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Jack Weinstein Department of Philosophy University of North Dakota March 16, 2004 Tuesday, 4:00pm-6:00pm Nursing, Room 127 In this paper, I address issues related to the unity of Adam Smith's corpus with special attention to his two published books The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. His work has received little attention, partly because of a false understanding of how his system fits together, and partly because he is too often read as an economist and not as a moral philosopher. In this paper, I offer a re-contextualized vision of Smith's work. I argue that if we understand Smith within his proper Scottish Enlightenment context — as developing distinct ideas found in Mandeville, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson — the separation and compatibility of the two books becomes more transparent. While arguing that the two are complementary, however, I wish to challenge the notion that The Wealth of Nations takes conceptual priority over The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I argue that his moral philosophy is both chronologically and conceptually prior to his economics, and must be regarded as such in order to understand the relative meaning of each.  |
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