yet influence sufficient at the capital to preserve it, and an order
came that the Muschir should retire to Kerbela (in Turkey), the shrine
of the prophets Houssein and Hassan, there to end his life in prayer
and repentance. But the Muschir may yet prove a thorn in the side of
his enemies; he is now back in Shiraz and apparently inactive.
The Kawam (grandson of the celebrated Hadji Kawam of Shiraz,
executed by boiling to death), after being for some years in the
shade, through the successful intrigues of the Muschir, is now in the
full blaze of power. His son has his foot in the stirrup of success, and
he is the only local man in real power in the province of Fars. Rather
boorish in manner, the Kawam is kind and honest, liberal and true to
his adherents in adversity; it remains to be seen whether he will
show the politic moderation of the Muschir, who never made an
enemy unless he was able to remove him. The system of the Kawam
has been to strengthen his local influence by marriages of the
various members of his family, and his open and honest, if at times
obstinate, policy has made him many personal friends, more
valuable than those of the Muschir, whose adherents were either
mercenary or those who for their safety assumed the name.
The policy of the Governors of Fars has invariably been to play off
the Kawam against the Muschir, so taking bribes from both, but
never destroying either. However, one thing is quite certain, the
Kawam is an old and honoured citizen of Shiraz without a personal
enemy save the Muschir, while the latter does not possess a real
friend, and being heirless may fall a victim to some unscrupulous
Governor, who may take his life on some pretext, secretly or openly,
for the sake of the pickings from his still gigantic estates.
Another grandee of Shiraz was Mirza Naim, the paymaster of the
forces of Fars, a military officer of high rank and great age. (He was
the general who in the time of the Baabi revolt besieged the walled
city of Zinjan, the capital of a province of Persia held by those
fanatics; the place was obstinately defended, the women even
appearing on the walls, and fighting and dying for the sake of their
ridiculous creed. On the taking of the city by assault, a kuttl-i-aum, or
general massacre, was ordered, and the atrocities committed were
too horrible to mention.) The Governor of Fars (at that time, 1870-5),
the Zil-es-Sultan, wishing to wring a large fine, and a considerable
sum of money supposed to have been appropriated by the
paymaster-general, after numerous indignities placed Mirza Naim in
a snow-chair—the man was seventy-five years of age—compelled
him to drink water-melon juice, to produce the well-known diuretic
effect, and while the sufferer was frozen to the snow-seat, caused a
dog to be placed on his lap, thus insulting his aged co-religionist.
Although the man had borne these horrible tortures for some hours,
he now consented to pay the sum demanded. Of course the result to
his aged frame was not long in doubt; he soon succumbed to the
effects of the injuries he received.
I am particular in describing his treatment from the Zil-es-Sultan,
as it shows the improbability of the story told by a radical politician
who recently travelled through Persia, and among other marvellous
tales inserted the groundless calumny, seen at page 15, volume ii.,
of Mr. Arthur Arnold’s ‘Through Persia by Caravan,’ in which he says,
“A European doctor, to his shame be it said, talking one day with the
Zil-i-Sultan [sic] upon the interesting topic of torture, suggested an
ancient method which, we were told, at once struck the prince as
applicable to the snowy regions of Ispahan. To draw the teeth of
Jews who refused gifts to the Government was the practice in days
when the civilisation of England was no more advanced than that of
Persia; but I never heard before of stuffing a man’s trousers with
snow and ice as an efficient way of combating his refusal to pay a
large demand in the season when the thermometer stands—as it
does in Central Persia—for months below zero.” Now, as possibly I
may be alluded to under the vague title of “A European doctor,” not
many of whom exist in Persia to speak to the Zil-es-Sultan, and the
story is glibly told by this author, yet I fancy that it will not be credited,
even on the statement of the retailer of scandals, said to be heard,
through interpreters, from Orientals; when it is considered that it was
hardly needful to apprise the Zil-es-Sultan of a means of cruelty,
since he was so ingenious as to use the very same old method on a
general of over seventy-five, some years before—I being in Shiraz at
the time, as the prince well knew—and the supposed refinement of
cruelty no new thing to the prince.[26] When an author swallows and
repeats such yarns, as that one of our sergeants shot an unoffending
Armenian, etc.—the unoffending Armenian and the shooting being
alike myths (see vol. ii. p. 167, etc.)—one can only suppose that the
capacity for swallowing such tough stories is equalled by the
pleasure found in retailing them. Whoever the cap fits—and I do not
believe it fits any one—it does not fit me, and I will not wear it. One
can only pity a man who travels through a country, mostly by night in
a closed litter, with his eyes very tightly shut and his ears very widely
open, all whose facts are hearsay, and most of whose deductions
are mistaken.
