H. Werhane, “Adam Smith, Aristotle, and the Virtues of Commerce,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 32 (1998).

17 Moral Sentiments, VII.ii.Introduction.1-4; in this edition, p. 317.

18 Moral Sentiments, VII.iii.2.6; in this edition, p. 376.

19 Smith notes that the word “justice” has “several different meanings,” though “there must be some natural affinity among these various significations.” We follow here the most general use of the idea of justice that can be found in Smith’s writings. This interpretational issue is discussed in my The Idea of Justice (2009).

20 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); see also his Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

21 See Raphael and Macfie, “Introduction,” in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 31.

22 Moral Sentiments, III.1.2; in this edition p. 133.

23 An analysis of the contrasting views on this subject between Justice Scalia and Chief Justice Roberts, on one side, and Justice Ginsburg, on the other, is discussed in my Idea of Justice (2009), chapter 18.

24 Moral Sentiments, V.2.15; in this edition pp. 245-46.

25 Moral Sentiments, VII.iii.2.7; in this edition, pp. 376-7.

26 The Wealth of Nations, I.ii.4, p. 120.

27 The presumption of equal potentiality of all human beings supplements Smith’s ethical belief on the priority of the interests of the poor in public policy: “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable” (The Wealth of Nations, I.viii, p. 181.)

28 The Wealth of Nations, V.i.f.50-4, p. 371.

29 For references to Smith’s remarks cited here, and to many other remarks on similar lines, see Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen, “Adam Smith’s Economics,” in Knud Haakonssen ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

30 The Wealth of Nations, I.ii.11.i, p. 265.

31 Even during the Irish famines of the 1840s (half a century after Smith’s death), grossly mishandled by London, Charles Edward Trevelyan, the Head of the Treasury, would include among his reflections on the famine: “There is scarcely a woman of the peasant class in the West of Ireland whose culinary art exceeds the boiling of a potato.”

32 Smith’s knowledge of other towns was mainly confined to Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London (other than Oxford, which he largely hated, not least for its high-brow parochialism), and his foreign travels were confined to one visit to France and Switzerland in 1764-66.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Adam Smith once told his students that to be “an ancient” was to “have commentators.” By that standard, few are more ancient than Smith. The scholarship on him is immense; what follows is merely a brief guide to some of the most helpful introductory and most essential scholarly works.

Smith’s quiet life, coupled with his deathbed insistence that all his papers be destroyed, has rendered him a challenging subject for biographers. The authoritative biography is Ian S. Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1995). A brief and lively account can be found in James Buchan, The Authentic Adam Smith (Norton, 2006). And still valuable is a short essay by Walter Bagehot, “Adam Smith as a Person,” included in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot.

Smith’s intellectual context has been examined in several excellent studies; among the best introductions are Nicholas Phillipson’s essay “The Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981); and The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, edited by Alexander Broadie (Cambridge, 2003). Essential works on the moral and political thought of the Scottish Enlightenment include Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983); and Christopher Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1997).

Among the best introductions to Smith’s thought is Jerry Z. Muller, Adam Smith in His Time and Ours (Princeton, 1995). Comprehensive overviews can also be found in D. D. Raphael, Adam Smith (Oxford, 1985); and Andrew S. Skinner, A System of Social Science (Oxford, 1979). Readers can also look forward to two forthcoming works that promise to be of considerable interest: Phillipson’s Adam Smith: An Intellectual Biography (Penguin), and Eric Schliesser’s study of Smith for the Routledge Philosophers series.

Over the course of the past century, The Theory of Moral Sentiments has largely lived in the shadow of The Wealth of Nations. Interest in Smith’s moral philosophy yet owes much to the discovery of Das Adam Smith Problem by German scholars in the late nineteenth century. Among early important works in English is Joseph Cropsey’s Polity and Economy (M. Nijhoff, 1957), which established Smith as a central figure in modern political philosophy, a question reconsidered in one of the most important recent works, Charles Griswold’s Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1999). In addition to Griswold’s, other essential comprehensive studies of Smith’s moral philosophy focusing on his conceptions of sympathy and spectatorship include A. L.