Adam Smith (1723-1790) is best known today for his pioneering work of economics, The Wealth of Nations (1776). But in fact, he soared to international fame earlier, with The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published on this day in 1759.
It was a sensation. Moralists had struggled for centuries to work out what it was that made some actions morally good and others morally bad. To Clerics, the answer was obvious: The Word of God. And believers relied on the Clerics’ moral authority to explain exactly what that meant.
Sceptics, on the other hand, speculated about whether we had a sixth sense, a ‘moral sense’ like sight or smell, that would guide us towards the good. And there were many other unsatisfactory ideas.
Smith’s breakthrough was to see our moral judgements as part of our social psychology. As social beings, he argued, we have a natural ‘sympathy’ (today we would say ‘empathy’) for others. That empathy prompts us to adjust and moderate our behaviour in ways that please others. That is the basis of our moral judgements and what we understand by virtue.
It also promotes social harmony. Smith was not sure why such socially beneficial behaviour should prevail over any other. He put it down to providence. Today — thanks to Charles Darwin’s The Origin Of Species, published a century after Smith’s book, we would attribute it to evolution.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments became a best seller and it so impressed Charles Townsend, a leading intellectual and government minister, that he promptly hired Smith, on a salary of £300 a year for life, to be tutor to his stepson, the teenage Duke of Buccleuch.
To a Glasgow academic, it was a fortune—and it gave Smith the independence and experience to start writing the work for which he is best remembered today: The Wealth of Nations.
