Ronald L. Meek’s research while affiliated with University of Leicester and other places

Most of the accounts hitherto given of the development of Adam Smith’s ideas on the division of labour prior to the appearance of the Wealth of Nations have been based on a number of crucial assumptions made by early Smith-scholars concerning the dating of the relevant documents — notably the so-called Early Draft of the ‘Wealth of Nations’ and the two fragments on the division of labour discovered by Scott. The recent discovery of a new set of student’s notes of Smith’s Glasgow lectures on Jurisprudence, relating to the 1762–3 academic session, has made it possible to reconsider these assumptions. It will be our contention in the present essay that in the light of the new evidence the documents should probably be placed in a date order very different from that which has up to now been accepted, and that if this is done the traditional picture of the way in which Smith’s ideas on the division of labour developed is radically altered. In the appendices to the essay we present some of the more important of the materials upon which the argument rests, including an extract from the new lecture notes and what we believe to be the first printed text of the two fragments.

Marginalism and Marxism may seem at first sight a very stale subject for debate, of interest only to antiquarians and the celebrators of centenaries. What possible good can it do, it may be asked, to discuss the relation between two theoretical systems which were first put forward a whole century ago, neither of which anybody today accepts without considerable qualification? We do not bother to discuss the bimetallism-versus-monometallism issue today: why then ‘Marginalism and Marxism? There are two justificatory points, I think, which can usefully be made before we start our task.

In the early years after the war, when I was a lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at Glasgow University, I became very interested in the work of the members of the so-called Scottish Historical School, which Roy Pascal had rescued from oblivion in his remarkable article of 1938.2 I was impressed in particular by John Millar, whose work was pervaded by a theory of history and society which seemed to me to be a kind of preview of the materialist conception of history upon which I had been brought up in my revolutionary youth. I was interested also, of course, in the work of the other members of the School — notably that of Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and Adam Smith; but these three seemed to be rather shadowy, peripheral figures in the face of the gigantic presence of the great John Millar.