ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Adam Smith’s stages of history
Author: BREWER Anthony
The purpose of this paper is to examine Smith’s four stages theory of history as an account of economic and social development, with an emphasis on the arguments and evidence he used to support it. It distinguishes between those aspects of the theory which are based on a priori arguments and those which are based on empirical evidence, with the second of these subdivided into comparative evidence of societies of different sorts in Smith’s own time and historical evidence about past societies (which could serve as evidence of processes of change over time). So, for example, societies of hunter/gatherers could be observed in Smith’s time, but there was no direct evidence available to Smith of the evolution of past hunting societies into pastoral or agricultural stages. By contrast, there was historical evidence of the development of (some) agricultural societies into the commercial stage. The paper will also examine the extent to which Smith intended the stages model as a universal account of economic development and the extent to which he qualified it in practice.
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