The last Fifty years have witnessed the rediscovery of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy and an increasing exploration of his conception of himself as a moral philosopher. Recent scholarship has dwelt on the eclectic nature of this thinking. Scholars have suggested that Smith draws on and combines elements drawn from across the ancient and modern schools of philosophy, and that the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment is characterised by an awareness of and response to the fact of moral pluralism. This leaves open the possibility that different modes of moral thinking can issue in incommensurable conclusions: that in some cases there might be no way to decide what is the ‘right’ thing to do. I explore the implications of these readings for Smith’s understanding of the role of philosophy in moral decision-making and, more particularly, what this means for teaching moral philosophy. Smith saw philosophy as a specific and limited activity that formed but a small part of the moral life of the individual. Moreover, Smith cautioned against over-ambition in philosophical thinking and warned of the intellectual, social, and political dangers of too much philosophy.

In the final edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), Smith recommends several literary authors – Racine and Voltaire, Richardson, Marivaux, and Riccoboni – as “much better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus,” specifically in their illustrations of relationships of love and friendship as well as the “private and domestic affections,” like “parental tenderness” and “filial piety” (III.3.13-4). Smith does not here explain how literature performs this instructive function, and his remarks on the function of literature are scattered across TMS and the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. This chapter contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Smith and literature by focusing closely on this recommendation, elucidating the instructive potential of the early novel, and showing how well suited the techniques of that form are to the goals and challenges of Smith’s sentimentalist moral philosophy. By examining shared themes and formal features of the novels of Samuel Richardson, Pierre Marivaux, and Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, I show how a reader’s engagement with these novels helps to enable and train their skills as an impartial and sympathetic spectator.

Adam Smith argued that, as the monopoly provider of religious services, the medieval Church represented a formidable impediment to economic development. How did the Church maintain its monopoly; and how did that monopoly break down in the Reformation? Further, given that the secular lords had a substantial comparative advantage in violence relative to the Church, how did the Church maintain its power? In addressing these questions, Smith developed a rich and systematic approach to the incentives, institutions, and competition surrounding the medieval Church.

For Adam Smith, resentment is the natural passion we feel at experiencing or witnessing injustice and the basis for our natural sense of justice. Why does Smith restrict justifiable resentment to injustice given his seeming admission that we do naturally feel resentment beyond the case of injury? Smith never directly addresses why such resentments are inappropriate in The Theory of Moral Sentiments; we reconstruct a response drawn from his moral psychology. First, we explain the origins of Smith’s narrow view of justice. We then turn to Smith’s account of resentment, explaining its purpose as the natural motive for narrow justice, questioning the split between descriptive and normative resentment. We ultimately argue that resentment’s logical tie to punishment for Smith is necessary but insufficient, and that injury and resentment are separate conditions required to justify punishment. Finally, we reconstruct Smith’s normative justifications for severing the tie between improper resentments and punishment, driven by his claims about equal status and about sociability.

This chapter situates Smith scholarship in a long historical view. It highlights the kaleidoscopic nature of reading and writing about Smith from the eighteenth century to the present. A brief survey of the early reception of Smith’s works in the anglophone world demonstrates how and why Smith was initially read as a practical resource before being transformed into an intellectual and political authority. Interpretive problems like “Das Adam Smith Problem” and the Chicago School Smith, introduced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then became starting points for critical and revisionist historiography. Contemporary scholarship has been marked by several distinctive features: an increasing interest in Smith as a philosophical thinker, the centrality of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, engagements with Smith to proliferate new defenses and critiques of liberalism, and the reformulation of older categories of analysis. I suggest that the ambiguity and contestability of Smith’s intentions as well as the slipperiness of the conceptual categories that he inspired have engendered shifting meanings, emergent problematics, and the enduring political relevance of his works and ideas.

In this chapter I argue that Adam Smith’s moral, social and economic thought was influenced by both Stoic and Epicurean sources with surprising and fruitful results. Although these schools of thought conflicted in most respects, Smith adopted and adapted elements from each to creatively construct a kind of ‘benign-realist’ social science able to explain the order of the human universe while comprehending humans as they really were rather than as we might wish them to be. By combining the Stoic idea that all of nature is both divine and benign with a pragmatic Epicurean moral psychology, Smith not only reconciles his own realist intuitions with his sincere faith in a designed universe, but produces a compelling account of how economies and societies should operate. I show this by exploring how Smith responded to the Stoic and Epicurean approaches to virtue, self-interest, benevolence, justice and our obligations to others, especially strangers and foreigners. I also explore how he applied an Epicurean sensibility to reimagine Stoic cosmopolitanism.

The year 2023 marks the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith’s birth. The essays collected here seek to both celebrate and reflect upon Smith’s intellectual achievements at this auspicious moment.

