Samuel Smiles - Legacy

Legacy

The Liberal MP J. A. Roebuck in 1862 called Smiles' Workmen's Earnings, Strikes and Savings "a very remarkable book" and quoted passages from it in a speech.

George Bernard Shaw, in his Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), called Smiles "that modern Plutarch".

The late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century saw the rise of New Liberalism, Keynesian economics and socialism, which all viewed thrift unfavourably. The New Liberal economists J. A. Hobson and A. F. Mummery in their Physiology of Industry (1889) claimed that saving resulted in the underemployment of capital and labour during trade depressions. John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) attempted to replace classical liberal economics.

In 1905 the Bishop of Ripon, William Boyd Carpenter, praised Smiles: "The Bishop said he had noticed a little tendency in some quarters to disparage the homely energies of life which at one time were so highly thought of. He recalled the appearance of "Self-Help," by Samuel Smiles, who 40 or 50 years ago gave lectures at Leeds encouraging young men to engage in self-improvement. His books were read with extraordinary avidity, but there arose a school which taught the existence of the beautiful and to do nothing. That school disparaged thrift and did not pay much attention to character and, perhaps, not much attention to duty".

The Labour MP David Grenfell, in a debate on the Transitional Payments (Determination of Need) Bill, claimed that the Bill "discriminated not against the unthrifty, the idler, and the waster, but against the industrious, thrifty person, who had to pay a heavy penalty. The Minister of Labour penalized self-help. He poured contempt on Samuel Smiles and all his works".

The liberal Ernest Benn invoked Smiles when praising the virtues of self-help.

In 1962 the director of the British Institute of Management, John Marsh, said that young men who entered industry needed a sense of service and duty; they must be "men of character who know how to behave well as in phases of success"; they must possess self-discipline in thinking and behaviour: "There is something still to be said for Samuel Smiles's doctrine of self-help".

The liberal economist F. A. Hayek wrote in 1976 that: "It is probably a misfortune that, especially in the USA, popular writers like Samuel Smiles...have defended free enterprise on the ground that it regularly rewards the deserving, and it bodes ill for the future of the market order that this seems to have become the only defence of it which is understood by the general public. That it has largely become the basis of the self-esteem of the businessman often gives him an air of self-righteousness which does not make him more popular".

Samuel's great-great-great-grandson, Chris Smiles, currently studies at Harvard University.