One of the means of making presents used by the great in Persia
is the giving of Cashmere shawls; the gift of a shawl is supposed to
be an honour as well as a money payment to the recipient. Among
other presents made to me by the Persians in my professional
capacity was a pair of handsome shawls; as it is not expected that
these should be retained, and as they were useless to me as dress-
stuffs, for which they are used by the upper classes in Persia of both
sexes, I disposed of one for eighteen pounds in the bazaar to a
merchant, and retained the other as a present to my mother. On
taking it to England I was astonished to find that it was
unappreciated, and still more surprised to learn that, as it was made
in several strips, as are all the real Cashmere shawls that go to
Persia, and fringeless, it was nearly absolutely valueless; in fact, one
of the large West End drapers offered as a favour to give me thirty
shillings for it. I took it back to Persia, as my mother said it was
useless to her, and sold it for twenty pounds, my servant probably
making a five pound commission on the transaction.
Under the hills, some mile and a half from Shiraz, is the garden of
the Dilgooshah, or “Heartsease,” the property of the Kawam; in the
middle is a large and solid brick building, having a small tank in the
centre, the water flowing into which is warm, about 70° Fahrenheit.
Above the tank is a dome, once decorated with a large picture of a
battle; this was painted on plaster, but all, save a few pieces, has
crumbled away. The garden is planted with orange-trees, and is very
large.
Above the garden is the “Sau-sau-rac,” or sliding-place; here for
centuries the young of both sexes were accustomed to resort; the
rocks slope sharply down, and generations of sliders have polished
the stones till they have become like glass. After a breakfast at
Dilgooshah, whenever there are children or young people, the whole
party adjourn to the “Sau-sau-rac,” and the juveniles, and not
unfrequently the elders, run up the edge and, squatting at the top,
slide rapidly down in strings, the whole tumbling over pell-mell at the
bottom; the more adventurous slide down on their stomachs head
downwards, but they generally squat and go down in strings for
mutual safety; all, however, thus conduce to the polishing of the
“Sau-sau-rac.”
A difficult climb of three-quarters of an hour brought one to the
Chah Ali Bunder, a well cut in the surface of the living rock; a huge
square aperture yawns in the surface. The well was probably
originally constructed to supply a mountain fastness with water
(which was, I think, never reached); the shaft is of great depth, and is
popularly supposed to be without bottom. I have attempted to
measure it by dropping a stone, but the echoes thus produced
render it impossible. One hears no sound of water on throwing
objects into it, and I have lowered six hundred yards of string, and
the cord has remained still taut.[27]
There are no ruins round it, and this points to an unsuccessful
boring for water. Such a position in the times previous to artillery—
and it is only of very modern introduction in Persia—would have
been, if supplied with water, almost, if not quite, impregnable, for the
road up is very steep, and could easily be rendered quite
impassable.
The use to which the Chah Ali Bunder is now put reminds one of
the ‘Arabian Nights’; it is the place of execution of faithless women. I
am not sure whether it has been used within the last ten years for
that purpose, I believe it has. But some seventeen years ago a friend
of mine was present at such an execution. The woman was paraded
through the town bareheaded, with her hair cut off, on an ass, her
face being to the tail. She was preceded by the lutis or buffoons of
the town singing and dancing, while the Jewish musicians were
forced to play upon their instruments and join in the procession. All
the rabble of the town of course thronged around the wretched
woman. The ass was led by the executioner, and it was not till nearly
dusk that the place of punishment was reached. The victim had been

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