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Mar 13, 2026
Adam Smith Is Still the GOAT After 250 Years
By Clive Crook
March 12, 2026 at 3:30 AM PDT
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This reading completely misunderstands Smith’s thinking, as the economist Ronald Coase explained 50 years ago. (His article “Adam Smith’s View of Man” is the best short thing to read on this.) In the same paragraph as that tiresomely familiar quotation, Smith also observed, “In civilized society [man] stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.” This is the puzzle that fascinates him throughout. For cooperation at a distance, benevolence (an admirable sentiment) can’t be expected, much less relied on; self-interest (deplorable in excess) is necessary.
Smith applies this thinking consistently to governments as well as to buyers and sellers – yet another contradiction of the modern caricature. He sees that rulers are also self-interested. They have the same motives as the rest of us and, crucially, face fewer constraints. He questions government interventions not because he wants private self-interest to prevail unhindered, but because he’s alert to the depredations of self-interested kings and ministers. He isn’t preaching self-love. He’s saying that self-love is a fact of human nature – a necessary evil, part of what makes commercial society work, and something that must be kept within bounds.
The Wealth of Nations, mainly concerned with cooperation at a distance, is appropriately preoccupied with self-interest and incentives, more than with benevolence. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is mainly concerned with the norms and intuitions that guide people in their relationships with families, friends, neighbors and fellow citizens, where benevolence and related sentiments, such as affection, loyalty and sympathy, figure more prominently. But again Smith applies the same basic framework: He sees self-love and benevolence intermingling and acting together. As he illustrates at length, our benevolent instincts often serve our interests, as when they promote trust (which successful commerce requires) or burnish our status, reputation or self-esteem.
As you’d expect, this framing gives rise to another line of criticism: Smith’s view of human nature, not just of commercial society, is mean and dispiriting. He isn’t content to argue that society is and should be ruled by selfishness; he also thinks that true benevolence doesn’t exist, regarding this sentiment as either fraud or self-deception.
Again, this critique is wrong. There’s such a thing as genuine benevolence, Smith believed, and it’s admirable; sometimes, it also rewards the benevolent, which is good, because it encourages benevolence. There’s no contradiction. Indeed, this understanding of benevolence and self-interest interacting in ways that, according to circumstances, moderate or reinforce each other – in turn helping commercial society to flourish – points ineluctably to adaptation and natural selection. Smith’s “science of man” anticipates Darwin.
Maybe we often misunderstand Smith’s project of morals and markets because he was more concerned with seeing and understanding how societies work than in advocating any particular course of action. His recommendations are well known, and the classical liberals he inspired (an endangered species, sadly) advocate them still: liberty, rule of law, limited government, competition, free trade. Yet he had little time for theoretical abstraction and delighted above all in observing and disentangling unforeseen or unintended consequences. As a result he ranged far beyond economics, as it’s now understood, through moral and political philosophy, sociology, and social psychology. He was driven by curiosity more than conviction.
This is why the charge of market fundamentalism is risible. First and foremost, Smith was a pragmatist: He saw that commercial society worked, and applied his open mind to asking why. After 250 years, his answers are still enlightening.
Editor: A long quotation from Charlotte Brown’s review of D. D. Raphael’s ‘The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-impartial-spectator-adam-smith-s-moral-philosophy/
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Raphael’s discussion of the way Smith develops the idea of an impartial spectator to explain how we morally judge ourselves is as elegant as it is economical. His discussion spans several chapters, which include a critical appraisal of Smith’s theory of conscience and an examination of Smith’s account of moral rules and the virtues; but his chapter, “The Impartial Spectator,” is the central one. Here Raphael is especially careful to detail Smith’s revisions.
Raphael prefaces this discussion with a brief chapter on the role of the ‘spectator’ in Hutcheson’s and Hume’s moral theories. On his reading, Smith follows his predecessors in grounding moral judgments in the feelings of a spectator, attempting, as they did, to capture the disinterestedness of the moral sentiments of approval and disapproval. According to Raphael, Hutcheson’s and Hume’s idea of a spectator is that of a stranger — someone who is “indifferent in the sense of not being an interested party.” (34) All three philosophers aim to provide an empirical account of the moral sentiments.
Hutcheson was the first to insist that our approval of someone else’s actions can be disinterested, “uninfluenced by any thought of benefit to oneself.” (28) He claims that we possess a special moral sense, in addition to our other senses, that disposes us to feel approval or disapproval when we survey people’s character traits and actions. Hume’s contribution is that he saw the need to explain our capacity to approve and disapprove. He traces it to sympathy: we sympathize with the person herself and everyone with whom she interacts. We judge her character traits and actions expressive of them to be virtuous or vicious in terms of whether they are good or bad for everyone affected. Raphael thinks that the idea of an impartial spectator is present in Hume, although not the term.
