Rethinking Das Adam Smith Problem

Bibliographic Data

ID10067339
AuthorsRichard F Teichgraeber (Tulane University, corresponding author), Richard Teichgraeber
Year1981
Volume20
Issue2
Pages106-123
Publication date1981-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of British Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1086/385775
OpenAlexW2027431621
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited18

During the last decade, there has been a steady growth in scholarship concerning the moral and philosophical dimensions of Adam Smith's economic theory. The reasons are various: a determination to take Smith out of the dark shadow cast on him by Karl Marx, the perceived intellectual impoverishment of socialism, and an historical concern for tracing the peculiarly Scottish dimensions of the Wealth of Nations (1776). This renewed interest in Smith appears to be more than a sudden intellectual fashion. The now completed publication of the “Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith” provides the basis for the work of systematically reconstructing Smith's intellectual career. Most students of Smith would agree that at the moment this work of reconstruction has just begun. One of the curious features of recent Adam Smith scholarship has been its perfunctory treatment of “ das Adam Smith Problem ,” a problem that once seemed at the very center of understanding the moral and philosophical dimensions of Smith's work. In the last decades of the nineteenth century a group of German scholars coined that phrase to describe what they saw as a possibly fundamental break between the assumptions that guided Smith's first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and those that supported the economic theory of his later work, the Wealth of Nations . On the one hand, Smith's explanation of moral judgment was based upon the psychological principle of “sympathy,” a capacity inherent in every individual which allows a person to “enter into” the situation of another and thereby bring his own “sentiments” into accord with those of his fellow

Adam smith · Economics · Epistemology · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Sympathy · Economic Theory and Institutions · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychology · Social Psychology

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