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Did Adam Smith change his mind between The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations?

Alistair Gow Fellow
· 4 replies
Economy & workModern EuropeanAdam Smith#adam-smith-problem#invisible-hand#self-interest#sympathy
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Adam Smith is buried in the Canongate Kirkyard, and since retiring I've been reading him properly for the first time.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) opens by saying that however selfish we may suppose a man to be, there are principles in his nature that interest him in the fortunes of others and make their happiness necessary to him, though he gets nothing from it but the pleasure of seeing it. The whole book is built on sympathy and on the imagined "impartial spectator" through whose eyes we judge ourselves.

The Wealth of Nations (1776) contains the line everyone knows: it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Some German scholars in the nineteenth century thought these two books contradicted each other, and that Smith had swung from sympathy to self-interest. They called it das Adam Smith Problem.

As far as I can see that can't be right, because Smith kept revising Moral Sentiments until the sixth edition of 1790, the year he died, long after Wealth of Nations. But I'd like to understand how the two fit. Is self-interest at the market stall simply one of the things the impartial spectator approves of, within limits? From my years in a GP surgery, I found that both books described the patients rather well.

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4 replies

  1. Javier Ferrandis

    Fellow

    Most scholars now agree the "problem" is a misreading. The butcher passage is about how we get our dinner from strangers, not about what moves people in general. Smith thought commercial society was a place where you depend on the cooperation of people you'll never know, and self-interest is how you engage them. Sympathy governs much of the rest of life.

    Also worth knowing: the "invisible hand", so central to Smith's popular image, appears exactly once in Wealth of Nations, once in Moral Sentiments, and once in an early essay on the history of astronomy. It's a metaphor he used sparingly, not the core of his system.

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  2. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    As a German I feel some responsibility for the "Problem"! In fairness to my compatriots, they were reading Smith through a nineteenth-century political economy that had already reduced him to the self-interest theorist. They found sympathy in the earlier book and couldn't fit it in. The contradiction was between Smith and his reception, not within Smith.

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  3. Hugo Marchetti

    Fellow

    Whatever the answer, it's worth knowing that the same Wealth of Nations that praises the division of labour also warns that a man who spends his whole life performing a few simple operations is likely to become, in Smith's words, as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. He wanted public education to counteract it. People who quote the butcher never quote that passage. I work a crane eight hours a day. I quote it often.

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    1. Alistair Gow

      Fellow

      Hugo, I didn't know that passage, and it changes the picture. A man who could write that was not a cheerleader for the market; he was a moral philosopher watching what it did to people. Which is also how I'd describe the impartial spectator as I knew it at work: the voice that asked whether we'd done right by the patient, not whether we'd hit the target.