Book Description
Adam Smith's major work of 1759 develops the foundation for a general system of morals, and is a text of central importance in the history of moral and political thought. Through the idea of sympathy and the mental construct of an impartial spectator, Smith formulated highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment and the virtues. This volume offers a new edition of the text with helpful notes for the student reader, and a substantial introduction that establishes the work in its philosophical and historical context.
Download Description
What can he added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience? To one in this situation, all accessions of fortune may properly be said to be superfluous; and if he is much elevated upon account of them, it must be the effect of the most frivolous levity. This situation, however, may very well be called the natural and ordinary state of mankind.
Customer Reviews:
4.5 stars-A masterpiece but only after Part VI was added in 1790.......2007-07-24
The other reviewers have covered Smith's theoretical concern of basing our moral judgements on a foundation of sympathy or sentiment when our impartial mental spectator requires us to walk a few miles, hypothetically, in the other person's shoes before rendering judgement.
The most important part of the book is Part VI, added in the year Smith died-1790.It is here that he provides the theoretical foundation for his recommendations in WN that the government is the only institution that can neutralize the severe negative impacts emanating from the Invisible Hand process of self interest and the division of labor.Smith's recommendation is that all working class members receive ,free if necessary,an education combined with religious instruction in order to deal with the dark side of the Invisible Hand process that negatively impacts the moral,political,social,martial,and intellectual development of all members of the working class(See pp.734-741 of the Modern Library(Cannan)edition of the Wealth of Nations).Part VI of the 6th and final edition of TMS establishes the need to promote morality as a necessary public good.The importance of virtue in societal interactions takes center stage.This can only be implemented by the provision,on a massive scale,of education and religious instruction for all members of the working class.Otherwise,society will be unable to prevent the "...entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people".(See Smith,p.734;see also the 5 additional repetitions of this conclusion that appear on pp. 734-741).
I deduct a half star because Smith failed to fully alert the reader of the importance of Part VI.
Contemporary importance of a 250 year old book........2007-06-09
After reading Paul J. Zak's "Values and Value: Moral Economics" (Gruter Institute Projecct on Values and Free Enterprise)in which he refers to Smith's book on morals, I wanted to reread a book that I had read several decades ago when I was studying economic theory. It continues to be most engaging. Zak noted that "of Adam Smith's two great books, the The Theory of Moral Sentiments is typically considered much less important than the Wealth of Nation, though this view is starting to change."
There is much current attention to ethics; much of it is "how to.. ." guidance and generally quite superficial. Rereading Smith's profound observations -- that continue to have relevance -- is refreshing and enlightening. Smith recognized the significance of "virtuous behaviors" . . and understood well that shared moral behaviors are prerequisistes for a successfully-functioning society. Chapters with titles such as "Of the Amiable and Respectable Virtures," "Of the social Passions," Of the Selfish Passions." are illustrative of the introductory sections topics.
A rereading reminds me of words of the founding fathers of the U. S. -- of the early leaders throughout the developing country. Smith wrote in the early decades of the 19th century; there is a quaintness to his language, but his insight is not lost. His writing provides the joy that beautiful antique furniture from the same century delights the eye; his book will delight the mind.
Wow! What a mind........2007-01-03
The language is quaintly old but somehow that eases in. A voice from the past is telling you how our whole social fabric has come to be. It isn't driven by dogma. It is driven by pure reason and an uncanny perception. Strongly grounded in reality, and not just air headed philosophical blather, this is a great source for those who need to assign values to concepts - but not just based on faith or some dogma taken as truth without question.
Adam Smith then turns that perceptual engine of his on speech, itself. It is an extra that, by itself, is worth the price of the book.
My favorite book of all time.......2006-05-23
I must seem like someone in great need of a unifying philosophy, because several people have tried to lend me theirs. Ex-boyfriends seem to think Daoism just the thing, while acquaintances recommend Jesus (that's why they stall out at acquaintances). After reading this book, though, I can now say, "No thanks. I've got Adam Smith."
