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Preface by Dr Eamonn Butler, Director of the Adam Smith Institute, London, 2001
Is this Adam Smith's greatest book?
It was not the famous Wealth of Nations, but a work on ethics and human nature called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which made Adam Smith's career. It was the sensation of its age, sold out in weeks. The prominent politician Charles Townshend was "so taken with the performance" (says David Hume) that he hired Smith as tutor to his stepson, the Duke of Buccleuch, and take him on the Grand Tour of Europe...luring Smith away from his professorship at Glasgow with the princely offer of £300 a year for life. Smith had become not just a best-selling author, but a well-off one too.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith asks that most fundamental question: Why do we regard certain actions or intentions with approval and condemn others? At the time, opinion was divided: some held that the only standard of right and wrong was the law and the sovereign who made it; others, that moral principles could be worked out rationally, like the theorems of mathematics.
Smith took a completely new direction, holding that people are born with a moral sense, just as they have inborn ideas of beauty or harmony. Our conscience tells us what is right and wrong: and that is something innate, not something given us by lawmakers or by rational analysis. And to bolster it we also have a natural fellow-feeling, which Smith calls "sympathy". Between them, these natural senses of conscience and sympathy ensure that human beings can and do live together in orderly and beneficial social organizations.
So our morality is the product of our nature, not our reason. And Smith would go on to argue that the same 'invisible hand' created beneficial social patterns out of our economic actions too. The Theory of Moral Sentiments establishes a new liberalism, in which social organization is seen as the outcome of human action but not necessarily of human design. Indeed, our unplanned social order is far more complex and functional than anything we could reason out for ourselves? (a point which Marxist politicians forgot, to their cost).
A prominent politician of the age, James Oswald reported that he "did not know whether he has reaped more instruction or entertainment" from The Theory of Moral Sentiments. So here it is. Open it up. You might well be instructed...but read Smith's elegant prose and you will certainly be entertained.
Excerpts
Even our sympathy with the grief or joy of another, before we are informed of the cause of either, is always extremely imperfect.
General lamentations, which express nothing but the anguish of the sufferer, create rather a curiosity to inquire into his situation, along with some disposition to sympathize with hi, than any actual sympathy that is very sensible.
Of the Pleasure of mutual Sympathy: Nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fewllofeeling with all the emotions of our own breasts; nor are we so much shocked by the appearance of the contrary.
We are still moe anxious to communicate to our friends our disagreeable than our agreeable passions, that we derive still more satisfaction from their sympathy with the former than from that with the latter.
Society and conversation, therefore, are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquility, if at any time, it has unfortunately lost it.
Nothing is so soon forgot as pain. The moment it is gone the whole agony of it is over, and the thought of it can no longer give us any sort of disturbance.
There is, however, this difference between grief and joy, that we are generally most disposed to sympathize with small joys and great sorrows.
The man who, by some sudden revolution of fortune, is lifted up all at once into a condition of life, greatly above whaat he had formerly lived in, may be assured that the congratulations of his best friends are not at all of them perfectly sincere.
An upstart, though of the greatest merit, is generally disagreeable, and a sentiment of envy commonly prevents us from heartly sympathizing with his joy.
Our sympathy with sorrow, though not real, has been more taken notice than our sympathy with joy.
Are you in earnest resolved never to barter your liberty for the lordly servitude of a court, but to live free, fearless and independent?
There seems to be one way to continue in that virtuous resolution; and perhaps but one. Never enter the place from whence so few have been able o return; never come within the circle of ambition; nor ever bring yourself into comparison with thoses masters of the earth who have already engrossed the attention of half mankind before you.
This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition (...)
The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another.
Thus man is by Nature directed to correct, in some measure, that distribution of things which she herself would otherwise have made.
Our imagination, which in pain and sorrow seems to be confined and cooped up within our own persons, in times of ease and prosperity expands itself to every thing around us.
When two objects have frequently been seen together, the imagination acquires a habit of passing easily from the one to the other.
The one we think is awkward when it appears without its usual companion. We miss something which we expected to find, and the habitual arrangement of our ideas is disturbed by the disappointment.
Before we can feel much for others, we must in some measure be at ease ourselves. If our own misery pinches us severly, we have no leisure to attend to that of our neighbour.
We suffer more, it has already been observed, when we fall from a better to a worse situation, than we ever enjoy when we rise from a worse to a better.
The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand wahtever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it.
There is always something dignified in the command of fear, whatever may be the motive upon which it is founded. It is not so with the command of anger.
The great artist always feels the imperfection of his own best works, and is more sensible than any man how much they fall short of that ideal perfection of which he has formed some conception, which he imitates as well as he can, but which he despairs of ever equalling.
It is the inferior artist only, who is ever perfectly satifsfied wih his own performances. He has little conception of this ideal perfection, about which he has little employed his thoughts; and it is chiefly to the works of other artists, of, perhaps, a still lower order, that he deigns to compare his own works.
Nothwithstanding all its groundless pretentions, however, vanity is almost always a sprightly and a gay, and very often a good-natured passion. Pride is always a grave, a sullen, and a severe one. Even the falsehoods of the vain man are all innocent falsehoods, meant to raise himself, not to lower other people.
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