The Theory of Moral Sentiments (5 page)

20
John Rawls,
A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); see also his
Political Liberalism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

21
See Raphael and Macfie, “Introduction,” in
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 31.

22
Moral Sentiments
, III.1.2; in this edition p. 133.

23
An analysis of the contrasting views on this subject between Justice Scalia and Chief Justice Roberts, on one side, and Justice Ginsburg, on the other, is discussed in my
Idea of Justice
(2009), chapter 18.

24
Moral Sentiments
, V.2.15; in this edition pp. 245-46.

25
Moral Sentiments
, VII.iii.2.7; in this edition, pp. 376-7.

26
The Wealth of Nations
, I.ii.4, p. 120.

27
The presumption of equal potentiality of all human beings supplements Smith’s ethical belief on the priority of the interests of the poor in public policy: “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable” (
The Wealth of Nations
, I.viii, p. 181.)

28
The Wealth of Nations
, V.i.f.50-4, p. 371.

29
For references to Smith’s remarks cited here, and to many other remarks on similar lines, see Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen, “Adam Smith’s Economics,” in Knud Haakonssen ed.,
The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

30
The Wealth of Nations
, I.ii.11.i, p. 265.

31
Even during the Irish famines of the 1840s (half a century after Smith’s death), grossly mishandled by London, Charles Edward Trevelyan, the Head of the Treasury, would include among his reflections on the famine: “There is scarcely a woman of the peasant class in the West of Ireland whose culinary art exceeds the boiling of a potato.”

32
Smith’s knowledge of other towns was mainly confined to Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London (other than Oxford, which he largely hated, not least for its high-brow parochialism), and his foreign travels were confined to one visit to France and Switzerland in 1764-66.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Adam Smith once told his students that to be “an ancient” was to “have commentators.” By that standard, few are more ancient than Smith. The scholarship on him is immense; what follows is merely a brief guide to some of the most helpful introductory and most essential scholarly works.

Smith’s quiet life, coupled with his deathbed insistence that all his papers be destroyed, has rendered him a challenging subject for biographers. The authoritative biography is Ian S. Ross,
The Life of Adam Smith
(Oxford, 1995). A brief and lively account can be found in James Buchan,
The Authentic Adam Smith
(Norton, 2006). And still valuable is a short essay by Walter Bagehot, “Adam Smith as a Person,” included in
The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot
.

Smith’s intellectual context has been examined in several excellent studies; among the best introductions are Nicholas Phillipson’s essay “The Scottish Enlightenment,” in
The Enlightenment in National Context
(Cambridge, 1981); and
The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment
, edited by Alexander Broadie (Cambridge, 2003). Essential works on the moral and political thought of the Scottish Enlightenment include Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds.,
Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment
(Cambridge, 1983); and Christopher Berry,
Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment
(Edinburgh, 1997).

Among the best introductions to Smith’s thought is Jerry Z. Muller,
Adam Smith in His Time and Ours
(Princeton, 1995). Comprehensive overviews can also be found in D. D. Raphael,
Adam Smith
(Oxford, 1985); and Andrew S. Skinner,
A System of Social Science
(Oxford, 1979). Readers can also look forward to two forthcoming works that promise to be of considerable interest: Phillipson’s
Adam Smith: An Intellectual Biography
(Penguin), and Eric Schliesser’s study of Smith for the
Routledge Philosophers
series.

Over the course of the past century,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
has largely lived in the shadow of
The Wealth of Nations
. Interest in Smith’s moral philosophy yet owes much to the discovery of
Das Adam Smith Problem
by German scholars in the late nineteenth century. Among early important works in English is Joseph Cropsey’s
Polity and Economy
(M. Nijhoff, 1957), which established Smith as a central figure in modern political philosophy, a question reconsidered in one of the most important recent works, Charles Griswold’s
Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment
(Cambridge, 1999). In addition to Griswold’s, other essential comprehensive studies of Smith’s moral philosophy focusing on his conceptions of sympathy and spectatorship include A. L. Macfie,
The Individual in Society
(Allen and Unwin, 1967); T. D. Campbell,
Adam Smith’s Science of Morals
(Allen and Unwin, 1971); and Raphael,
The Impartial Spectator
(Oxford, 2007). Smith’s theory of moral judgment is examined in Samuel Fleischacker,
A Third Concept of Liberty
(Princeton, 1999); his theory of the emergence of norms through sympathy and exchange is examined in James Otteson,
Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life
(Cambridge, 2002). The context of Smith’s moral and political thought is considered in Donald Winch,
Adam Smith’s Politics
(Cambridge, 1978); and Leonidas Montes,
Adam Smith in Context
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Treatments of specific aspects of Smith’s moral philosophy also abound. The link between his rhetoric and his ethics is examined in Vivienne Brown,
Adam Smith’s Discourse
(Routledge, 1994); and Stephen J. McKenna,
Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety
(SUNY Press, 2006); the connection between his natural jurisprudence and his ethics is examined in Knud Haakonssen,
The Science of a Legislator
(Cambridge, 1981). Craig Smith examines the place of spontaneous order in
Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy
(Routledge, 2005). The role of teleology in Smith is examined in James E. Alvey,
Adam Smith: Optimist or Pessimist?
(Ashgate, 2003). Smith’s relationship to Rousseau is treated in Ignatieff,
The Needs of Strangers
(Picador, 1984); Pierre Force,
Self-Interest Before Adam Smith
(Cambridge, 2003); and Dennis Rasmussen,
The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society
(Penn State, 2008). Smith’s debts to the ancients are the focus of Gloria Vivenza,
Adam Smith and the Classics
(Oxford, 2001). Smith’s theory of virtue is examined in Ryan Patrick Hanley,
Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue
(Cambridge, 2009), and his theory of cosmopolitanism is examined in Fonna Forman-Barzilai,
Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy
(Cambridge, forthcoming).

