Adam Smith's Market Place of Life.

• Author: Costelloe, Timothy M.
• Position: Book Review

By James R. Otteson Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii, 338. $70.00 cloth, $26.00 paperback.

As James Otteson points out in the introduction to Adam Smith's Market Place of Life, in recent years Adam Smith's work has received a great deal of scholarly attention, including important studies of the specifically philosophical underpinnings of his thought. In Otteson's view, however, the world still lacks a "sustained examination" of the approach Smith develops in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and a concomitant account of its connections to other parts of his \vide ranging corpus. Otteson aims to remedy this deficiency by focusing on the idea Smith develops famously in his Wealth of Nations: that the "unintended order" called the "market" emerges naturally "from the free, everyday interactions of people with one another as they strive to satisfy their interests" (p. 8). Otteson, however, urges that this "market model" be interpreted as the unifying theme of Smith's overall system, that it organizes not only his approach to economic relations but informs his view of institutional arrangements in general, be they linguistic, governmental, juridical, legal, or religious (p. 287). In this view, Smith "generalized" the concept of the market to explain "all of human social customs and interactions" (p. 7) and to reach a "foundational understanding of the overall development and evolution of human social institutions" (p. 321).

Otteson defends this bold thesis over the course of seven chapters and a conclusion. The early chapters are devoted to chiseling out, with great care and attention, the "four central parts of Smith's moral theory" (p. 8) from which Otteson plans to "construct" the proposed model. Chapter 1 unearths Smith's "technical" concept of, sympathy--the "correspondence or harmony between the sentiments of the person principally concerned and the spectator" (p. 18)--and describes the "impartial spectator procedure" through which agents check their actual, private sentiments against a spectator's imagined sentiments. A version of this process, says Otteson in chapter 2, underlies Smith's treatment of "conscience," the "inner judgment" that arises from applying the impartial-spectator procedure to our own actions and sentiments. Otteson shows how, against the backdrop of human nature, especially the desire for mutual sympathy, tempered by love of self, in Smith's view the"perspective of a disinterested third...