On Raphael’s reading of Smith, he only needs the simpler idea of a spectator as “not being an interested party” to explain moral judgments we make about others. His originality and lasting contribution lie in his account of how we come to judge ourselves: how we acquire conscience, how it operates, and how it becomes authoritative.
There are two central features of Smith’s explanation of conscience, both of which were present at all stages in the development of his theory. One is that conscience is a social product, a “mirror of social feeling.” The other is that an agent is able to judge herself only by imagining what an impartial spectator would approve or disapprove of in her conduct.
Smith first stresses the impartiality of the reactions of spectators in his discussion of the virtue of self-command: when an agent tries to moderate his passions to the point where a spectator can sympathize. The virtue of self-command is essential to our being able to see ourselves as others do. Conscience originally springs from our “social experience” of being judged by others and being spectators who judge others. We have a natural desire to be loved and we dread blame. Because we love praise and hate blame, we learn to see our conduct through the eyes of others. We come to approve or disapprove of ourselves by imagining how spectators would judge us.
Raphael argues that Smith increasingly came to trust “imagination more and society less.” (38) One reason is that he was bothered by an objection that Sir Gilbert Elliott raised after TMS first appeared: if conscience is merely a reflection of actual spectators’ social attitudes, how would judgments of conscience differ from those of actual spectators?
However, even in the first edition, Smith’s spectator isn’t an actual bystander, but one we imagine. In the 2nd and 6th editions, Smith stresses even more that the spectator is a creation of imagination. Self-examination requires an ability to divide ourselves:
Whenever I endeavor to examine my own conduct … I divide myself as it were into two persons: and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of. The first is the spectator… The second is the agent… (TMS III. 1.6)
I become a judge of my own conduct by imagining what I would feel if I were a spectator of my own behavior. I then compare these feelings with the feelings that I as an agent actually have.
This leads to Smith’s famous idea of an internal, impartial spectator — “the man within.” Although conscience is initially a product of the approval and disapproval of others, Smith retains the traditional idea that “the voice of conscience represents the voice of God.” As a superior tribunal, it may conflict with the judgments of actual spectators. How does conscience gain its independence and become a higher authority?
Once we are capable of judging ourselves, we make a new distinction between being praised and being praiseworthy, being blamed and being blameworthy. We want not only praise, but to be praiseworthy; we dread not only blame, but to be blameworthy. Actual spectators may be partial and ill informed, but we are able to view ourselves without partiality or misunderstanding. I may gain the approval of others, for example, by pretending to be virtuous. But since I am able to judge what others would think of me, if they knew everything and were impartial, I realize that I do not merit praise. Not only may the judgments of the internal, impartial spectator differ from those of actual spectators, conscience comes to represent a higher tribunal. Smith eventually saw that being “flattered by the praise of society,” while ignoring the superior verdicts of conscience, is a sign of vanity.
At one point, Raphael remarks that a spectator theory is able to explain more easily third-person judgments, and also second-person judgments, but is “apt to be in difficulties with judgments made in the first person (about ‘me’ or ‘us’).” (31) But, on his view, what is original and enduring in Smith’s thought is his explanation of our capacity to judge ourselves from the point of view of an impartial spectator. He also notes that a spectator theory is “more comfortable with passing verdicts on what has been done in the past than with considering and deciding what should be done in the future.” (31) Does Raphael think that Smith is able to explain how we go from being a spectator of our own conduct to being a moral agent who tries to live up to her own ideals of conduct? In the moment of action, we may not be able to view ourselves impartially. But doesn’t the importance of the internal, impartial spectator lie in the fact that the spectator is the person to whom we, as agents, try to conform our conduct, thereby becoming worthy of love and praise? Raphael says that, according to Smith, an agent who attains a high degree of self-command can “identify himself with the imagined spectator to the extent of obliterating the natural feelings of self-regard.” (41)
Raphael maintains that Smith’s psychological and sociological explanation of conscience also shows that judgments of conscience possess a kind of authority or normativity. Does he think that Smith is able to show that they are authentically normative — answering a justificatory question about why we ought to approve as an impartial and well-informed conscience would? Or does he think that Smith is answering a question in “moral anthropology” — explaining why we are inclined to think that the judgments of conscience are normative?
Interestingly, Hume sketches a process that is similar in some ways to Smith’s account of conscience. According to Hume, sympathy ensures that we will catch the moral feelings other people have about us. Since we care deeply about what others think about us, our internalization of the praise and blame of others has the effect of making us see ourselves as others see us, valuing ourselves as others value us. Sympathy thus pressures us to survey ourselves as we appear to others. Hume says that sympathy may even go so far as to make us disapprove of our own vices, even though they benefit us.
Anyone interested in Adam Smith’s moral philosophy or in 17thand 18thcentury British moral philosophy will find Raphael’sTheImpartial Spectatora stimulating book.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-impartial-spectator-adam-smith-s-moral-philosophy/
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