St. Augustine's Press
|
|
|
|
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 and Causes 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.
The intention of Polity and Economy is to present Adam Smith as author of
liberal capitalism, as propounder within an order that converts the natural
self-preference of every living thing into an instrument of goodness, prosperity,
and freedom – as long as our deployment of natural means does not,
in the organization and conduct of society, violate the truths of nature
itself.
This edition of Polity and Economy revises the original with cross-references
from the standard Glasgow editions and adds two further essays not in the
original: “Adam Smith and Political Philosophy” and “The
Invisible Hand: Moral and Political Considerations.” |
|
