Smith's View Research Articles

How Adam Smith's banking views influenced Hamilton, Jefferson, and the debate over the Bank of the United States

AbstractThe most sophisticated monetary and banking policy advice available in the decades after 1776 was found in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Smith recommended free competition among nationwide banks of issue with minimal legal restrictions and no legal privileges. Yet neither Alexander Hamilton nor Thomas Jefferson accepted Smith's recommendation, despite their familiarity with his arguments, and despite Scotland's positive experience while following it. We spell out Hamilton's and Jefferson's theoretical disagreements, and explain how Smith's advice did not serve either founder's political agenda. For Hamilton, competitive banking without a single privileged national bank would not do enough to strengthen the federal government. For Jefferson, any federal chartering of banks would strengthen the federal government too much at the expense of the states.

The Relationship between Religion and Economic Growth: A Study of Religiosity and Social Capital

This research will prove that: the better the religiosity, the higher the work ethic. This research also wants to show that there is a causal relationship between religion and economic growth. The similarity with academic communities such as Max Weber is that there is a clear causal relationship between religion and economics. Then Adam Smith's view that individual behavior in relation to religion combined together could explain how religion and economics work together. And religious beliefs especially beliefs in heaven, hell and life after death tend to increase economic growth. Meanwhile, Islam itself is closely related to economic growth, which makes it easier for muamalah activities, such as buying and selling and trading. More than that, there is a difference with other academic communities that religion is opium or poison for society. And third parties think that religion is an exogenous factor and that there is no causal relationship between religion and economic growth.

South African experiences in a restructured post-apocalyptic geo-political future as depicted in speculative fiction

This article draws on science fiction's aesthetics of instability and multiple perspectives that disrupt the dominance of a Euro-American narrative voice (Langer 2011), as well as decolonial concepts such as coloniality, decentring and epistemic freedom (Ngügï 1986, 1992; Quijano 2007; Grosfoguel 2011; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018), to analyse the human condition and geopolitical patterns reflected in post-disaster worlds as depicted in Gillian Armstrong's "Elton" (2011), Abigail Godsell's (2011) "Taal" and Sarah Lotz's "Marine Drive, Durban Beachfront" (2014). The notion of multiple perspectives and contexts, and Smith's (2012) disruptive view that science fiction occurs everywhere, are used as lenses to examine the decolonised literary imagination. Ngügï argues (1986, 1992), that such an imagination moves the literary setting and vision from the Euro-American centre to another centre, in this case to a speculative post-apocalyptic South African future. The article argues that the depicted literary future and unfolding human experiences enable the constitution of decolonised literary imaginings and a cultural geography that restructure the current domination of geo-political and spatial mappings by the Global North. This restructured imagining places South Africa, and by extension Africa, at the centre of a speculative vision of humanity's sense of itself, knowledge production and agency, which are needed for the future survival of both the environment and other global inhabitants.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Adam Smith on Gender and Self-Control

abstract: Mary Wollstonecraft is an early and important critic of Adam Smith, engaging with his Theory of Moral Sentiments in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman . Given Wollstonecraft's arguments against moralists who "give a sex to virtue," what did she make of Smith's use of gender-coded language and the oft-cited passage where he claims that "humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity of a man" ( TMS IV.2.10)? This paper revisits the scholarly debate over gender essentialism in Smith, arguing that Smith's view of virtue is not gender essentialist, and that Wollstonecraft saw this and did not target Smith with her critique. Instead, Wollstonecraft affirms Smith's claims, leveraging them in order to advocate for educational and social reform. Reading these texts together corrects the tenacious reading of Smith as a gender essentialist, while also illuminating the differences between Smith's and Wollstonecraft's conceptions of self-control.

