What does pride mean in Pride and Prejudice?

Ask Adam Smith.

I have removed the paywall from “How to Have Good Taste.” This is an increasingly important topic and the post is rapidly becoming one of the more popular things I have written.

How to have good taste

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The pride in Pride and Prejudice was derived from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. In their excellent study of the intersection of Smith and Austen, Pride and Profit, economics professors Cecil E. Bohanon and Michelle Albert Vachris trace the ways Austen uses Smith’s ideas in her fiction. (They are drawing on the work of previous scholars, such as Mohler, Knox-Shaw, Valihora). Far from the common-sense moralist she appears, Austen is a true intellectual, as engaged with the philosophy of her times as George Eliot later was.

Mary informs her family that vanity and pride are different: pride is concerned with what we think of ourselves; vanity is concerned with what others think of us. Smith makes the same distinction.

We call it pride or vanity; two words, of which the latter always, and the former for the most part, involve in their meaning a considerable degree of blame. Those two vices, however, though resembling, in some respects, as being both modifications of excessive self-estimation, are yet, in many respects, very different from one another.

All readers know Darcy’s pride. “He declined to be introduced to any other lady.” When Bingley suggests he dance with one of the ladies, Darcy tells him,

I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this, it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand up with.

As Smith says, “the proud man never flatters… and is scarcely civil to anybody.” Darcy goes on to reject the idea of dancing with Lizzy because she is “tolerable” but not handsome. He will not humour the women who have been left by other men. Here is what Smith has to say about the proud man.

He disdains to court your esteem. He affects even to despise it, and endeavours to maintain his assumed station, not so much by making you sensible of his superiority, as of your own meanness. He seems to wish not so much to excite your esteem for himself, as to mortify that for yourself.

Could not Jane Austen have written that herself?