The other Adam Smith

PSN: Liberal Market Economies (Topic), 2007

Despite his fame, there is still widespread ignorance about the breadth of Adam Smith's contributions to economics, politics and philosophy. In Adam Smith - A Primer, Eamonn Butler provides an authoritative introduction to the life and work of this 'founder of economics'. The author examines not only The Wealth of Nations, with its insights on trade and the division of labour, but also less well known works, such as The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the lectures, and the writings on the history of science. Butler therefore provides a comprehensive, but concise, overview of Adam Smith's intellectual achievements. Whilst earlier writers may have studied economic matters, it is clear that the scope of Smith's enquiries was remarkable. In relating economic progress to human nature and institutional evolution he provided a completely new understanding of how human society works and was very much a precursor of writers such as Hayek and Popper. Indeed, with poor governan...

2017

History of European Ideas, 2008

Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, 2024

This paper offers the first comprehensive comparison between the philosophy of Adam Smith and that of his successor, Thomas Reid. It looks at Reid's and Smith's remarkably similar accounts of human perception and judgment, and at their different moral and economic theories. In this way, this paper offers not only a new perspective on Reid's critique of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, but also new insights into the intellectual roots of the genuinely Scottish debates about sense perception and the task of scientific philosophy. "Reiding" Smith can thus offer a unique vantage point from which to understand the connections between epistemological and economic issues in Smith's work. With a focus that is at once historical and philosophical, this undertaking serves three purposes: a) to familiarise economists with the philosophical and economic works of Thomas Reid, b) to sharpen our understanding of Adam Smith's intellectual context in the Scottish Enlightenment, and c) to better understand the paradoxical role that individual human judgment plays in Adam Smith's analysis of the economy.

This article argues that Adam Smith's notion of sympathy and the impartial spectator in his work The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759] connects the individual to society. In this work, Smith's economics are far more complex than mere self-interest as a driver of commerce. Self-interest functions within a socio-ethical framework that limits excess and narcissism. However, morality was not based on normative assumptions for Smith and Hume. Morality was directly linked to social and cognitive processes in which the approbation of others was important. In other words, behaviour was based on the perceptions of others; therefore, action was to be adjusted to obtain sympathy. The impartial spectator refers to the cognitive process in which moral assessments are made. Therefore, the empiricism of Smith differs from determinism as related to physical causation because it operates through habituation and/or socialisation that can accommodate change and variation. Clearly, the socio-cu...

Manuscrito, 2021

Despite the fact that the discussion on the economic man flourishes in John Stuart Mill's work, this does not mean that this issue has not been previously discussed, at least, not in clear terms. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that even if Adam Smith never specifically characterized the person who deals with economic affairs, he pointed out some of his characteristics in his writings. We can find some clues to his thoughts on that issue in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762) and The Wealth of Nations (1776). In this article, Smith's homo oeconomicus is approached in three aspects: rational, moral and emotional. In addition, we also argue that the philosopher had advanced some studies of psychology and behavioral economics that would be developed from the twentieth century, which is

Postmodern Culture, 2012

Recent Adam Smith scholarship, whether focusing on his Stoic inheritance, Moral Sentiments' impact on economic theory, or influences of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson or Rousseau, has gained traction rereading Smith against the cultural myths in which his name stands as cipher for self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism. Ironically, Smith has now re-emerged as a proponent of the naturally social quality of human beings. This essay argues that the new critical focus on natural sociality elides from Smith's work the absolutely central mode of unnatural relations: citizenship. Accordingly, this essay outlines the consequences of Smith's overlooked, thoroughly economic theory of citizenship. Recent reevaluations of Adam Smith in political philosophy, eighteenth-century studies and economics have tended to pivot on a single claim: despite clichés concerning unfettered markets and unrestrained self-interest, Smith's oeuvre has always maintained that human beings are naturally social animals. Anyone who has so much as thumbed through The Theory of Moral Sentiments will recognize this claim as true. If such widespread cultural misperceptions do indeed exist, they could only result from reducing Smith's entire body of work to a single, decontextualized citation from the Wealth of Nations: "[i]t is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest" (29; I.ii). Nonetheless, recent Smith scholarship, whether focusing on his Stoic inheritance, Moral Sentiments' impact on economic theory, or influences of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson or Rousseau, has gained traction rereading Smith against the cultural myths according to which "Adam Smith" stands as cipher for self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism. 1 Consequently, Smith has reemerged as a peculiar inversion of the former caricature. Rather than shorthand for homo economicus, Adam Smith has been mystically transformed into a theorist of our ineluctable being-in-common. This depiction, too, reads like a caricature, again reducing

CRIS - Centre for Research and Interdisciplinary Studies Bulletin, Prague College, 2010

Starting with the reading of Adam Smith’s oeuvre I have carried out in previous papers, I discuss first the reasons why the 19th century mythology of homo economicus involved Adam Smith and Bentham in a constellation named ‘utilitarianism’ made of individualism, harmony of interests, hedonism, rationalism. Secondly, I try to reconstruct the main lines of Adam Smith’s philosophy of action, stressing the role of imagination, deception, and limited rationality. I argue that the limits-to-knowledge thesis plays an essential role not only in Smith’s epistemology, ethics, and natural theology, but also in his philosophy of action. In more detail, I argue that according to Smith action is prompted by limited knowledge of future events while the full knowledge of a (fully)ideal spectator would make choice and action impossible. Thus, Smith’s agent, even when he is not irrational, is steered by passions, sentiments, a degree of sympathy, self-interest (with limited knowledge of the real character of one’s own interests), and blindness to remote consequences. Thirdly, I discuss in this light the figures of the prudent man and the wise man. Fourthly, I try to shed light, on the basis of Adam Smith’s philosophy of action, on his characterization of landlords, labourers, merchants and manufacturers, and people in the middling ranks.

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2017

This is a review from the Fall 2017 issue of Eighreenth-Century Studies of Mike Hill and Warren Montag, _The Other Adam Smith_ (Stanford UP, 2014). This is a challenging, daring, and innovative book; although I raise some questions about approach and method, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Smith or in the intertwining of eighteenth-century philosophy and its historical moment.

2003

Jeffrey Young is well-known in history of economic thought circles in Australia because of his collaboration with the late Barry Gordon. This collaboration is shown again in the book under review, where two chapters are based on this teamwork. Young’s intellectual debt is also shown in the dedication of the book to Barry Gordon and Kenneth Boulding. Through the prior publication of some articles in scholarly journals, a moderate portion of the book has already become known to the history of economic thought community. Nevertheless, there are a number of new things in this publication. The content of Young’s book is better indicated by the sub-title, The Political Economy of Adam Smith, than by the title, Economics as a Moral Science. The title is a better indication of the approach adopted to the study of Smith. As Young says ‘In this book I attempt to offer a coherent interpretation of Smith based on the interplay of economics and moral philosophy’ (p. ix). The view that ‘moral con...