D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (1976) II An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner; textual editor W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (1976) III Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman  ...

Until quite recently, philosophers tended to ignore Adam Smith. They noted his idea of sympathy in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, but generally regarded it as superficial and unsophisticated, and tended to dismiss Smith as a minor figure in the shadow of David Hume. Moreover, he was regularly cast aside as a crass materialist who corrupted the world with a moral justification for capitalism. In this environment, Smith scholarship was left to the mercy of economists and historians of economics who (...) for the most part subordinated his moral philosophy, if not ignored it altogether. This project joins in a interdisciplinary effort today among intellectual historians, moral philosophers and political theorists to shatter the economists' hegemony over Smith's meaning and to broaden the scope of his relevance to key questions in contemporary ethical and political theory. ;I develop a reading of Smith that will strike many as counterintuitive, given all he said in the Moral Sentiments about our capacity to sympathize with others. I pursue his provocative suggestion, woven throughout the text, that we actually live, in a world without sympathy, in a fundamentally conflictual world, in what Smith once referred to with trepidation as a "fatherless world," a world without the comforts of universal and timeless truths, without a summum bonum. I seek to understand why Smith believed the world was like this, why he believed that traditional theories of cosmopolitanism in such a world were implausible, and how as a moral philosopher, he attempted to reconcile his bleak description of the world with his ardent wish for harmony among peoples in the international sphere---how he sought to address the problem of international peace and cross-cultural intelligibility given the various constraints that his moral philosophy revealed to him. Addressing these timely questions will entail a fresh reading of the Moral Sentiments in its various editions, placing special emphasis on Smith's moral-psychological and sociological claim that sympathy has limits---that our natural interest in the well-being of others is constrained notably by physical proximity, by historical and cultural familiarity , and by affective partiality, and is therefore resistant to philosophical universalization. (shrink)