Adam Smith's Moral and Political Philosophy

Adam Smith's Moral and Political Philosophy
Author: Adam Smith
Publisher:
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2008-06-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9781436713214

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Of Sympathy and Selfishness

Of Sympathy and Selfishness
Author: Charlotte C. S. Thomas
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780881465297

Adam Smith is best known for his magisterial Inquiry into the Nature and Cause a of the Wealth of Nations, but his other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is as deserving of serious study. In this volume, scholars in economics, philosophy, and political science take up questions that range throughout Smith's work, seeking to find connections between his moral theory and political economy. For much of the history of Smith studies, scholars worried about what was called "das Adam Smith problem." the apparent disjunction between the philosophies espoused in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations. In recent decades, scholars are increasingly likely to argue that there is no such "problem," and that Smith's two great works are compatible products of a coherent and consistent philosophical point of view. But, much work remains to explore how particular aspects of Smith's political economy and moral theory illuminate each either. And, as Smith's over-arching, perspective comes into view through the binocular vision afforded by a study of both books, new comparisons emerge between Smith and other thinkers in the tradition. This volume, based on the 2013 A. V Elliot Conference on Great Books and Ideas at Mercer University, represents a great diversity of disciplinary perspectives. Its authors take up a wide range of concerns that exist in the intersection of Smith's political and moral theory. It also includes several articles that attempt to compare his work to thinkers that preceded and followed him, coming from as far back in the tradition as the Italian Renaissance, and moving forward in history to claim Smith's relevance for contemporary research in experimental economics. Book jacket.

Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue

Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue
Author: Ryan Patrick Hanley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2009-06-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139477390

Recent years have witnessed a renewed debate over the costs at which the benefits of free markets have been bought. This book revisits the moral and political philosophy of Adam Smith, capitalism's founding father, to recover his understanding of the morals of the market age. In so doing it illuminates a crucial albeit overlooked side of Smith's project: his diagnosis of the ethical ills of commercial societies and the remedy he advanced to cure them. Focusing on Smith's analysis of the psychological and social ills endemic to commercial society - anxiety and restlessness, inauthenticity and mediocrity, alienation and individualism - it argues that Smith sought to combat corruption by cultivating the virtues of prudence, magnanimity and beneficence. The result constitutes a new morality for modernity, at once a synthesis of commercial, classical and Christian virtues and a normative response to one of the most pressing political problems of Smith's day and ours.

Adam Smith

Adam Smith
Author: Ryan Hanley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 597
Release: 2016-01-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1400873487

The essential guide to the life, thought, and legacy of Adam Smith Adam Smith (1723–90) is perhaps best known as one of the first champions of the free market and is widely regarded as the founding father of capitalism. From his ideas about the promise and pitfalls of globalization to his steadfast belief in the preservation of human dignity, his work is as relevant today as it was in the eighteenth century. Here, Ryan Hanley brings together some of the world's finest scholars from across a variety of disciplines to offer new perspectives on Smith's life, thought, and enduring legacy. Contributors provide succinct and accessible discussions of Smith's landmark works and the historical context in which he wrote them, the core concepts of Smith's social vision, and the lasting impact of Smith's ideas in both academia and the broader world. They reveal other sides of Smith beyond the familiar portrayal of him as the author of the invisible hand, emphasizing his deep interests in such fields as rhetoric, ethics, and jurisprudence. Smith emerges not just as a champion of free markets but also as a thinker whose unique perspective encompasses broader commitments to virtue, justice, equality, and freedom. An essential introduction to Adam Smith's life and work, this incisive and thought-provoking book features contributions from leading figures such as Nicholas Phillipson, Amartya Sen, and John C. Bogle. It demonstrates how Smith's timeless insights speak to contemporary concerns such as growth in the developing world and the future of free trade, and how his influence extends to fields ranging from literature and philosophy to religion and law.

Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy

Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy
Author: Jerry Evensky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2005-10-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1139446770

Adam Smith is the best known among economists for his book, The Wealth of Nations, often viewed as the keystone of modern economic thought. For many he has become associated with a quasi-libertarian laissez-faire philosophy. Others, often heterodox economists and social philosophers, on the contrary, focus on Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, and explore his moral theory. There has been a long debate about the relationship or lack thereof between these, his two great works. This work treats these dimensions of Smith's work as elements in a seamless moral philosophical vision, demonstrating the integrated nature of these works and Smith's other writings. This book weaves Smith into a constructive critique of modern economic analysis (engaging along the way the work of Nobel Laureates Gary Becker, Amarty Sen, Douglass North, and James Buchanan) and builds bridges between that discourse and the other social sciences.

Adam Smith's Political Philosophy

Adam Smith's Political Philosophy
Author: Craig Smith
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2006-01-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1134235879

When Adam Smith published his celebrated writings on economics and moral philosophy he famously referred to the operation of an 'invisible hand'. Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy makes visible this hand by examining its significance in Smith’s political philosophy and relating it to similar concepts used by other philosophers, thus revealing a distinctive approach to social theory that stresses the importance of the unintended consequences of human action. The first book to examine the history of Smith’s political philosophy from this perspective, this work introduces greater conceptual clarity to the discussion of the invisible hand and the related notion of unintended order in the work of Smith, as well as in political theory more generally. By examining the application of spontaneous order ideas in the work of Smith, Hume, Hayek and Popper, this important volume traces similarities in approach, and from these constructs a conceptual, composite model of an invisible hand argument. While setting out a clear framework of the idea of spontaneous order, the book also builds the case for using this as an explanatory social theory, with chapters on its application in the fields of science, moral philosophy, law and government.

The Impartial Spectator

The Impartial Spectator
Author: D. D. Raphael
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2007-01-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191526649

D. D. Raphael provides a critical account of the moral philosophy of Adam Smith, presented in his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Whilst it does not have the same prominence in its field as his work on economics, The Wealth of Nations, Smith's writing on ethics is of continuing importance and interest today, especially for its theory of conscience. Smith sees the origin of conscience in the sympathetic and antipathetic feelings of spectators. As spectators of the actions of other people, we can imagine how we would feel in their situation. If we would share their motives, we approve of their action. If not, we disapprove. When we ourselves take an action, we know from experience what spectators would feel, approval or disapproval. That knowledge forms conscience, an imagined impartial spectator who tells us whether an action is right or wrong. In describing the content of moral judgement, Smith is much influenced by Stoic ethics, with an emphasis on self-command, but he voices criticism as well as praise. His own position is a combination of Stoic and Christian values. There is a substantial difference between the first five editions of the Moral Sentiments and the sixth. Failure to take account of this has led some commentators to mistaken views about the supposed youthful idealism of the Moral Sentiments as contrasted with the mature realism of The Wealth of Nations. A further source of error has been the supposition that Smith treats sympathy as the motive of moral action, as contrasted with the supposedly universal motive of self-interest in The Wealth of Nations.