Ryan Patrick Hanley

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13653.html

Invaluable wisdom on living a good life from the founder of modern economics

Adam Smith is best known today as the founder of modern economics, but he was also an uncommonly brilliant philosopher who was especially interested in the perennial question of how to live a good life. Our Great Purpose is a short and illuminating guide to Smith's incomparable wisdom on how to live well, written by one of today's leading Smith scholars.

In this inspiring and entertaining book, Ryan Patrick Hanley describes Smith's vision of "the excellent and praiseworthy character," and draws on the philosopher's writings to show how each of us can go about developing one. For Smith, an excellent character is distinguished by qualities such as prudence, self-command, justice, and benevolence—virtues that have been extolled since antiquity. Yet Smith wrote not for the ancient polis but for the world of market society—our world—which rewards self-interest more than virtue. Hanley shows how Smith set forth a vision of the worthy life that is uniquely suited to us today.

Full of invaluable insights on topics ranging from happiness and moderation to love and friendship, Our Great Purpose enables modern readers to see Smith in an entirely new light—and along the way, learn what it truly means to live a good life.

Ryan Patrick Hanley is professor of political science at Boston College. He is the author of Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue and the editor of Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy (Princeton) and the Penguin Classics edition of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

A number of prominent moral philosophers and political theorists have recently called for a recovery of love. But what do we mean when we speak of love today? Love's Enlightenment examines four key conceptions of other-directedness that transformed the meaning of love and helped to shape the way we understand love today: Hume's theory of humanity, Rousseau's theory of pity, Smith's theory of sympathy, and Kant's theory of love. It argues that these four Enlightenment theories are united by a shared effort to develop a moral psychology that can provide both justificatory and motivational grounds for concern for others in the absence of recourse to theological or transcendental categories. In this sense, each theory represents an effort to redefine the love of others that used to be known as caritas or agape-a redefinition that came with benefits and costs that have yet to be fully appreciated.

Adam Smith (1723–90) is perhaps best known as one of the first champions of the free market and is widely regarded as the founding father of capitalism. From his ideas about the promise and pitfalls of globalization to his steadfast belief in the preservation of human dignity, his work is as relevant today as it was in the eighteenth century. Here, Ryan Hanley brings together some of the world’s finest scholars from across a variety of disciplines to offer new perspectives on Smith’s life, thought, and enduring legacy.

Contributors provide succinct and accessible discussions of Smith’s landmark works and the historical context in which he wrote them, the core concepts of Smith’s social vision, and the lasting impact of Smith’s ideas in both academia and the broader world. They reveal other sides of Smith beyond the familiar portrayal of him as the author of the invisible hand, emphasizing his deep interests in such fields as rhetoric, ethics, and jurisprudence. Smith emerges not just as a champion of free markets but also as a thinker whose unique perspective encompasses broader commitments to virtue, justice, equality, and freedom.

An essential introduction to Adam Smith’s life and work, this incisive and thought-provoking book features contributions from leading figures such as Nicholas Phillipson, Amartya Sen, and John C. Bogle. It demonstrates how Smith’s timeless insights speak to contemporary concerns such as growth in the developing world and the future of free trade, and how his influence extends to fields ranging from literature and philosophy to religion and law.

Thanks to several recent studies, we now understand better than ever the place that virtue has in Smith’s larger economic and political system, the sources on which he drew in developing his theory of virtue, and the ways in which his theory of virtue can contribute to illuminating various debates in contemporary ethical theory. In what follows I touch on each of these themes. My principal goal, however, is to provide a reconstruction of the essential elements of Smith’s theory of virtue in a manner that might be of use to those working on each of these fronts, as well as others.

Scholars of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy today tend to agree that Adam Smith, while deeply indebted to Hume, was also engaged in a comprehensive and creative transformation and extension of certain of Hume’s fundamental concepts. But what exactly did Smith take from Hume, and precisely how did he transform these concepts? This chapter traces Smith’s appropriation and transformation along five fronts: sympathy and humanity, justice and utility, judgment and impartiality, virtue and commercial society, and epistemology and religion. In so doing, it aims to provide a synthetic account of previous scholarship on the Hume–Smith relationship and to supplement these accounts with an examination of several further points of contact that have yet to receive significant attention.

Our understanding of the freedom advanced by the political thinkers of the Enlightenment has long been dominated by two conceptual categories, negative and positive liberty. Yet this convenient dichotomy obscures appreciation of the ways in which these two concepts of liberty can and often do work together. This chapter aims to redress this by examining the conception of freedom set forth by three key Enlightenment thinkers: Adam Smith, Rousseau, and Kant. It argues that their concept of “moral” or “inner” freedom suggests an important way in which positive liberty can promote ends traditionally associated with negative liberty. Specifically, these philosophers regard moral freedom as inextricable from political freedom insofar as moral freedom enables us to shoulder the burdens of political freedom. Thus their concept of freedom offers good reasons not only to question the separation between positive and negative freedom, but to regard moral freedom as indispensable to political freedom.