In the Shadow of the Palms: The Selected Works of David Eugene Smith

In the Shadow of the Palms: The Selected Works of David Eugene Smith

애덤 스미스와 민주주의

The name of Adam Smith is inextricably linked with modern economics. The most fundamental goal of his academic life, however, was the study of the principles of law and government. He formally declared this goal, pursued it throughout his life, and wrote The Wealth of Nations as a partial fulfilment, contributing to his immortality as a thinker. Although Smith was not a scholar dedicated to the study of democracy, he did explore the principles of law and goverment, and his writings contain rich discussions of political decision-making issues from which we can infer his understanding of democracy. This paper reconstructs them through the lens of realising and limiting majoritarianism.
 While Smith's view was that majoritarianism should be at the centre of political decision-making, and he emphasised the role of elections as a means of realising majoritarianism, this does not mean that the path to majoritarianism is limited to elections. Rather, this paper argues that Smith saw the role of public opinion in influencing public deliberation as an important means of realising majoritarianism. In this regard, Smith identified the problem of class bias in public opinion based on socioeconomic conditions as a reason for the adoption of mercantilism, and recognized the role of the state in addressing this problem. Smith's discussion has significant relevance to the problem of the limited political role of the people in today's democracies, and the need for the active exercise of political liberty to prevent the implementation of unjust policies that violate liberty.
 At the same time, Smith also touched on the possibility of the limiting majoritarianism. Majoritarianism is typically realised through representative legislation, and Smith recognized the existence of a higher normative content that guided statutory law by regarding such parliamentary legislation as aiming to be consistent with the rules of natural justice that arise from the sympathy of human nature. Smith also emphasized the existence of the state's duty of equal treatment as a normative principle that guides legislation in the area of police. Essentially, Smith recognized that representative decision-making is constrained by more fundamental norms. On the other hand, by locating the source of this limitation in the moral principles or political will emanating from the members of the state as a whole, Smith is credited with showing that the limitation of representative decision-making and the ideology of majoritarianism may not be incompatible. By viewing a constitution based on popular sovereignty as a product of the will of the majority, being higher democratic law-making than ordinary legislation, Smith's position has a similar logical structure to the current debate that even if a constitution appears to limit representative legislation, it can ultimately be reconciled with the ideology of majoritarianism.

Introduction: "House Rules"—Reading with Authorial Instructions

Introduction:"House Rules"—Reading with Authorial Instructions Tatyana Gershkovich (bio) "The novels we know best have an architecture," writes Zadie Smith in an essay on reading (43). "Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, etcetera. It's a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime" (42). Despite having their "own ideas of the floor plan," however, Smith reminds readers that they are only tenants, not landlords, let alone architects. Readers fashion a "wonderful way of living in" a novel, but they must still abide by "the house rules […] the author's peculiar terms" (Smith 43, 57). This was not always Smith's view; she describes her way of reading as evolving over time. Like many modern readers, Smith has tried to navigate two contradictory impulses. The first is to embrace linguistic skepticism and to accept—even to revel in—the multiple meanings it is possible to find in texts when they are unmoored from an authorial anchor. The second is to grieve that loss of a shared textual center and to search for ways to restore it. For Smith, the first impulse is personified by Roland Barthes, the second by Vladimir Nabokov. As a college student she thrilled to Barthes' brash disregard for the supposedly dubious project of pinning down the meaning of a text. Barthes declared that the "unity of the text is not in its origin, but its destination"—not in the writer, but in the reader (Barthes 129). And Smith relished her readerly prerogative to "inscribe dusty old novels into [her] own interests and [End Page 111] concerns" (Smith 51). In hindsight, though, she realizes that reading this way made her "feel lonely," for it meant abandoning one's faith in writing "as an intentional, directional act, an expression of an individual consciousness" (57, 44). This faith is something she feels the need to retain. Barthes's suspicion of the text—of its monopoly on its own meaning—was intended to enrich our reading. But it took something away, too: it robbed us of the pleasurable sense that in reading we come to know the mind of another person. Perhaps it stands to reason that as Smith became a writer herself, she turned from Barthes to Nabokov. Few authors have felt as keenly as Nabokov the pathos of our shattered faith in the communicative function of language; fewer still have tried so hard to restore that faith for readers. Charles Kinbote, the mad commentator of Nabokov's Pale Fire, wonders with horror: "What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?" (289). In a way, that is just what happens to him: he loses faith in a writer's capacity to make himself known to a reader. But Nabokov himself never loses that faith, nor does he relegate his readers to a world without it. By haunting his texts, never letting the reader forget his presence, he insists on the communicative capacity of literature—and on his ownership rights to the meaning of his work. He is always reminding us (as Smith puts it) that "the only perfect tenant of the house that Nabokov built is Nabokov" (Smith 53). Barthes pronounced the death of the author, but "Nabokov refused to lie down and die" (46). Many readers experience his authorial presence as overbearing, even tyrannical. But Smith delights in it, in trying to replicate Nabokov's way of dwelling in his works. Though the modern reader knows she can never truly grasp the mind of the author, Nabokov's fictions convince her that if she reads according to his rules, she can approximate this knowledge "by degrees" (48). Nabokov's authorial instructions enable Smith to "make a connection with a consciousness other than my own" (57). Of course, not all authors are intent on dictating the rules of the house. Some are long-absent proprietors, happy to give us the run of the place. Others are tyrants and despots, meddlers and micromanagers, who like Kinbote's landlord have "taken stupendous pains to write out on slips of paper recommendations...

Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom

Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom

The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo

The Garden Atonement and the Mormon Cross Taboo

Judge the Evil of Human Nature: “Moll Flanders” and Defoe's View of Conscience

“Moll Flanders” is a companion piece of Daniel Defoe's “Robinson Crusoe”, known as Defoe's "female version of spiritual autobiography". For a long time, Defoe researchers have focused on the "individual self-sufficiency" and social problems in his works. However, the research on Defoe's moral outlook is slightly fragmented, involving money and morality, Christian morality, national morality and so on. Therefore, it is necessary to start from the text of “Moll Flanders” to deeply explore the core of Defoe's moral thought, reveal Moll Flanders' crime and punishment under the threshold of his view of conscience, and analyze the birth context of Defoe's view of conscience, which mainly includes the following aspects: The relationship between Moll Flanders and the spirit of early capitalism, the lack of national welfare policy and Moll Flanders’s moral crisis, Moll Flanders' criminal predicament and spiritual redemption. Finally, this paper aims to explore the similarities and differences between Defoe's view of conscience and David Hume's and Adam Smith's view of conscience in the context of moral philosophy, to reveal the continuity and development of the ideas, to provide the thought resources from Defoe for the modern society. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the behavior and moral concepts of the heroine Moll Flanders in Defoe's work and to explain how the social values and ideas implied in it reflect Defoe's notion of conscience. The significance of this paper is to explore the moral philosophy of Defoe's work and the connection between his conscience and Hume and Adam Smith.

Joseph Fielding Smith's Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President

Joseph Fielding Smith's Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President

Was Joseph Smith a Monarchotheist? An Engagement with Blake Ostler's Theological Position on the Nature of God

Was Joseph Smith a Monarchotheist? An Engagement with Blake Ostler's Theological Position on the Nature of God

Cowboy Presidents: The Frontier Myth and U.S. Politics

In Cowboy Presidents, David A. Smith examines the ways in which Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush reflected and deployed facets of a “frontier myth” between 1901 and 2009.Smith's volume, based on his doctoral dissertation in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, makes substantial use of materials at the presidential libraries of Roosevelt, Johnson, and Reagan as well as the collections of the Theodore Roosevelt Center in North Dakota to document his contention that the frontier myth has changed substantially over time since 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner first staked a claim on its centrality to American development. In Smith's view, the myth has moved politically in right-wing directions just as has the nation, “shifting from a thesis of liberalism and inclusion to one of conservatism and exclusion” (p. 8), “a profound change that scholars or political analysts have not previously identified” (p. 13).Influenced by historian Brian W. Dippie, whose classic The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (1982) argued that the “vanishing” myth affected political leaders who took myth for fact as they made decisions affecting Native Americans, Smith carries his story through the twentieth century with attention to popular journalism as well as presidential statements, contemporary historiography, and communications studies. Cowboy Presidents has well-chosen illustrations, including apt cartoons, and a photograph of Barack Obama in a cowboy hat.Because Turner focused on the West as the locus of the frontier, Smith pays special attention to the ways the four chief executives offered contrasting presidential visions of the significance of that region during the twentieth century and especially between the 1960s and the 2000s. Roosevelt receives one chapter, raising issues such as the role of government at home and abroad and the importance of protecting the environment; Johnson and Reagan, two apiece—demonstrating successively how each performed more effectively early on and less so toward the end of their terms—Johnson in Vietnam and Reagan with his “reactionary, nostalgic way of understanding America” (p. 137). Bush merits one chapter that stresses failures—Iraq, Katrina, and a faltering economy.An epilogue briefly mentions Barack Obama—citing his Ossawatomie speech and its reference to Roosevelt—and Donald J. Trump “with [his] grievance-based ideology, toxic masculinity, corporate tax cuts, environment-busting, America-first approach to trade and foreign relations . . . ” (p. 217), but Smith does not take into account either the earlier challenges to the frontier myth by William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, or Lloyd Gardner, or the recent work of such influential scholars as Heather Cox Richardson and, especially, Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2019).