When I was trying to get over a death in the family, this book provided me by far the greatest solace. Smith summarizes the ancient schools of philosophy (and most interestingly, how some got perverted into serving as the basis of Christianity), and from them distills a manual for life that's both intuitive and useful. What I like best about Adam Smith is that while his genius may not be immediately apparent, his common sense is.
The last chapter of the book deals with the origins of language, and it's about my favorite. Besides making me wonder why there are any linguists still employed, Smith touches on evolution and boolean logic (computer language). Based on this chaper alone, he should be called the father of linguistics; if he had elaborated just a bit more, perhaps he would have been the father of evolution, as well.
Modern, Empirical Ethical Theory.......2005-07-07
The book under review was published by LibertyClassics.
Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" (TMS) is both an excellent work of psychology and an eloquent exposition of philosophy. It was written about the same time as David Hume's and Francis Hutchinson's theories of moral sentiments (theory of benevolence) in the 18th century, departing from the ancient ethical paradigms of a priori ethics and reaching instead toward an empirical, a posteriori ethics for modernity. Rather than deducing first principles from the philosopher's armchair, Smith's account begins with experience, habit, and custom based on nature's disposition of mankind's moral constitution. Therefore, it is a wholly modern theory, and in many ways anticipates Darwinism and evolutionary biology (EB).
Smith's ethical account is grounded entirely in observation. Nature, custom, habit, and experience teach us its principles, which comports with both our internal judgments and our external evaluations. By our imagination, we place ourselves as if we are the other person, conceiving ourselves as if we were that person. Our emotions well up with an "analogous emotion" of the other, vicariously experiencing the other's pleasures and pain, his gratitude and resentment, becoming sympathetic to the other's plight as though it were our own. Love and gratitude are agreeable sensations, while hatred and resentment are disagreeable passions. Our sympathy for the other is measured like that of "an impartial spectator" who we become by viewing another's motives and actions by our own in accordance with our own sense of propriety, moral sense (duty), and benevolence, by "bringing the case home to ourselves."
"Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love" (I.i.3.10). "We approve of another mans judgment, not as something useful, but as right, as accurate, as agreeable to truth and reality" (I,i.4.4). Conscious of another person's situation generates sympathy in ourselves, and the correspondence with one another, is "sufficient for the harmony of society" (I.i.4.6). "To feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature . . . .as to love our neighbor as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity . . . . as our neighbor is capable of loving us" (I.i.5.5).
Based upon these primary motives of gratitude and resentment (foreshadowing Trivers' and Hamilton's reciprocal altruism in EB) leads to an analysis of grief and joy, anger and love, suffering and enjoyments, distress and relief, envy and magnanimity, and all the other binary emotional relations. To each emotion we attach a "proportionable recompense" for merit and demerit, reward and punishment. A sympathetic imagination or indignation naturally boils up in the breast of the impartial spectator.
While beneficence is always a free act, we do have duties given us by nature in order to be just. Justice, writes Smith, is a negative virtue and only hinders us from harming our neighbor through retaliation or punishment "to safeguard of justice and the security of innocence." Even though we are primarily motivated by self-love, we imagine an impartial spectator to humble the arrogance of self-love to avoid hurting one's neighbor.
Smith makes clear that "man, who subsist only in society, was fitted by nature to that situation for which he was made," and that is to act reciprocally. For ill inflicted unjustly on another, we naturally seek retaliation; for the good afforded from love, we reciprocate the affection. After all, "society cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another" (II.ii.3.3). This occurs "for the purpose of advancing the two great purposes of nature, the support of the individual, and the propagation of the species" (II.ii.3.5). When it comes to society, justice is more important than beneficence, because, while society can live without beneficence, it cannot survive without justice. Nature, and society through habit and custom, implant conscience in the human breast, and every injustice, therefore, alarms man. Conversely, Smith observes, "mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent" (II.ii.3.7).