Smith scholars have become interested of late in his thoughts on religion, and particularly the question of the degree to which Smith’s understanding of religion was indebted to the influence of his close friend Hume. Until now this debate has largely focused on three elements of Smith’s religious thought: his personal beliefs, his conception of natural religion, and his treatment of revealed religion. Yet largely unexplored has been one of the most important elements of Smith’s thinking about religion: namely his treatment of ‘the natural principles of religion’ in TMS 3.5. What follows aims to reconstruct this treatment and thereby shed light on what Smith might have meant by ‘the natural principles of religion’, and how he understood the relationship of religion and morality more generally – an
understanding, it is argued, that significantly differs from Hume’s, and reveals Smith to have been a critic of Hume’s vision of the relationship of religion to morality, for all their agreements on other fronts.

Adam Smith has long been celebrated as a polymath, and his wide interests in and contributions to each of the discrete component fields of PPE have long been appreciated. Yet Smith deserves the attention of practitioners of PPE today not simply for his substantive insights, but for the ways in which his inquiries into these different fields were
connected. Smith’s inquiry was distinguished by a synthetic approach to knowledge generation, and specifically to generating knowledge with applications exportable to other fields. Further, Smith’s investigations of various areas of study led him to recognize patterns in and across these fields, and his sensitivity to such patterns helped guide his inquiry and
render it a connected enterprise. This paper examines several of Smith’s discrete inquiries in the history of astronomy, language, moral philosophy, and political economy, to show how he employed the techniques of pattern detection that he practiced in each of these inquiries to the task of generating new insights into new fields of inquiry. In so doing,
Smith not only distinguished himself as an early practitioner of what we today identify with PPE, but he also provides a useful point of reference for those doing PPE today.

That Kant owed much to Rousseau has long been known. Yet some of
Kant’s most significant debts to Rousseau still await appreciation. This paper offers an examination of two key understudied writings from the 1760s in order to provide a more comprehensive account of Kant’s debts to Rousseau. In focusing on these texts, it particularly aims to supplement the existing accounts of Kant’s debts to Rousseau which have largely focused on concepts of human dignity and human equality or on concepts of gender and gender relations, and to demonstrate the degree to which Kant read Rousseau as a theorist of epistemic development. In so doing it offers a reconsideration of Kant’s own philosophical development, and a
reconsideration of the philosophical significance of Rousseau’s epistemology.

Kant's views on sex and marriage deserve the renewed attention of political scientists for three reasons. First, Kant's theory of marriage was shaped by his engagement with Rousseau's political thought and especially his Social Contract—a key if unappreciated side of his engagement with Rousseau. Second, Kant's application of Rousseau's political theory to marriage suggests an egalitarian view of marriage's nature and function that helpfully illuminates marriage's role in a liberal society of free and equal persons. Third, in appropriating Rousseau's egalitarianism for his theory of marriage, Kant transfers his foundational concern with equality from the public to the private sphere: a move that suggests liberal political institutions require more than mere commitment to procedural neutrality for their perpetuation but require also a commitment to equality best cultivated by certain types of private associations and personal relationships.

Marquette University Adam Smith's engagement with China and Tartary is a central yet underappreciated element of his economic and political thought. This article reconstructs this engagement and demonstrates its broader significance, arguing that it focuses on three themes: the economic institutions that promote domestic growth in a manner that alleviates the material conditions of the poorest, the social and political conditions that minimize the dependence of the poor on the wealthy, and the ethical values and civic institutions that guarantee the existential survival of the state. This treatment is significant for three reasons: It offers useful insight into the contested issue of Smith's conception of legitimate state action; it clarifies Smith's vision of a commercial order that promotes human dignity; and it reveals the depth of his participation in a specific contextual debate.

Rousseau is famous as an advocate of the politics of “denaturing.” But attention to his conception of the “science of the legislator,” as developed in the Geneva Manuscript and his writings on Poland and Corsica, reveals a more moderate approach to statecraft. Here Rousseau claims that legislative science requires tempering commitment to principles of political right with sensitivity to actual political conditions—a claim that importantly and unexpectedly parallels the better known account of the science of the legislator developed by Adam Smith. In comparing these conceptions, this article draws three conclusions: first, Smith's and Rousseau's shared moderation reveals their common commitment to accommodating the passions and prejudices of modernity; second, their fundamental difference concerns not practical legislative methods but rather differing conceptions of natural justice and political right; and finally, their prudential approach to legislation helps clarify the specific types of “moderation” and “intelligence” required of contemporary nation builders.