Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy The Wealth of Nations and the Morality of OpulenceEvensky's

Abstract

Edward J. Harpham (2001, p. 139) once began an article by writing that “many Adam Smiths are presented to us in the secondary literature.” The new wave of Smith scholarship is so varied that one's reading of the 18th-century Scot is bound to change significantly as one switches secondary sources. While recent scholarship on Smith is, in fact, diverse in both its methodology and its overall picture of Smith's system, Harpham is wrong. There aren’t many Smiths. Essentially, there are just two: one that adopts a certain caricature bending A Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereafter TMS) into irrelevance, and one that regards him as a moral philosopher with a theory of political economy fully integrated into his ethics.