St. Augustine’s Press

The first book to capture the impact Smith’s great work had on his contemporaries, this volume documents the immediate reaction in Britain, the entrance of the Wealth of Nations into politics, and the early reception on the Continent. Features letters written to Smith, early reviews, and extracts from books, and includes a wealth of previously inaccessible criticism and analysis, including contributions from David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Lord Lauderdale, Dugald Stewart, William Pitt, Henry Mackenzie, J. G. Schiller, and others.

To perceive Adam Smith’s place in the stream of Enlightenment philosophy is to gain an indispensable insight into our own condition as denizens of the liberal capitalist society. Before Smith was the author of An Inquiry into the Nature andCauses of the Wealth of Nations, he was the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The earlier work establishes Smith unmistakably as among those thinkers who aspired to describe the human condition in terms of motivation, of cause and effect, thus in terms of the principles of nature itself, of nature as mechanism, not nature as edifying teleology. Precisely because morality was not to be traced to any homiletic beyond nature or to a volition with nature, the thinkers of the modern order assumed responsibility for locating the ground of true moral virtue within mechanical nature alone. And just as the locating of mankind within a remorseless system of cause and effect could be the reduction of humanity to the status of robotic slavery, it became the self-assigned task of the thinkers in question to demonstrate that the natural order was one not of etiological bondage but of freedom in an elevated sense.