Mutual Sympathy and the Moral Economy: Adam Smith Reviews Rousseau

Abstract

Contemporary concerns with the prospects for capitalism and its potentially deleterious effects are an episode in an ongoing debate over commercial society going back nearly three centuries. Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were leading figures on opposed sides in the eighteenth-century debate, and yet scholars have recently highlighted the remarkably similar way Smith and Rousseau both diagnose the potential psychological, moral, and economic ills of commercial society. Why, then, does Smith advocate commercial society, while Rousseau opposes it? We argue that Smith’s divergence from Rousseau is decisively based on his distinct account of human psychology. Specifically, we demonstrate that Smith’s theory of mutual sympathy differs from Rousseau’s understanding of pity (pitié) such that Smith is led to be cautiously optimistic about the potential for positive-sum moral, social, and economic interactions among individuals, or what we term the “moral economy.”

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