https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/smith-bentham-wilberforce-liberal-foundations-australia/
As planning for the new colony of New South Wales was under way, Thomas Jefferson was in Paris working with La Fayette on a French Declaration of the Rights of Man. It was an age when the democratic idea had been given such momentum that it would be unstoppable, and nowhere would be more receptive to it than the Australian colonies. The British government might have hoped that the new colony would be well out of the way of dangerous ideas, located as it was on the other side of the world, but it could not but be influenced by the intellectual ferment of the times.
In the domestic debate in Britain about the nature of government, there were three thinkers who were to have deep and direct impact on the colonies through their influence on Britain’s government and the thinking of its rulers and its intellectual classes: William Wilberforce (1759–1833), Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and Adam Smith (1723–1790).
The ideas of these thinkers would constantly resonate in political debate and in the press (when it developed in the 1820s) in Australia, but the one who has claims to be the theorist around whom the greatest debate swirled was Adam Smith, for Smith’s ideas were extraordinary and counter-intuitive. They challenged some of the deepest prejudices and beliefs that had governed policy as far back as anyone could remember. Wilberforce’s ideas appealed to the heart, and through Christianity to a deep faith-based belief in the equal humanity (and divinity) of all people; Bentham’s appealed to the legal reformers and institution builders, to those who liked a systematic and rationally ordered world; but Smith’s ideas required people to confront conflicts between heart and mind in a way no other thinker of the age was to do. In no other thinker was the conflict between the recommendations of reason and those of prejudice to be so dramatic. His ideas were to build a broad social and policy base for liberalism, both in Britain and in its Australian possessions.
Economic liberty and the public interest
Smith was a leading figure of the so-called “Scottish Enlightenment”. During the eighteenth century the Scottish universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews were pre-eminent in Britain in their intellectual quality, and a number of thinkers in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen developed ideas that were to transform people’s understanding of human society. David Hume (1711–1776), a historian and philosopher, Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), a historian, Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University, James Steuart (1707–1780), the first political economist to use the phrase “supply and demand”, and Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, led the revolution in ideas. Each of these men attempted to add to the then pitifully small amount of knowledge about how human societies actually worked: what caused them to evolve and grow and develop certain characteristics and, above all, what was the basis for peaceful co-operation between people in a world where authority had retreated and coercion was weak.
Like the philosophes in France who influenced them, these Scottish thinkers were highly sceptical of the common understandings and explanations of their day about the functioning of the social and economic order. They did not believe that societies were held together by the force or the authority of absolute monarchs or ruling classes nor even by the efforts of organised religion, nor did they believe that the ceaseless pursuit of treasure was the real road to wealth, nor that a nation was better off by excluding the products of others.
