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Adam Smith: Moral Sentiments
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Before his decease Smith directed that all his manuscripts except a few selected essays should be destroyed, and they were accordingly committed to the flames. Of the pieces preserved by his desire the most valuable is his tract on the history of astronomy, which he himself described as a "fragment of a great work"; it was doubtless a portion of the "connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant arts" which, we are told, he had projected in early life. Among the papers destroyed were probably, as Stewart suggests, the lectures on natural religion and jurisprudence which formed part of his course at Glasgow, and ... the lectures on rhetoric which he delivered at Edinburgh in 1748. To the latter Hugh Blair seems to refer when, in his work on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783), he acknowledges his obligations to a manuscript treatise on rhetoric by Smith, part of which its author had shown to him many years before, and which he hoped that Smith would give to the public. Smith had promised at the end of his Theory of Moral Sentiments a treatise on jurisprudence from the historical point of view.
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The unity of Smith's thought is more clearly seen now than it once was. The moral sentiment on which he placed most trust in TMS was sympathy. Sympathy—the knowledge that one shares others' feelings—is presented as the basis for cooperation, both in fact and normatively: ‘O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us | To see oursels as others see us!’ (Robert Burns, To a Louse: Burns probably knew Smith's work, and the phrase ‘if we saw ourselves as others see us’ is Smith's). But TMS does not go so far as to say that there is enough benevolence to make the world go round unassisted; and it introduces the idea of the invisible hand in a passage describing how the investment of the surplus of the rich unintentionally benefits the poor. Smith's return to the invisible hand in WN moves the stress further from sympathy towards self-interest. Although ‘it 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 interest’, still each individual's pursuit of his own gain leads him ‘by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention’. ‘Sympathy’ for Smith has a wider meaning than in modern English, and in the wide meaning all these phenomena show sympathy at work.
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In the Wealth of Nations Smith claims that self-interest alone (in a proper institutional setting) can lead to socially beneficial results. But in his Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith argues that sympathy is required to achieve socially beneficial results. On the surface it appears that a contradiction exists. Economist August Oncken referred to this as 'the Adam-Smith-Problem'.[10] Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter ... emphasized this apparent contradiction in his commentary on Smith's work.
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This anthology provides an overview of the philosophical writings of Adam Smith (172390), one of the chief figures of the astonishing period known as the Scottish Enlightenment. It includes sections of his two major books - The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) - as well as selections from his lectures on jurisprudence, his history and philosophy of science, his criticism and belles lettres, and his philosophy of language. Also includes are two important letters from the philosopher David Hume, as well as Smith's account of Hume's death. The collection reveals the impressively breadth of Smith's learning in an effort to spark the reader's interest in further investigation of Smith's work.
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Well, Jonathan Wight did his doctoral studies on Adam Smith and found him to be much more Maslovian in his world view. Consider this passage: “Smith’s model is based upon notions that are intuitive to any parent – that children are driven first by the basic instinct for survival, and beyond that, the basic instinct for approval. Smith takes this one step further, arguing that adults as well as children desire not only pats of encouragement and approval, they desire to be worthy of that approval. People want to be virtuous.” In other words, Wight suggests that Smith believed markets and morals go hand-in-hand and he uses a first person narrator – a fictional economics grad student – who travels across the country with Adam Smith to get his points across.
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In this vigorous, crisp and informal book, James Buchan shows that Smith fits no modern political category and that much of what politicians and economists say about him is false. After twenty-five years of studying Smith and his world, Buchan shows that The Wealth of Nations and Smith’s 1759 masterpiece, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, are just the brilliant fragments of one of the most ambitious philosophical enterprises ever attempted: the search for a just foundation for modern commercial society both in private and in public. As befits the most accessible of all philosophers, this biography does entirely without jargon.
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Moral Sentiments