Like Hume before him, Smith locates the causes of pain and pleasure as being behind the primary motivations of the two chief emotions: For Hume they are love and hatred, for Smith they are gratitude and resentment. To measure the propriety and duty of one's own actions, "we must become the impartial spectators of our character and conduct" (III.2.2). Man is naturally endowed to live in society with a desire to please others and avoid offending others, and it is our duty to impartially evaluate ourselves at least as stringently, if not more, than we evaluate others. Nature has made man the immediate Judge of mankind, ever making proper comparisons between our own interests and those of other people. We judge ourselves best when act as if we stand in a place with eyes of a third person. "It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct" (III.3.5). Of course, our own disciplined, self-command, coupled with constancy and firmness, makes our interior and exterior comparisons and resemblances fair and equitable.
Smith's TMS covers much territory also covered by Hume, but from a different angle, and with a different regard for "utility" in a theory of benevolence. Both theories are thoroughly modern, and readers familiar with EB will find that Smith better anticipates many of EB's themes, i.e., reciprocal altruism, kin selection, etc. Smith's perception of man as he will become described by Darwin is uncanny. Although Hume's account begins with first principles of observation, and heuristically builds upon empirical foundations, Smith's observation begins with the more mundane and ordinary and refines toward first principles. Even though they are in agreement on most matters, it's intellectually interesting to take note of their differences (e.g., utility). Regrettably, the ethical theory of moral sentiments gets little attention in ethics courses, despite the ease of reading and relevance to today's modern synthesis. Both deserve a wider audience. This handsome text is well introduced, annotated, and documented.. Recommended.
Book Description
The eighth century dawned on a Greek world that had remained substantially unchanged during the centuries of stagnation known as the Dark Age. This book is a study of the economic and cultural upheaval that shook mainland Greece and the Aegean area in the eighth century, and the role that poetry played in this upheaval. Using tools from political and economic anthropology, David Tandy argues that between about 800 and 700 B.C., a great transformation of dominant economic institutions took place involving wrenching adjustments in the way status and wealth were distributed within the Greek communities.
Tandy explores the economic organization of preindustrial societies, both ancient and contemporary, to shed light on the Greek experience. He argues that the sudden shift in Greek economic formations led to new social behaviors and to new social structures such as the polis, itself a by-product of economic change. Unraveling the dialectic between the material record and epic poetry, Tandy shows that the epic tradition mirrored these new social behaviors and that it portrayed the stresses that economic change brought to the ancient Aegean world.
Tandy brings in comparative evidence from other small-scale communities beset by changes, spotlighting the specific plight of one community, Ascra in Boeotia, on whose behalf Hesiod sang his Works and Days. The result is a lively, moving account of a human dilemma that, many centuries later, is all too familiar.
Customer Reviews:
Simultaneously Impressive and Disappointing.......2007-01-08
Tandy's first three chapters get the book off to a great start. After a brief introductory chapter tracing the overall line of argument, he gets down to business with an excellent study of population growth in Dark Age Greece, presenting a broad picture buttressed by specifics from archaeological studies. In Chapter Three, he describes the establishment and growth of the Greek colonies, which were later to play such an important part of Greek society.
But from there it's all downhill. Chapter Four presents an extended theoretical discussion of social organizations, with applications to early Greek society. Tandy is attempting to establish that Greek society made a transition from a patronage-based system (in which material wealth flows down from the leader in return for loyalty flowing up) to a market-based system (in which the creators of wealth exercise direct control over its distribution). However, this subject has been handled in great detail in the anthropological literature, and I think that Tandy's treatment of it is weak. He's trying to fit existing theory onto the Greek experience, and while the fit isn't bad, he has to stretch it in a few places to make it work.
In Chapter Five he directly addresses the transition from the patronage-based system to the market-based system, and here his discussion descends into a hopeless muddle. Part of his problem is that he has completely missed one of the most important elements of the Greek transformation: the shift from a subsistence economy (relying exclusively on cereal production) to a market economy in which processed foodstuffs (wine and olive oil) are exchanged for cereals. This market-based approach is what enabled the Greeks to continue rapid population growth long after they had exceeded the cereal-based carrying capacity of their lands. There is no question that by the Classical period, many Greek cities were dependent upon grain imports paid for with wine, olive oil, and manufactures -- but Tandy fails to address this development.
