Jack Russell Weinstein's Adam Smith's pluralism: rationality, education, and the moral sentiments. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2013, 360 pp.

Abstract

Review of Jack Russell Weinstein's Adam Smith's pluralism: rationality, education, and moral sentiments. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2013, 360 pp.Jack Russell Weinstein's new book sets itself two major tasks: to argue that Adam Smith offers coherent philosophy of education that permeates his system (p. 216) and that Smith's thinking is interestingly attuned to very modern problem of pluralism. The first strand of argument seeks to provide a way of reading Smith that demystifies some of remaining ambiguity across his oeuvre. The second sees in Smith an anticipation of current debates about cultural diversity and pluralism.In seeking to apply Smithian ideas in a contemporary setting Weinstein rejects limiting over-emphasis on contextualism. His approach accepts importance of getting Smith 'right' through historically informed readings, but denies that this is where inquiry must cease. As Weinstein himself admits this is a difficult task (p. 9), but it is a potentially profitable approach and one which is proving increasingly attractive. Weinstein aims to examine Smith's potential contribution to contemporary debates on pluralism by offering the first full-length investigation of Smith's philosophy of education and his theory of (p. 15).Weinstein provides an interpretation of Smith that sees his writings as characterised by desire to provide an expansive account of human rationality. He points out Smith's attempts to distance himself from a dependence on formal logic and stresses Smith's interest in rhetoric and narrative notions of learning and rationality. The early chapters trace Smith's interaction with Mandeville, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson, suggesting that his dissatisfaction with elements of thought of each is combined with a facility for absorbing what is of use. There is a particularly interesting comparison of Smithian spectatorship and Shaftesbury's soliloquy (p. 44), which opens way into idea of rationality that runs through Weinstein's reading. Both Smith's impartial spectator and Shaftesbury's soliloquy involve dialogical self-division that results in need for rational adjudication between competing mental features in a given context (p. 44).The book has three significant contemporary interlocutors: Alasdair MacIntyre, Michel Foucault, and James Otteson. The account of rationality provided is clearly influenced by MacIntyre; in closing chapters Foucault is considered in terms of notion of progress in history and extent to which he may have failed to grasp Smith's views; Otteson on other hand appears as a foil in initial part of book. A great deal of time is spent establishing that Weinstein is offering an alternative to Otteson's (2002) use of metaphor of 'Marketplace' in his account of Smith's theory. The objection seems more than a little manufactured. As Weinstein admits, two agree on a large range of issues; disagreement as he sees it is that by using metaphor of marketplace Otteson might mislead readers into prioritising market-like interactions in reading The theory of moral sentiments [TMS] (p. 50) or into viewing market as Smith's sole organisational principle (p. 65). But disagreement seems to be less about their very similar accounts of unintended consequences and more about potential misreading and extensions of market into other areas (via homo economicus). This strikes me as a manufactured disagreement in that underlying similarities of two authors are ignored in favour of a rhetorical disagreement. Otteson's account of Smith does not depend on homo economicus, nor does it invite any but most superficial reader to see that as Smith's view. He uses market as a metaphor for more general spontaneous order accounts-including Smith's argument in TMS-while accepting that general model has important nuances in its application. …