Abstract
AbstractThere is long-standing disagreement about how radical Adam Smith should be taken to be. Recently, Jonathan Israel’s work on the enlightenment situates Smith as a moderate enlightenment thinker. This article challenges that assessment. Smith sees aristocrats as largely devoid of competence, wisdom, and virtue and thinks they do not wield significant political power in commercial societies. He is also highly critical of their economic power; and uses a neo-Roman concept of liberty to provide a powerful critique of slavery and feudalism. In so doing, he extends discussions of liberty and focuses them on economic relations in ways that prefigure labour republicanism. Finally, I show how these more radical commitments can be reconciled with his moderate proposals for political reform through his epistemology and realist anti-utopianism. These are aspects of Smith’s thought that are essential for understanding it correctly and have much to teach us today.
Highlights
How radical was Adam Smith? To thinkers like Friedrich Hayek,[1] Smith was a paradigm case of the careful and conservative empiricist, counterpoised to the radical rationalist wings of enlightenment thought
I will argue that Smith combines a radical neo-Roman or republican emphasis on non-domination in social life, especially in the economy, which is married to a sophisticated form of realist anti-utop ian ism designed to guide legislation and public policy, showing that Smith has much to contribute to contemporary debates about the neo-Roman concept of freedom and realist political philosophy
We saw that part of Smith’s critique of slavery and feudal economic relations appeals to a neo-Roman concept of freedom as independence, which he radically extends to all human beings and applies to evaluate economic relations. This leads to an important question: How can and does he square these radical commitments with his comparatively modest proposals for political reform? To understand why Smith’s arguably more radical commitments don’t issue in more radical pro posals, we must turn to his epistemology and realist anti-utopianism
Summary
How radical was Adam Smith? To thinkers like Friedrich Hayek,[1] Smith was a paradigm case of the careful and conservative empiricist, counterpoised to the radical rationalist wings of enlightenment thought. Like Emma Rothschild,[2] Smith is a much more progressive figure, with more in common with later radicals such as Condorcet, while Andrew Skinner and Kalle Moene go further, arguing that Smith’s writings on the grounds of state interference with markets prefigure important aspects of social democracy3 – a interesting contention in light of recent comments by Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati to the. This work has fundamentally changed the way we think about that period and its thinkers, dividing a vast intellectual movement into two principal parts: the radical enlightenment and the moderate enlightenment.[6,7] This makes the task of contextually locating Smith’s political views more tractable than before, and forces us to re-open this important question in light of the new classifications it introduces.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