The remainder of the book is a sad effort to justify his misinformed thesis. Tandy claims that the central driving force in Greek society during the eighth and seventh centuries was the conflict between the old aristocracy and the new market-based egalitarians. He claims that the Iliad and the Odyssey were promulgated by the aristocracy as a kind of propaganda to justify their elevated status, while Hesiod's Works and Days represents the growing power and resentment of the producing classes. Tandy seems to see the development of Greek Classical society as a class revolt by the proletariat against the aristocracy. But this conflict was not resolved in the eighth and seventh centuries -- they were still fighting this well into the fourth century! How can this class warfare have been the driving force of Greek development when it was never resolved?
The conclusion of the book betrays all the good work done in its early portions. Having presented Greek development as a battle between royalty and proletariat, Tandy concludes that the winner was nasty old capitalism!
I think that Tandy's analysis is weakened by over-reliance on close analysis of Homer and Hesiod. While these two are certainly the most extensive testimony we have on Greek society at the time, they cannot be relied upon as rigorous sources of fact. Homer's representation is a melange of Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures, mixing bits and pieces spread over several centuries. Using Homer to draw conclusions about eighth century Greece is rather like using Christmas carols to draw conclusions about the significance of partridges in pear trees in twentieth-century America. And while Hesiod does provide us with many specifics of his time, we must remember that he is in no wise typical of Greek farmers. Really, how many Greek farmers do you think could read and write at that time, much less compose verse for the ages?
Lastly, I especially resent Tandy's failure to deliver on the promise of his title. I expected an explanation of how Greek culture shifted from a warrior-led society to a trader-led society. Yet Tandy's treatment of the development of Greek commerce seems peripheral to his main argument. There are a few good bits and pieces, but he doesn't bring to bear the wealth of information we've been developing over the last few decades. The crucial element of ship construction and handling merits only a few lines and a footnote.
I still recommend this book for anybody interested in the forces that led to "the glory that was Greece". However, I'd suggest that you read only the first five chapters. The remainder of the book will only disappoint you.
Speculative, but interesting.......2001-10-31
In this book, Tandy tells the story of the rise of the market economy in the Greek world. His version of this story is that Greece in the Archaic period (776-490 b.c.e.) underwent a transformation from a redistributive/reciprocal economy based on exchange obligations between neighbors and between chiefs and subordinates to one based on market exchange. Tandy makes a Marxist argument (though not particularly "half-baked," I think) that the rise of the market economy in cities in Greece allowed the upper classes (those who had surplus wealth) to enrich themselves in overseas trade while the poorer classes became indebted to them through a kind of economic attrition. Tandy also argues, contrary to many scholars, that Greek overseas colonization in this period was the result of economic/commecial expansion rather than population pressure. Tandy's third major argument is that epic poetry is a "tool of exclusion," in that elites used epic poetry as a kind of propaganda to disguise the fact that their society no longer conformed to the more "egalitarian" redistributive economy.
There are some flaws to Tandy's method: 1) the basis for arguing that there was a redistributive/reciprocal economy in the early Archaic period and Greek Dark Ages is mostly comparative evidence -- this is because there really isn't any good indigenous evidence for this kind of economy; 2) Tandy uses Hesiod's "Works and Days" as a model for a peasant perspective, which is a controversial move (Hesiod was probably not a peasant, but a gentleman farmer), and his general indictment of epic as a tool of exclusion is speculative (at least the kind of exclusion he's talking about; epic certainly excludes in other ways in that it advertises an aristocratic ethos).
I found his arguments for Greek colonization as commercial expansion rather than population export to be convincing; he analyzes patterns and sites of colonization, showing that colonies were generally founded on defensive, non-productive (agriculturally) sites first, and, in many cases, follow-up colonies would be founded in areas more amenable to farming. All told, there is much that is useful and interesting in this book, but the book's main arguments are ill-founded and agenda-driven.