Examining the Structure of Remedial Law

Examining the Structure of Remedial Law

Geçmişten Günümüze Dinler Tasnifinde Morfolojik Yaklaşım

XIX. yüzyılın ikinci yarısından itibaren dinler tasnifi teşebbüslerinin artarak çoğalması ve ortaya çıkan tasniflerin dini araştırmalarda kullanılmasının sonucunda dinleri tasnif etme yaklaşımları ön plana çıkmıştır. Dinler Tarihinde coğrafi yaklaşımın yaygınlığına rağmen morfolojik yaklaşımın yadsınamaz şekilde cezp ediciliğe sahip olduğu ve konunun ilk defa bu bağlamda belli bir sistematiğe kavuştuğu ve dinamik hale geldiği belirtilmektedir. XIX. Yüzyılın ikinci yarısında hâkim olan ve XX. Yüzyılın ortalarına kadar Batı’daki dini araştırmalarda kullanılan dinin kaynağına ilişkin teoriler morfolojik dinler tasnifinin ilk tezahürleri niteliğindedir. Morfolojik dinler tasnifini sistematize eden din bilimcisi olma payesini ise Din Fenomenolojisinin mimarlarından Cornelius Petrus Tiele hak etmiştir. Çünkü Tiele’nin dinleri ahlaki dinler olarak kategorize edip evrensel dinlere/dünya dinlerine alt kategoride yer vermesi morfolojik dinler tasnifi açısından bir dönüm noktası olmuş ve yapılan morfolojik dinler tasniflerini etkilemiştir. Tiele’nin dünya dinleri kavramını İngilizceye kazandırması akademik ve popüler Dinler Tarihi çalışmalarının, Hıristiyanlık, Budizm, İslam, Hinduizm ve Yahudilik dinlerinin daimî üye olduğu; Konfüçyanizm, Taoizm, Şintoizm, Caynizm, Sihizm ve Zerdüştilik dinlerinin ise sıklıkla kullanıldığı bir dinler listesi ekseninde şekillenmesine kadar uzanmıştır. Jonathan Z. Smith ve Tomoko Masuzawa gibi din bilimcilerinin politik ve teolojik varsayımlara dayandığı gerekçesiyle eleştirdikleri bu durum, James L. Cox tarafından dünya dinleri paradigması şeklinde nitelendirilmiş ve dinleri daha iyi anlamak ve yerli dinleri de araştırmalara dâhil etmek için aşılması gereken bir problem olarak görülmüştür. Günümüzde özellikle batılı Dinler Tarihi çalışmaları incelendiğinde dünya dinleri kavramının üst bir kategori olarak kullanılmakta olduğunu ve belli başlı dinleri kapsayan bir dinler listesi sunduğunu görmek ve bu durumun alandaki pek çok çalışmayı kapsadığını söylemek mümkündür.

Smith and Hume on Animal Minds

This paper situates Hume's views on animals in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment by contrasting them with the views of Adam Smith. While Smith is more central to the philosophical establishment of the Scottish Enlightenment, their views on morals resemble each other greatly and both think that the analogies between humans and non-human animals are useful for thinking about morals. Their estimation of the nature and extent of those analogies, however, differ widely from one another. This has been historically obscured by the fact that in no single work does Smith precisely detail what he thinks non-human animals are capable of. I argue that Smith thinks non-human animal minds are different in kind from human minds. This is evident from Smith's view of how language facilitates and co-creates certain aspects of human cognition. Hume, by contrast, seems to hold that non-human animal minds differ merely by degree from human minds. After reconstructing Smith's view, I contrast it with Hume's, providing historical context to show how Hume falls outside the mainstream on this issue and Smith within it. Their views on animals reflect, broadly, their standing with respect to the wider Scottish philosophical community.

