Some read The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a damper on Smith’s support for free markets, but that’s not the only way to read it, nor is it the best ...
Barton Swaim began his Wall Street Journal review of Adam Smith’s America, a new book by Harvard’s Glory Liu on the great Scottish economist, by writing, “Admirers of Adam Smith may be surprised to learn that there is an entire academic industry dedicated to the proposition that the great Scottish economist was not a proponent of free-market capitalism.”
It’s true, such a movement does exist, and Liu’s book is only the most recent entry into the tradition. There are many “left-Smithians” who try to claim Smith as one of their own. They argue that because Smith makes some limited exceptions to free-market principles (which he certainly does), he shouldn’t really be considered a proponent of free markets. There’s now a right-wing equivalent to this movement as well, claiming that Smith’s exceptions permit wide-ranging government interventions in the economy when doing so is in “the national interest.”
Swaim is right to push back forcefully on those who claim Smith didn’t truly support free markets, but he goes a little too far in doing so, as Dan Klein of George Mason University pointed out in a letter to the editor. Swaim wrote that The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Smith’s other book, published before the The Wealth of Nations — “isn’t very good. It is not a great work of philosophy. It’s mostly unreadable, to my mind. What’s more important, its thesis lacks cogency. Sympathy as Smith defines it is far too weak a foundation on which to build an elaborate theory of morality.”
Klein noted that Smith actually thought The Theory of Moral Sentiments was his better work. Klein wrote:
Mr. Swaim levels a long-prevalent criticism of the “Moral Sentiments”: “Sympathy as Smith defines it is far too weak a foundation on which to build an elaborate theory of morality.” That criticism—that Smith’s ethical philosophy lacks a foundation—consigned the “Moral Sentiments” to oblivion from roughly 1800 to 1976. During that long period, many other thinkers also attempted to give a foundation to ethics. Were any of them successful?
The demand for a foundation in ethics eased up after 1976. Since that year, the “Moral Sentiments” has enjoyed a tremendous resurgence. It is now perhaps more admired than even the “Wealth of Nations.” Smith’s approach to ethics is nonfoundationalist; that’s a feature, not a bug.
As I have written in the past, the moral framework in The Theory of Moral Sentiments provides a very useful way to reconcile individual liberty with notions of the common good. That phrase, “the common good,” has been abused by many, but notions of it will be inescapable in a society of any size, and developing a useful way to think about it is vital. By putting sympathy at the center of his moral philosophy, Smith shows us how to be social without being socialist and how to avoid the trappings of atomistic individualism while propounding the “system of natural liberty” that Smith illustrated in the The Wealth of Nations.
For years, scholars pitted The Wealth of Nations against The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in something they called the “Adam Smith problem.” But you don’t have to choose. Both of Smith’s completed works are phenomenal, and they should be read together, as they are at George Mason in the economics department’s Adam Smith Program that Klein directs (and of which I am an alumnus).
Some left-Smithians read The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a damper on Smith’s support for free markets, but that’s not the only way to read it, nor is it the best way to read it. Understanding Smith’s moral philosophy is vital to understanding why he propounds economic liberty and how free markets are best suited for humans to flourish with one another.