Adam Smith, Sociality, and Classical Liberalism.

• Author: Smith, Vernon L.

Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments ([1759] 1853; hereafter TMS), a treatise on psychology, preceded his foundational work in economics, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Smith ([1776] 1904; hereafter WN). His second great book would subsequently overshadow his first great book. Both, however, are foundational in understanding how the West grew rich because of its commitment to classical liberalism anchored in freedom.

Sentiments and the Origins of Human Sociality

Smith's psychology was social. Thus, in his incisive mental experiment, if we were to imagine a member of the human species growing up in complete isolation from others, she could not know any more about what it means for her mind to be deformed than for her face to be deformed. Bring her up in society, and she is supplied with the mirror she needs to know these things (TMS, 162).

Smith modeled human social relationships at their root in human sentiment, particularly in the human capacity for mutual fellow-feeling, which enables us simultaneously to form an image of each other as an integral part of defining our relationships. In our earliest interactions with others, we find that their actions are sometimes pleasing and sometimes hurtful to us, and this leads us to form judgments concerning their conduct. Similarly, we learn that our actions have like effects on them. In this process, we gradually learn to see ourselves as others see us, and "to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it" (TMS, 162). In this quotation, it is essential for modern scholars to read/for in its eighteenth-century meaning as "fair play"--the sports metaphor distinguished its meaning then from its modern reference to distributional outcomes. There was no word unfair; the opposite of fair was foul, a concept born into the heart of injustice in classical liberalism. Indeed, fair was a unique English word without translation into any other language. Other languages such as German and Polish simply adopted the English fair (Wierzbicka, 2006).

Still a third perspective is our ability to examine our conduct shorn of a tie only to me or to you: "To be amiable and to be meritorious; that is, to deserve love and to deserve reward, are the great characters of virtue; and to be odious and punishable, of vice. But all these characters have an immediate reference to the sentiments of others. Virtue is ... amiable, or ... meritorious ... because it excites those sentiments in other men" (TMS, 165). Our personal experiences, those of others, and the rules we learn become societal norms. In Smith's model of community, modern liberal notions of "individual responsibility" were manifest in "self-command," a trait that individuals acquired in growing up and as they drew strength and empowerment from the matrix of social connectedness (TMS, 203-7; 213-16). As John Donne, one of Smith's seventeenth-century forerunners, proclaimed: "No man is an island entire of itself." Neither is he a collectivist.

Classical Liberalism and the Rule of Law

This essay will focus on Smith's two propositions on justice--actually, on injustice, because, as we will articulate, Smith's justice was defined negatively as the residual set of actions not expressly prohibited. These propositions constitute...