GuidoAlfani and Cormac ÓGráda (eds.) Famine in European HistoryCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xi + 325 p. $89.99; $29.99 (pbk.).

This impressive volume presents a series of quantitatively rich historical studies by leading scholars that together offer a broad picture of famine in Europe—scale, context, and cause and effect—from medieval times onward. Eight chapters cover specific countries or regions of Western Europe; another treats the European areas of the former Soviet Union. Only a north–south segment of the continent from Poland to the Balkans is not accorded this specialized attention. The main period is from the late Middle Ages (earlier for the Nordic countries) to the nineteenth century. A final chapter focuses on the famines of the two world wars. The definition of famine used by the contributors is Cormac Ó Gráda's: “a shortage of food or purchasing power that leads directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger-induced diseases.” This formulation combines Amartya Sen's (and Adam Smith's) view of famine as largely an entitlement failure—a man-made event—with simpler notions of “natural” causes such as crop failure. In each chapter the basic data drawn on to statistically identify famine years are recorded time series of deaths or burials and food prices, especially wheat. These materials are supplemented from contemporary accounts and case studies. The consistent definition and roughly uniform approach of the regional studies allow the editors to present, in their introductory overview, “the first truly comparative chronology of European famines.” Their listing ranges from the famines of the mid-thirteenth century in Italy, Spain, and Britain to those of the 1860s in the Nordic countries, Ukraine, and Russia. The three most widespread European famines over this period occurred in 1315–17 (the so-called Great Famine, “the worst food crisis of the late Middle Ages”), 1590–98 (the trough of the Little Ice Age, though its link to the famine is contested), and 1693–97 (affecting Scandinavia, France, and Italy especially). More regionally limited famines, describing most of those identified, could be just as devastating. The Great Irish Famine of 1845–50, though it “hardly qualifies for inclusion in a shortlist of the main European famines of all times,” killed a million people and forced the emigration of even more. The discussions of the causes of famine in the volume emphasize the range of factors involved. Weather, of course, figures prominently, especially harvest failures due to heavy spring and summer rains, with distant volcanic eruptions, sunspot cycles, and climate trends contributing as well. Crop and cattle diseases also play a role: New World crops—maize in Italy, the potato in Ireland—proved particularly susceptible. Man-made famine has mostly been war-related. Recent research has not supported earlier charges of intentional British and Soviet policy, beyond mere callousness, behind the Great Irish Famine or the Ukrainian and Moldovan famines of the 1930s and 1940s. Revisionist interpretations point rather to ignorance and poor judgment. Contributors also explore the consequences of famine. Demographically, even massive famine death tolls seemingly left overall population trends little affected—the conclusion reached by Watkins and Menken in PDR, 11, no. 4. Ireland is the chief exception to this. (Epidemic disease for the most part is similarly hard to discern in the aggregate population record, though here the main exception is spectacular: the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, which by a recent estimate killed over half of Europe's population.) Political instability is a surer famine outcome; indeed, by some accounts, food crises helped trigger the revolutionary events of 1789, 1848, and 1917. Famine in Europe had largely ended in the nineteenth century, only to return in strikingly man-made form in the disruptions of food supplies in World Wars I and II. The authors of this chapter, Stephen Wheatcroft and Ó Gráda, remark that in both situations, “the threat of massive continental mortality caused by food shortages was only narrowly averted by an unusually active international aid policy.” The volume's editors, noted experts in famine studies, are economic historians at Bocconi University, Milan and University College Dublin. Comprehensive bibliography, index.

