Speaker
Description
This paper is concerned to explore the different ways in which time and history operate within Smith’s works. It begins by setting Smith in his own temporal context by examining the wider debates stimulated by his close friend Jospeh Hutton’s arguments about the age of the Earth. It then examines the ways in which Smith deploys two ‘voices’ or two registers across his works from the early essays on philosophy through to the Wealth of Nations. These two voices reflect not just Smith’s particular intellectual influences, but also some of the key elements and tensions within Enlightenment thought more generally. In one voice Smith worked historically and empirically tracing the ways in which processes of philosophical, moral and economic progress played out over time. It is this that provides Smith’s works with some of their richness, but it could generate difficulties, as pursued to its logical conclusion this historicization threatened the secure grounds for judgments about morality and progress. Smith avoided this by also working in another voice that found grounds for judgment outside of history. In these two voices Smith was thinking both in and out of time. The paper argues not that Smith was ‘inconsistent’, but that the tensions we find in his thinking remain of considerable importance, not just for understanding Smith, but more generally for the temporalities of liberal thinking today.
| Organization | Queen Mary University London |
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