Symposium on Jesse Norman’s Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why it Matters
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Smith, Justice, and the Scope of the Political
There was a time when many commentators thought that there was a problem with Adam Smith. The tendency to read Smith’s thought as marred by supposed tensions between the ‘sympathy’ of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) and the ‘selfishness’ of The Wealth of Nations (WN) has long since been debunked. Smith scholars are coming…
Two Invisible Hands: Family, Markets, and the Adam Smith Problem
Smith scholarship is split on whether the apparent conflict between self-interest in the Wealth of Nations (WN) and sympathy in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) indicates an intractable problem or is merely the result of a misunderstanding of Smith’s overall system. This chapter is written as a response both to the believers in das…
Instincts and the Invisible Order: The Possibility of Progress
The invisible hand means a variety of things to modern writers, who use the phrase loosely to imply the market, the price system, efficiency, laissez-faire, greed is good, and so on (Samuels et. al., 2011; Medema, 2009; Rothschild, 1994). In some circles the invisible hand is referred to with reverence and in others with mockery.…
The ‘Invisible Hand’ Phenomenon in Philosophy and Economics
This chapter discusses Adam Smith’s rhetorical use of the ‘invisible hand’ in the context of his teachings on metaphors as figures of speech in his lectures on Rhetoric (Edinburgh, 1748-51; Glasgow, 1752-64 (LRBL). After Smith died (1790), a strikingly long-period of silence about his three references to an ‘invisible hand’ followed until 1875, when traces…
Metaphor Made Manifest: Taking Seriously Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’
Is there any reason to devote time or effort to reading (or writing) an additional essay on Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”? Given the plethora of papers (as well as chapters, comments, and asides) dedicated to uncovering, interpreting, explaining, or contextualizing this notable expression, one could be pardoned for responding that, in fact, no such reason…
What My Dog Can Do: On the Effect of The Wealth of Nations I.ii.2
In the midst of one of the most famous passages in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith writes “nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog” (WN I.ii.2). In and of itself, this is probably not a noteworthy sentence, but it has always rubbed…
Adam Smith on Sympathy: From Self-Interest to Empathy
Is the assumption of self-interested behavior assumed in economics at odds with altruism and compassion? I believe that this question—which has been formulated in various ways in the literature for the past two centuries—is the thorn that often turns us away from reconciling the Adam Smith of the Wealth of Nations (hereinafter WN) with the…
Adam Smith on Sensory Perception: A Sympathetic Account
The aim of this chapter is to propose an account of sensory perception from the known writings of Adam Smith, chiefly his juvenile work, “On the External Senses.” This account asserts that when we perceive an object we simulate its painful or pleasurable effects on our body—we imaginatively place ourselves in proximity to the object and…
Indulgent Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator
Cognitive neuroscience is in the midst of what has been called an “affective revolution,” which places empathy at the center of a core set of moral competencies. While empathy has not been without its critics (Bloom, 2013; Prinz, 2011), both the radicals and the reactionaries routinely cite Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS)…
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