Trading Places: Adam Smith’s Moral Commerce

If modern readers sometimes find Adam Smith’s laissez-faire market vision in Wealth of Nations difficult to reconcile with his emphasis on sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which Smith published in 1759 while serving as Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, the fault may be ours. For many of Smith’s eighteenth-century contemporaries, the connections between the two books would have been obvious: they were distinct but converging aspects of an Enlightenment project to lay the ethical foundations of an urban middle-class discourse of polite sociability that reflected Britain’s status as a modern transactional society. This focus on the moral dimensions of eighteenth-century Britain’s experience of commercial modernity becomes especially clear when we read Smith in the philosophical context out of which his ideas emerged, including writers such as Joseph Addison, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume. Closer attention to these earlier writers, especially Steele and Addison’s Spectator, offers a powerful reminder of the philosophical complexity of this project and a timely rejoinder to current efforts to sever economic policies from ethical imperatives in the name of an often brutal protectionism today.