Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue

This book revisits the moral and political philosophy of Adam Smith to recover his understanding of morality in a market age.

Ryan Patrick Hanley (Author)

9780521188234, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 31 January 2011

242 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.36 kg

'The great originality of Ryan Hanley's book is twofold: first it exhibits Smith's pervasive, surprising, and previously ignored focus on 'nobility.' Even more surprising is that Hanley is persuasive in explaining how in deploying this concept, Smith attempts to merge Christian and Pagan virtues appropriate to commercial times. Second it shows that Smith offers his readers a program of self-actualization that can transform their various manifestations of self-love into socially beneficial activities. In the process, Hanley puts to rest the idea that Smith was sanguine in relying on market forces or the invisible hand alone. Moreover, Hanley shows how Smith capitalized on humanity's religious longings. Hanley wisely avoids the question about Smith's religious views and focuses on Smith's treatment of the role(s) of religion in commercial society. By letting Smith regularly engage with Aristotle, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, Hanley makes Smith seem like a helpful and instructive companion in a world where the victory of Liberalism and Enlightenment are not to be taken for granted. Along the way, Hanley articulates a detailed account of Smith's intellectual development over time.' Eric Schliesser, Leiden University, editor of New Voices on Adam Smith

Recent years have witnessed a renewed debate over the costs at which the benefits of free markets have been bought. This book revisits the moral and political philosophy of Adam Smith, capitalism's founding father, to recover his understanding of the morals of the market age. In so doing it illuminates a crucial albeit overlooked side of Smith's project: his diagnosis of the ethical ills of commercial societies and the remedy he advanced to cure them. Focusing on Smith's analysis of the psychological and social ills endemic to commercial society - anxiety and restlessness, inauthenticity and mediocrity, alienation and individualism - it argues that Smith sought to combat corruption by cultivating the virtues of prudence, magnanimity and beneficence. The result constitutes a new morality for modernity, at once a synthesis of commercial, classical and Christian virtues and a normative response to one of the most pressing political problems of Smith's day and ours.

Introduction
1. The problem: commerce and corruption
2. The solution: moral philosophy
3. Interlude: the what and the how of TMS VI
4. Prudence, or commercial virtue
5. Magnanimity, or classical virtue
6. Beneficence, or Christian virtue
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Economic theory & philosophy [KCA], History of ideas [JFCX], History of Western philosophy [HPC]