This paper argues that many of Adam Smith’s insights,particularly those in his Theory of moral sentiments, have a relevance tocontemporary thought about economics and ethics that is currentlyunderappreciated. In economics, for example, Smith was concerned notonly with the sufficiency of self-interest at the moment of exchange butalso with the wider moral motivations and institutions required tosupport economic activity in general. In ethics, Smith’s concept of animpartial spectator who is able to view our situation from a criticaldistance has much to contribute (...) to a fuller understanding of therequirements of justice, particularly through an understanding ofimpartiality as going beyond the interests and concerns of a localcontracting group. Smith’s open, realization-focussed and comparativeapproach to evaluation contrasts with what I call the “transcendentalinstitutionalism” popular in contemporary political philosophy andassociated particularly with the work of John Rawls. (shrink)

There is no room for the concept of need in the prevailing neoclassical school of economics. Not so, however, in classical political economy. Through close analysis in this paper, I wish to trace the concept’s prominence in Adam Smith’s thought and to fine-tune its definitional aspects. The thrust of Smith’s argument is to delineate the mechanism via which the needs of the poorest in society are satisfied. Grounded in an understanding of need as limited and exhaustive rather than infinite, like (...) desire or preference, his theory is one of affluence rather than scarcity. But his justification of commercial society (from which the neoclassical school only lifts the conclusion) rests on becoming actually satisfied that these needs are, indeed, satisfied—an erroneous belief (at least according to the terms of Smith’s own definition) and an internal contradiction in the development of his argument, occasioned, I wish to suggest, by certain colonialist discourses. Finally, Smith’s ontology of need, as reconstructed here, corresponds to similar enquiries recently undertaken in philosophy and in some heterodox schools of economics. (shrink)