Henry Oliver wrote an article comparing two of my favourite authors, Jane Austen and Adam Smith. Both have a deep understanding of human psychology and behaviour. I’ve admired Knightley’s and Darcy’s character and self-command ever since I read Jane Austen’s novels when I was young.
Excerpts:
Smith argued that people want to be praised and to be praiseworthy. That they want to be loved and to be deserving of love. Smith says we must be virtuous to be happy. His virtues are prudence, benevolence and justice. His vices are pride and vanity. “The proud and the vain man . . . are constantly dissatisfied,” he writes. The route to virtue is through “self-command”. Therefore we must achieve “superiority over the most ungovernable passions of human nature”.
Self-command is a question of willpower, education, habit. It comes from being bred in “the bustle and business of the world” when we are exposed to “violence and injustice of faction”. To those who are miserable, Smith advises in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “do not mourn in the solitude of darkness . . . Live with strangers, with those who know nothing or care nothing about your misfortune.”
As the economists Bohanon and Vachris write, both Smith and Austen prioritise self-control as a means of achieving balance and self-improvement. By attaining the skill of self-command, Marianne is able to cultivate virtue.
What marks out the capacity to improve, in Smith, is being able to see ourselves as an “impartial observer” would see us…Emma is unable to improve morally until she takes Knightley’s advice. Like Marianne, she must learn to see like those with more self-command. It is when Emma sees things as Knightley does that she is able to reform. “I doubt whether my own sense would have corrected me,” she acknowledges to Knightley.
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.
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