Adam Smith’s Cosmopolitan Liberalism
Taste, Political Economy, and Objectification
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6355973 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brianne Wolf (Madison Area Technical College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 709-733 |
| Publication date | 2022-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Polity (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0032-3497 • E-ISSN: 1744-1684 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/721233 |
| OpenAlex | W4293825981 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 26 |
The cosmopolitan character of liberalism has been debated since its beginnings. The status of mercantilism, colonialism, and market relations is central to this debate. While most scholars agree that among eighteenth-century thinkers in the liberal tradition, Adam Smith is remarkably anti-colonial on both moral and economic grounds, they do not engage his theory of taste as part of his normative critique of the mercantilist and colonial projects and argument for free trade. Smith’s theory of taste, largely developed in Theory of Moral Sentiments and History of Astronomy, highlights the importance he placed on connecting with distant others despite the limitations of sympathy. I argue that for Smith, aesthetic judgment acts as an impetus to moral judgment because taste can overcome barriers to sympathy. However, taste has a dual-nature in Smith’s political economy. Bad taste widens the sympathetic gap. I show that the framework of taste in Smith’s moral theory applied to mercantilism and colonization demonstrates that substituting poor aesthetic judgment—love of order instead of true beauty—for sympathy objectifies distant others and prevents them from developing moral judgment through freely engaging in the market and sympathetic interaction
Aesthetics · Economics · Liberalism · Mercantilism · Political economy · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Sociology · Sympathy · Taste · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Political Theory and Influence · Psychology · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Social Psychology
Political Emotions
Civil Passions
Liberalism, Diversity and Domination
Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life
A Short History of Distributive Justice
Liberalism and Empire
History of Political Thought
The Politics of Resentment
Seduced by System
The Capital and the Colonies. London and the Atlantic Economy 1660–1700
Slavery, Sovereignty, and “Inheritable Blood”
Recognizing Resentment
Power versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Spontaneous Disorder in Adam Smith’sTheory of Moral Sentiments
The Carolinian Context of John Locke’s Theory of Slavery
Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery
Sympathy in Space(s)
Adam Smith's Critique of International Trading Companies
The Moralizing Role of Distance in Adam Smith
The Invisible Hand of Jupiter
Spheres of Intimacy and the Adam Smith Problem
Commerce and Conversation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2025 (4) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |