No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution.30

His extraordinary excursion into nutritional wisdom serves the indirect purpose of standing up for the Irish against ridicule by the English (including the ridicule of Ireland’s dependence on the potato),31 which goes back even to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene in the sixteenth century.

The global reach of Smith’s moral and political reasoning is, of course, quite a distinctive feature of his thought, but it is strongly supplemented by his belief that all humans are born with similar potential and—most importantly for policymaking—that the inequalities in the world reflect socially generated, rather than natural, disparities.

There is a vision here that has a remarkably current ring. The continuing global relevance of Smith’s ideas is quite astonishing, and it is a tribute to the power of Smith’s mind that this global vision is so forcefully presented by someone who, a quarter of a millennium ago, lived most of his life in considerable seclusion in a tiny coastal Scottish town.32 Smith’s analyses and explorations are of critical importance for any society in the world in which issues of morals, politics, and economics receive attention, and The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a global manifesto of profound significance to the interdependent world in which we live. This is indeed a book of amazing reach and contemporary relevance.a

AMARTYA SEN

NOTES

1 On this see D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie’s introduction to the Clarendon Press edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 20-25.

2 See Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

3 There is also a third book, Lectures on Jurisprudence, which he did not write in the form of a book, but which was posthumously put together on the basis of the lecture notes of his students.

4 See Rothschild, Economic Sentiments (2001). See also my On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), and Patricia H. Werhane, Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

5 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Penguin Classics, 1999), 1.1.2, p. 119.

6 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I. iv. 2.6-9; in this edition, pp. 220 -1.

7 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1.11.4.14-5, p. 457.

8 Bentham included this letter in the second of the two prefaces he wrote for the second edition of his combative defense of the market economy against regulations that restrain usury, Defence of Usury.

9 In fact, Smith is supposed to have remarked to his friend William Adam that Bentham’s book was “the work of a very superior man,” and though he had given Smith some “hard knocks,” “it was done in so handsome a way that he could not complain” (see John Rae’s Life of Adam Smith, 1895 pp. 423-4) Bentham was cheered by the report of this oral conversation and went on to write to Smith on this basis: “I, have been flattered with the intelligence that, upon the whole, your sentiments with respect to the points of difference are at present the same as mine.” Bentham’s interpretation of Smith’s good-humored reaction as substantive agreement with him would seem to be a considerable overstretch.

10 The Wealth of Nations, I.II.ii.2,28, p. 389.

11 The Wealth of Nations, I.IV. Introduction, p. 246.

12 The Wealth of Nations, I.i.10.ii, p. 246.

13 Smith notes: “Upon some occasions . . . those passions are restrained, not so much by a sense of their impropriety, as by prudential considerations of the bad consequences which might follow from their indulgence” (Moral Sentiments, VI.concl.3; p. 309).

14 An important analysis of Smith’s ethics of virtue can be found in Ryan Patrick Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, eds., Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

15 The importance of scrutinizing “comprehensive outcomes” (including the processes involved), as opposed to only “culmination outcomes,” is discussed in my “Consequential Evaluation and Practical Reason,” Journal of Philosophy, 97 (2000), and The Idea of Justice (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books, and Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2009), especially chapter 10.

16 On the distinction involved see Ryan Patrick Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On related subjects see also Christopher Berry, “Adam Smith and the Virtues of Commerce,” in John W. Clapham and William A. Galston, eds., Nomos XXXIV: Virtue (New York: New York University Press, 1992); M. J. Calkins and P.