Lectures on Jurisprudence

Smith argues that the chief purpose of civil government is to preserve justice, which he defines as security from injury to one's person, property, reputation, and social relations. Building on The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the state functions as an impartial spectator when judging whether an individual has been wronged. The lectures also develop Smith's four-stages theory: societies progress from hunting to pastoral to agricultural to commercial stages, and the form of property, law, and government changes with each stage. This historical framework underpins his later economic analysis in The Wealth of Nations.

The four-stages theory is Smith's conjectural history of social development through hunting, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial stages. Each stage is defined by its mode of subsistence, which in turn shapes property relations, legal institutions, and forms of government. In hunting societies, there is no private property and no formal government. Pastoral societies introduce herds and inequality, generating the need for authority. Agriculture and commerce bring complex property rights and legal systems. The theory explains why justice and government take different forms across societies, and it frames The Wealth of Nations' analysis of commercial society as one stage in a broader historical process.

The lectures are the crucible in which Smith's economic ideas first took shape. Delivered at Glasgow in the 1760s, they show Smith working out the division of labor, the role of markets, and the four-stages theory that structure The Wealth of Nations. The economic analysis in the lectures concerns agriculture, manufacture, and commerce characterized by division of labor and exchange facilitated by money. The lectures also clarify that Smith's political economy was embedded in a broader theory of justice and government. Recognizing this continuity helps correct the misreading of Smith as a purely economic thinker divorced from moral and legal philosophy.

Smith never prepared the lectures for publication; they survive only as student notes taken during his Glasgow lectures. Two principal manuscripts exist, known as LJ(A) and LJ(B), from different years and possibly different student note-takers. LJ(A) was discovered in 1895 by Edwin Cannan, who recognized it as Smith's lecture record based on its correspondence with Millar's account of Smith's course and passages in The Wealth of Nations. The two versions differ in detail and emphasis, so scholars consult both. The standard scholarly edition appears in the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith.

Marx criticized Smith and Ricardo for projecting modern commercial individuals into primitive societies, but scholars have argued this charge is unjustified for Smith, who explicitly described hunting societies as lacking private property and rank distinctions. Some interpreters, including Pascal and Meek, saw Smith's four-stages theory as a precursor to historical materialism. The theory was largely neglected in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Smith was read primarily as an economist, but late twentieth-century scholarship rediscovered it as the historical frame of The Wealth of Nations and as central to understanding Smith's system as a whole.

The Lectures on Jurisprudence applies and extends the moral framework of The Theory of Moral Sentiments to legal and political institutions. In TMS, Smith analyzes sympathy and the impartial spectator as the basis of moral judgment. In the lectures, he asks what rules a society of strangers—not bound by affection—needs to maintain justice. The impartial spectator becomes the standard for judging injuries and designing laws. Justice in the lectures is primarily negative: it consists in abstaining from injury to others, and the state's role is to enforce that abstention through civil and criminal law.