The literature on Smith’s economic thought is massive, but several studies are of particular interest to readers of
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
. Important connections between Smith’s ethics and his economic ideas are examined in Fleischacker,
On Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations (Princeton, 2004); Jerry Evensky,
Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy
(Cambridge, 2005); Emma Rothschild,
Economic Sentiments
(Harvard, 2001); Winch,
Riches and Poverty
(Cambridge, 1996) and Richard F. Teichgraeber,
“Free Trade” and Moral Philosophy
(Duke, 1986). Studies of the moral implications of Smith’s economic ideas include Patricia Werhane,
Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism
(Oxford, 1991) and Spencer J. Pack,
Capitalism as a Moral System
(Elgar, 1991).

Helpful collections of essays include Skinner and Wilson, eds.,
Essays on Adam Smith
(Oxford, 1975); Montes and Schliesser, eds.,
New Voices on Adam Smith
(Routledge, 2006); and Haakonssen, ed.,
The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith
(Cambridge, 2006). Many key essays have also been republished in John C. Wood, ed.,
Adam Smith: Critical Assessments
, 7 vols. (Routledge, 1983); and Haakonssen, ed.,
Adam Smith
(Ashgate, 1998).
The Adam Smith Review
of the International Adam Smith Society provides a forum for new scholarship.

RYAN PATRICK HANLEY

A Note on the Text

The Theory of Moral Sentiments
was first published in 1759. It was subsequently revised with great care and republished in five additional editions in Smith’s lifetime. The version published here is that of the sixth edition, which appeared in 1790, months before Smith’s death.

The standard scholarly edition of Smith’s works is the Glasgow Edition, published in hardcover by Oxford University Press and in paperback by the Liberty Fund. The Glasgow Edition includes Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
, as well as student transcriptions of his lectures on jurisprudence and rhetoric, his philosophical essays, and his correspondence. Its edition of
TMS
, prepared by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, is especially valuable for having established a critical edition of the text and for its inclusion of a comprehensive textual apparatus detailing variations across editions. In an effort to present the most accurate text possible, the construction of the present edition included a thorough comparison of its text to the Glasgow Edition and to the 1790 original. In most instances of disagreement, the present edition incorporates the decisions of the Glasgow editors for the compelling reasons set forth in their notes.

The textual apparatus to the present edition includes a set of biographical notes and a set of textual notes. Historical information can be found in the biographical notes. The textual notes are of four types: definitions of words; citations of authors directly referenced or indirectly appropriated by Smith; references to key prior interventions in selected philosophical debates in which Smith is a participant; and references to parallel passages elsewhere in his corpus. Some notes also indicate the key changes that Smith made to the sixth edition; these do not, however, aspire to replicate the labors of the Glasgow Edition’s editors, and readers interested in tracking these changes are encouraged to consult their thorough documentation of such. In preparing my own notes I have relied chiefly on sources with which Smith was demonstrably familiar on the evidence supplied by the catalogues of his library compiled by James Bonar and Hiroshi Mizuta, and by references elsewhere in his corpus; hence my recurrence to Johnson’s
Dictionary of the English Language
, Hume’s
History of England
, and the
Encyclopédie
of Diderot and d’Alembert, among other sources ancient and modern that seem to have been prominent in Smith’s mind during the long period in which he composed and revised his work. In all instances notes are meant to be explicatory rather than interpretative.

All readers of Smith owe a tremendous debt to the excellent annotations of several previous editions. In addition to those of Raphael and Macfie, these include those to be found in the editions of Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 2002), of Walther Eckstein (Leipzig, 1926; reissued Felix Meiner, 2004), and of Michaël Biziou, Claude Gautier, and Jean-François Pradeau (Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). Their notes have proven to be the inevitable and indispensible foundation for many of my own, and I wish particularly to record my great appreciation for and reliance on the careful work of Eckstein as well as Raphael and Macfie in documenting Smith’s changes across editions, for Haakonssen’s and the French editors’ references to parallel passages in Smith’s corpus and especially his jurisprudence lectures, and for the French editors’ comprehensive efforts at documenting Smith’s eighteenth-century philosophical context. To spare readers from having to witness the pedantic quarrels of editor with editor, I have not registered my own agreements and disagreements with their annotations in individual notes, but these agreements, as well as those several instances where I have added to or felt compelled to depart from their judgments, will be evident to any who compare my annotations to theirs. I’m also pleased to record here my debts to Igor Borba, Patty Rodda, Ethan Bercot, and Alan Kellner for their invaluable assistance, and to Leon Montes, Eric Schliesser, and Doug Den Uyl for their many helpful comments.

Preparing this edition has taught me a great deal, and only further increased my admiration for and interest in Smith. Readers of this work are always very welcome to contact me if I can be of any assistance in contributing to their own study of his work: [email protected].

RYAN PATRICK HANLEY

The Theory of Moral Sentiments