Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment

"When I first encountered Griswold’s book in graduate school, it really helped to open my eyes to the sophistication and power and relevance of Smith’s writings, especially The Theory of Moral Sentiments . Griswold’s book is among the first of what has now become a pretty steady of stream of books on Smith by philosophers. During the 20th century there were a number of economists and intellectual historians working on Smith, maybe a political theorist or two here and there, but very, very few philosophers even read Smith, much less devoted serious attention to him. Griswold’s book was one of the big things that helped to change that, to inspire a whole new generation of philosophers and political theorists to take Smith very seriously indeed. I’ve returned to the book again and again. It remains one of the very best, most comprehensive analyses of The Theory of Moral Sentiments that I know of. Griswold not only provides an incredibly rich, careful and rigorous analysis of the text, but also puts Smith in a dialogue of sorts with ancient philosophy, especially Plato, and situates his thought within contemporary debates over the virtues and shortcomings of Enlightenment. There’s just a ton there to chew on. He frames the book around the fact that we’re all, in some respects, children of the Enlightenment. He even says that scarcely anyone would claim a different heritage. We all appreciate what the Enlightenment did, the advent of liberal democracy and market capitalism and religious toleration and all these things that we’ve come to value. But almost nobody accepts the Enlightenment in its totality, either. People find it to be overly universalist, or rationalist, or individualist, or whatever. People—especially academics—describe all kinds of problems with the Enlightenment. So Griswold holds up Smith as an exemplar of somebody who embraces the broad Enlightenment worldview but also himself sees some of the potential pitfalls and dangers associated with it and tries to find ways we might combat those. Just the nuance and subtlety of Smith’s thought alone could help us to show that the Enlightenment wasn’t the simple caricature that it’s sometimes made out to be. Well, many associate the Enlightenment with upheavals like the French Revolution, where you’re just too dogmatically attached to certain principles. You don’t recognise the need for custom and tradition and the sentiments, when you think the whole world can be ruled by reason alone. Yes, that’s right. Hume and Smith see reason as weak and fallible and a thin reed on to which to hang a social order. People are far more likely to be moved by their feelings or passions or emotions. And not just the selfish ones. We’re moved by the whole range of passions. These are the things that we really need to take into account when we’re thinking of what motivates people and how we ought to build our societies."