“Regard,” he continues, “to our own private happiness and interest too, appear upon many occasions very laudable principles of action. The habits of œconomy, industry, discretion, attention and application of thought, are generally supposed to be cultivated from self-interested motives, and at the same time are apprehended to be very praiseworthy qualities which deserve the esteem and approbation of everybody. … Carelessness and want of œconomy are universally disapproved of, not, however, as proceeding from a want of benevolence, but from a want of the proper attention to the objects of self-interest.”
Adam Smith clearly believed that Hutcheson’s system did not give a sufficiently high place to self-interest. It was not Hutcheson that inspired his remark, “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” He may have obtained a general love of liberty from Hutcheson, but whence did he obtain the belief that self-interest works for the benefit of the whole economic community? He might possibly of course have evolved it entirely in his own mind without even hearing another lecture or reading another book after he left Hutcheson’s class. But it seems probable—we cannot safely say more—that he was assisted by his study of Mandeville, a writer who has had little justice done him in histories of economics, though McCulloch gives a useful hint on the subject in his Literature of Political Economy . In the chapter of the Moral Sentiments which follows the one which contains the criticism of Hutcheson just quoted, Smith deals with “Licentious Systems.” The appearances in human nature, he says, which seem at first sight to favour such systems were “slightly sketched out with the elegance and delicate precision of the duke of Rochefaucault, and afterwards more fully represented with the lively and humorous, though coarse and rustic eloquence of Dr. Mandeville.”