Speakers
Description
Carl Schmitt famously argued that politics is grounded in the friend-enemy distinction. In doing so, he was building upon a Hobbesian legacy that frames (the potential for) conflict and enmity as the primordial conditions of human association. In this tradition, political society is primarily a safeguard, a necessary construct where humans gather to protect themselves from one another, leaving limited room for positive social bonds.
Adam Smith expounds a profoundly different picture of human association. In Smith's view, the natural state of human interaction is not one of strife or antagonism but rather one of largely peaceful connections, supported by “fellow-feeling”. It is sympathy – an innate responsiveness to others’ emotions – that grounds social cohesion and drives moral order.
This view places Smith within a classical tradition that can be traced back to Aristotle, in which civic friendship – a collective goodwill rooted in shared virtues and aligned moral objectives – rather than enmity, is seen as the ontological foundation of political life.
Central to both thinkers is the notion that human sociability emerges through our capacity for communication. Aristotle famously argues that humans are distinctively political animals precisely because we are speaking animals. Politics is inherently rooted in this communicative capacity. Similarly, Smith believes that communication is born out of an inherent desire to connect emotionally with others: sympathy, the capacity to “change places in fancy” with others, enabling us to feel a “fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.” This shared emotional resonance serves as the bedrock of social cohesion and moral understanding, fostering not only instrumental bonds but genuine human connection.
Smith’s perspective stands in opposition to early liberal thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, who foreground self-interest and rivalry. Instead, his stress on sympathy as the cornerstone of human society aligns him closely with classical political thought, where politics is seen not merely as a contract for survival but as a social enterprise rooted in shared human sociality.
We thus argue that Smith’s emphasis on sympathy as the basis of human society offers a distinctive bridge between classical notions of community and early liberal thought, offering an alternative to the conflict-centred views that came to define much of early modern political theory.
| Organization | University of St Andrews |
|---|
