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The Theory of the Moral Sentiments |
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BY ADAM SMITH, LL.D. |
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EDINBURGH: 1759 |
Is this Adam Smith's greatest book? It was not the famous Wealth of Nations, but a work on ethics and human nature called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which made Adam Smith's career. It was the sensation of its age, sold out in weeks. The prominent politician Charles Townshend was "so taken with the performance" (says David Hume) that he hired Smith as tutor to his stepson, the Duke of Buccleuch, and take him on the Grand Tour of Europe...luring Smith away from his professorship at Glasgow with the princely offer of £300 a year for life. Smith had become not just a best-selling author, but a well-off one too. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith asks that most fundamental question: Why do we regard certain actions or intentions with approval and condemn others? At the time, opinion was divided: some held that the only standard of right and wrong was the law and the sovereign who made it; others, that moral principles could be worked out rationally, like the theorems of mathematics. Smith took a completely new direction, holding that people are born with a moral sense, just as they have inborn ideas of beauty or harmony. Our conscience tells us what is right and wrong: and that is something innate, not something given us by lawmakers or by rational analysis. And to bolster it we also have a natural fellow-feeling, which Smith calls "sympathy". Between them, these natural senses of conscience and sympathy ensure that human beings can and do live together in orderly and beneficial social organizations. So our morality is the product of our nature, not our reason. And Smith would go on to argue that the same 'invisible hand' created beneficial social patterns out of our economic actions too. The Theory of Moral Sentiments establishes a new liberalism, in which social organization is seen as the outcome of human action but not necessarily of human design. Indeed, our unplanned social order is far more complex and functional than anything we could reason out for ourselves? (a point which Marxist politicians forgot, to their cost). A prominent politician of the age, James Oswald reported that he "did not know whether he has reaped more instruction or entertainment" from The Theory of Moral Sentiments. So here it is. Open it up. You might well be instructed...but read Smith's elegant prose and you will certainly be entertained. Index to "The Theory of the Moral Sentiments" |