Civilians and Cities in a Western Borderland

Civilians and Cities in a Western Borderland April E. Holm (bio) Bridget Ford. Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xix + 398 pp. Illustration, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. Sharon Romeo. Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. xvi + 192 pp. Illustrations, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95. The argument that the border states played a crucial role in the Civil War is nothing new. As early as 1927, Edward Conrad Smith established a thesis that became standard fare in Civil War narratives. He argued that the vast border region—which included not only the northernmost tier of slave states but also the southern portion of Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, as well as what is now West Virginia—was home to a white population so immense that it had the power to sway the outcome of the war in either direction. Many subsequent historians have reiterated Smith's view that the border was important because of its military and political significance. They cite, as evidence, Lincoln's anxious comments in an 1861 letter: "to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game."1 These historians are primarily concerned with how the border figured into Union strategy and how the region affected the outcome of the war. In particular, they focus on how close border states came to secession and ask how essential border loyalty was to securing Union victory. Historians who pursue these questions tend to situate the border states as a crucial component of Union strategy early in the war: white men on the border wavered between loyalty and secession, but Lincoln artfully managed to keep them from seceding until the region was militarily secured. Lost, in such an approach, are the complexities internal to the border: antebellum sectionalism, religious disputes, gendered conflicts, the black struggle for freedom and rights, and white politics of slavery and loyalty. Recent years have seen scholars take a different approach to the significance of the border states in the Civil War era. Concerned less with the border's role in the national political narrative, these scholars treat the border as a third [End Page 72] section, not just as the line dividing slavery from freedom. While they do not all agree on how to characterize the region (or, indeed, even where it is) their work shares certain assumptions. First, they view the border and its residents as intrinsically significant, regardless of their relationship to national events. Second, they contend that the border was meaningfully different from both the North and the South and that border residents consciously viewed themselves as neither northern nor southern. Finally, they focus on states west of the Appalachians. Their border region is as much defined by its westernness as it is by straddling the line dividing slavery from freedom. While some historians, such as Stanley Harrold, argue that differences over slavery starkly divided the region, most recent scholars of the western border focus more on what unified its residents. Christopher Phillips, Aaron Astor, Matthew Salafia, and Adam Arenson have all highlighted characteristics common to people living on either side of slavery's border. Among white border dwellers, these included shared commercial and economic ties, a sense of difference from and antagonism toward the east, widespread racism and white supremacy, and opposition to abolitionism. Older work on the border states, exemplified by Harrison Trexler's 1914 study, Slavery in Missouri, minimized the central importance of unfree labor to the region and perpetuated a myth of the mildness and "humanity" of border slavery that has long since been debunked by scholars such as Diane Mutti Burke. However, it is only in recent years that historians have fully recognized the persistent significance of slavery to white border residents. Patrick Lewis and Luke Harlow have demonstrated that proslavery unionism defined white border attitudes toward national politics and the Civil War. For their part, black border residents, and their protracted struggle for freedom and equality, have also received relatively scant scholarly attention. Historians have not only drawn our attention...

Adam Smith and the Social Foundation of Agreement: Walford v Miles as a Relational Contract

That the reception in subsequent case law of Leggatt J's outstanding discussion of good faith in Yam Seng Pte Ltd v International Trade Corporation Ltd has been disappointing demonstrates the continuing failure to appreciate the normative constitution of economic exchange and the law of contract. This paper re-examines the concept of economic exchange which may be derived from the work of Adam Smith in order to show that Smith did not conceive of exchange as a system of solipsistic self-interest but as self-interest which is formed on the basis of the mutual respect of the parties to the exchange. The significance of Smith's views for the law of contract will be demonstrated by a re-examination of the rejection of good faith in Walford v Miles in light of those views. Whilst it is moot whether the law of contract should recognise a general doctrine of good faith, that law must become self-conscious of the mutual respect it requires of parties to a contract which is indicated in the concept of good faith.

Not Just an Inferior Virtue, nor Self-Interest: Adam Smith on Prudence

This paper focuses on the treatment of prudence by Adam Smith. Smith was one of the few philosophers to conceive of it as a moral virtue. Smithian prudence is the care of one's own happiness that is limited and ennobled, respectively, by the sense of justice and that of self-command. A reconstruction of Smith's view of prudence helps to clarify three central points in his thought: the interaction between the agent's economic and moral dimensions, the relationship between the self and the other, and the dialectical tension between partiality and impartiality. Furthermore, Smithian prudence is important, in itself, as an approach to the above-mentioned points that is still viable. These three points are recurrent crucial issues in the history of ethics.