Adam Smith.

• Author: Paganelli, Maria Pia

Adam Smith

By Samuel Fleischacker

New York: Routledge, 2020

Pp. xvi, 364. $24 paperback.

Samuel Fleischacker opens Adam Smith saying the book is about Adam Smith the philosopher, not Adam Smith the economist. And indeed it is.

The book's first chapter is about the context in which to place Adam Smith. We are immediately told it is not the same one shared by Ayn Rand or Bernard Mandeville, but rather that of David Hume. We are also told that the (incorrect) image of Smith as a "rational egoist" (p. 6) has been made possible by the decline in popularity of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), the first book Smith published (in 1759) and a best seller in his day. Fleischacker's work seems to be meant to correct this. For Fleischacker, Smith was instead a curious thinker "interested in everything" (p. 16).

The second chapter deals with the early works of Smith, published posthumously (with the exception of his "considerations on language" and the review of Dr. Johnson's dictionary, both published in his lifetime), which for Fleischacker are examples of cross-cultural comparisons. Indeed Smith "moves among English, Greek, Latin, and Italian, and even makes references to Armenian, Hebrew, and Gothic" (p. 35) and mentions African kings. Here Fleischacker also argues that Smith is a serious "common sense" philosopher, rather than a skeptic or a realist. In the next chapter, the first on The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith is presented as being far from a deontologist or a utilitarian, but rather closer to a virtue ethicist.

So, for Fleischacker, Smith is not Kant, nor Bentham, but also not Shaftesbury nor Hume nor Hutcheson. For Smith, self-interest is relevant, but not key; benevolence plays a role, but it is not the sole virtue that counts; and we do not have a sensory organ to determine the approvable quantity of benevolence. Smith is a sentimentalist to whom circumstances matter more than just feelings. The impartial spectator is in fact the instrument that Smith uses to evaluate the propriety of feelings given the circumstances. Sympathy, for Smith, cannot thus be just contagion of feelings, but a projection into the circumstances of another person to evaluate the propriety of the observed feelings of the observed with the imagined ones of the observer. What to me is most interesting is Fleischacker's conclusion that for Smith, "self cannot so much exist until it is awakened to such reflection by way of its sympathetic engagement with...