The Wealth of Nations is a stupendous palace erected upon the granite of self-interest. Thus George Stigler, and thus, with minor qualifications here and there, two centuries of misinterpretation of Adam Smith, especially by economists. To claim that Smith endorses the notion that people should, or inevitably do, act selfishly is severely to misread his text, especially in relation to other theories of human motivation at the time. That misreading arises, especially, from a misunderstanding of the famous “butcher and baker” paragraph in Book I, chapter ii of the Wealth of Nations – a misunderstanding that virtually inverts the true meaning of that paragraph. I explore the paragraph in depth here, commenting on sections of it line by line, so as to bring out what I take to be its overall argument. The result points, among other things, to a deep kinship, as well as certain significant differences, between Smith and Aristotle.

In Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, prescriptive and descriptive analysis are intertwined. While incentives analysis is strictly descriptive, the motivation of the analysis is prescriptive as are the motivations for its prescriptions. For Smith, wealth tends to promote justice; it also tends to be a consequence of justice. Poverty tends to create injustices instead, and to be a consequence of injustice. Understanding how to increase the wealth of a nation is thus understanding how to increase its justice. The perverse incentives of special interests are destructive forces of both wealth and justice. Smith called Wealth of Nations a violent attack against the British commercial system because, in the interpretation offered here, the entire apparatus of the British Empire was the result of those perverse incentives of special interest groups that not only generated inefficient monopolies but also, and especially, generated gross injustices for the weakest members of society.

This chapter challenges the view that The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) is concerned with analyzing modern commercial society – a view that is especially prominent amongst those who turn to Adam Smith to help identify the malaises of capitalist societies today and their potential remedies. The chapter proceeds by, first, examining what both Adam Smith and Smith scholars mean by commercial society, and whether this concept has any place in TMS; second, assessing whether TMS should be read as response to other theorists of modern commercial society (Bernard Mandeville and Jean-Jacques Rousseau); and, third, analyzing whether Smith’s reflections on moral corruption, inequality, and prudence in TMS should be associated with commercial society. The chapter concludes with some brief reflections on why many Smith commentators superimpose the concept of commercial society onto TMS, speculating that this can be partially explained by the broader tendency in much recent scholarship to read TMS and the Wealth of Nations as forming a coherent whole, rather than as independent works that mostly address distinct questions.

We present a semantic and textual analysis of the first two chapters of the Wealth of Nations to elucidate the meaning of several of Adam Smith’s key ideas. Using the methodology of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, we produce semantic explications of some of Adam Smith’s fundamental principles of economics phrased in simple and cross-translatable words. The extracts from the original text function as textual evidence and conceptual reference for the explications we present. We demonstrate that: (i) by reducing the principles as conceived by Smith to their core meanings, it is possible to resolve some interpretive ambiguities for general readers of economics, and (ii) by producing explications that are clear, cross-translatable, and free from terminological ethnocentrism, these principles become accessible and maximally intelligible to twenty-first-century readers who are nonexperts in economics and nonnative speakers of English, too. Ultimately, our project re-humanizes economics as a study of the human condition by drilling down to the core of what Adam Smith the moral philosopher meant in his most famous book that founded a discipline.

For being the reputed “father of capitalism,” Adam Smith had many criticisms of commercial society. Smith’s concerns were so numerous, in fact, that some commentators argue that Smith is properly considered as on the political left rather than on the political right. Given the seemingly unending stories of business malfeasance and corruption, many today wonder whether there can even be such a thing as what we might call “virtuous business.” Despite his concerns about business, perhaps there might nevertheless be something relevant to contemporary concerns in Adam Smith. Smith recommends political-economic institutions that can provide a framework enabling us to address what a just and humane society is, as well as the role virtuous business might play in it. This chapter investigates how the Smithian system might plausibly provide such a framework and suggests that it can offer guidance today for what we might call “virtuous business.”

Every edition of the French translation of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments published between 1798 and 1981 was accompanied by the Letters on Sympathy: the philosophical text of Smith’s French translator and interlocutor, Sophie de Grouchy (1763–1822). Grouchy declared that she intended to massage the message delivered in TMS for a French audience. Yet there has been little attempt to analyse the political motivations for the changes she made to Smith’s theory. This chapter describes two key critiques that Grouchy made of TMS: her rejection of the impartial spectator and her attack on hierarchy. Based on a redating of the drafting of the Letters to the mid-1780s, it argues that Grouchy focused on these elements due to two parallel contexts: her desire to write an educational treatise for an Académie française competition, and her involvement in an ancien régime legal scandal. After exploring how Grouchy constructed an Epicurean and egalitarian theory which she saw as better suited to these contemporary demands, the chapter concludes by arguing that seeing Grouchy as an “activist commentator” on Smith leads us to re-interpret the reception of his TMS in France.