Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~120,000 words · 570 passages
Cite this work
- APAAdam Smith. (n.d.). Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/adam-smith/lectures-on-justice-police-revenue-and-arms
- MLAAdam Smith. "Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/adam-smith/lectures-on-justice-police-revenue-and-arms.
- ChicagoAdam Smith. Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/adam-smith/lectures-on-justice-police-revenue-and-arms.
What it is about
The lectures Smith gave at Glasgow around 1763, reconstructed from a student's notes and discovered in 1895: the bridge between his two books.
Context and history
Smith did not write this. It is a student's fair copy, found more than a century after his death, and it must be cited for what it is: second-hand testimony of what he said in the lecture room. That said, its value is great, for here is his theory of law and government, which he never published and which he ordered burnt with his papers. The four parts — justice, police, revenue and arms — cover property, contract, the family, public safety, taxation and the army; and in the part on 'police', which then meant the administration of provisioning, much of 'The Wealth of Nations' is already sketched, thirteen years before it appeared.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
JURISPRUDENCE is that science which inquires into the general principles which ought to be the foundation of the laws of all nations. Grotius seems to have been the first who attempted to give the world anything like a regular system of natural jurisprudence, and his treatise On the Laws of War and Peace, with all its imperfections, is perhaps at this day the most complete work on this subject l. It is a sort of casuistical book for sovereigns and states, determining in what cases war may justly be made and how far it may be carried on. As states have no common sovereign and are with respect to one another in a state of nature, war is their only method of redressing injuries. He determines war to be lawful in every case where the state receives an injury which would be redressed by an equitable civil magistrate 2. This naturally led him to inquire into the constitution of states and the principles of civil laws ; into the rights of sovereigns and subjects ; into the nature of crimes, contracts, property, and whatever else was the object of law, so that the two first books of 1 Moral Sentiments, ad fin. - Lib. ii. cap. i. § 2. 2 JURISPRUDENCE his treatise, which are upon this subject, are a complete system of jurisprudence. The next writer of note after Grotius was Mr. Hobbes. He had conceived an utter abhorrence of the ecclesiastics, and the bigotry of his times gave him occasion to think that the subjection of the consciences of men to ecclesiastic authority was the cause of the dissensions and civil wars that happened in England during the times of Charles I and of Cromwell. In opposition to them he endeavoured to establish a system of morals by which the consciences of men might be subjected to the civil power, and