For the September essay in the Adam Smith 300 series, Catherine Pakaluk of Catholic University wrote about the relationship between Smith’s thought and Catholic social teaching.
“Wittingly or not, he wrote on the character of the social order in a way that is consistent with Catholic thought,” Pakaluk argues. She writes:
In an age overrun with political theories, reactions, and revolutions, Adam Smith offered none of those. Not because he wasn’t interested in the common good and the nature of government — on the contrary, his most significant works, the Wealth of Nations, Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Lectures on Jurisprudence, are all about those things. But his works aren’t theories about why people come together to cooperate for the good. Rather, resonant with the deepest commitments of Catholic thought, Smith looked to the nature of human institutions and the divine ordering of things, to supply the ends — and the limits — for the political domain.
Read the whole thing here.