Book is trainted by anti-capitalist political bias........1998-02-06
This book deals with a very important issue: how classical Greece became a commerical culture under the influence of the Phoenicians. "Warriors into Traders" is the key point. However, Tandy spoils his treatment of this with the kind of sour, half-baked Marxism that is all too typical of American academics in the humanities today. He compares the "evils" of Greek commericalism, which was only responsible for all the glory of places like Athens, to the "evils" of the introduction of market ecnomies into Third World countries today. Unfortunately, most of the problems of Third World countries, if we mean by that poverty and tyranny, are due to the lack of market economies, not to their introduction. Tandy, on the other hand, inadverently draws attention to what was unique about the Greeks: that commericalization revolutionized Greek culture, which was something that did not happen to the Phoenicians, who were old hands at the business--unless we count the philosophers Thales and Zeno of Citium, reportedly ethnic Phoenicians themselves.
Book Description
A vital and varied survey of economic theory in the pre-modern era, this well-chosen collection includes extracts from the works of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Antonio Serra, and David Hume. A marvelous illustration of how great thinkers of the past sought to explain the moral, ethical, monetary, and political dimensions of trade and exchange.
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Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage (Classics and Contemporary Thought, VII)
Phebe Lowell Bowditch
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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ASIN: 0520226038 |
Book Description
This innovative study explores selected odes and epistles by the late-first-century poet Horace in light of modern anthropological and literary theory. Phebe Lowell Bowditch looks in particular at how the relationship between Horace and his patron Maecenas is reflected in these poems' themes and rhetorical figures. Using anthropological studies on gift exchange, she uncovers an implicit economic dynamic in these poems and skillfully challenges standard views on literary patronage in this period. Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage provides a striking new understanding of Horace's poems and the Roman system of patronage, and also demonstrates the relevance of New Historicist and Marxist critical paradigms for Roman studies.
In addition to incorporating anthropological and sociological perspectives, Bowditch's theoretical approach makes use of concepts drawn from linguistics, deconstruction, and the work of Michel Foucault. She weaves together these ideas in an original approach to Horace's use of golden age imagery, his language concerning public gifts or munera, his metaphors of sacrifice, and the rhetoric of class and status found in these poems.
Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage represents an original approach to central issues and questions in the study of Latin literature, and sheds new light on our understanding of Roman society in general.
Book Description
Benjamin Franklin is one of the best known and least understood figures in the history of eighteenth-century political thought. Alan Houston clarifies our understanding of his thought by making available a representative selection of his most important political writings. The entire text of the Autobiography is included alongside letters, essays, pamphlets, and manuscript notes that cover political economy, moral psychology, and religious belief and practice, among other topics.
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Adam Smith: Early German Responses (History of German Economic Thought)
Manufacturer: Thoemmes Continuum
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 1855066165 |
Book Description
Adam Smith: Early German Responses is a four-volume set which includes Lueder's principal economic work, the 3-volume Nationalindustrie und Staatswirthschaft (3 vols., 1800-04), a paraphrase of Smith's system in which he seeks to illustrate the doctrines of the Wealth of Nations by means of geography and books of travel. With this is the exceptionally scarce first edition of the first German abridgement of Smith's greatest work, Handbuch der Staatswirthschaft (1769), prepared by another of the small group of German economists to first understand and diffuse Smith's ideas, Georg Sartorius.
--Source texts for modern German economic development
--New Introduction by Hiroshi Mizuta
--Texts by two of the earliest German representatives of Smith scholarship
Customer Reviews:
Brain Wells, Esquire, reviews, Collected works of Marx.......1997-12-22
This is the secnond of the huge 50 volume undertaking of International Publishers to collect and translate into English everything ever written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels into one set of books.
This is truly an historic and valuable contribution to reseach into history and political economy. The second volume contains the earliest writings of Frederick Engels. It is a very interesting tool in studying the development of the journalistic style of Engels. Engels' writing was always easier to read that Marx's. The entire 50 volume set is a worthy addition to the library of any one attempting to understand the development of Marxism from its earliest roots.
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The Development Of The National Economy: The United States From The Civil War Through The 1890s (Early American Economic Thought, 3)
Manufacturer: Pickering & Chatto Publishers
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ASIN: 1851967516 |
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Early Economic Thought in Spain, 1177-1740
Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson
Manufacturer: Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited (Australia)
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ASIN: 0049460110 |
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