This paper presents my initial thoughts for a chapter in The Smithian Mind on Smith’s idea of good citizenship.
Smith is sometimes depicted as a prophet of a depoliticized liberal society, in which ordinary citizens can and even should limit themselves to obeying the laws and following their private interests, as his contemporary James Stewart more explicitly wrote. But Smithian citizenship...
The Wealth of Nations presents a bleak picture of the prospects for well-informed public deliberations in commercial society. This paper reads the book as a work of political pedagogy, in which Smith encourages his readers to recognize themselves as a public and reflect on the diversity of perspectives that might equip them to make better moral and political judgments.
To what extent does Smith think are either free or equal? In this paper, I suggest Smith’s arguments for class hierarchy and ambition in commercial society render individuals socially unequal and psychologically unfree despite his basic commitments to moral equality and certain kinds of equal freedom.
The British eighteenth-century debate about the foundation and limits of political obligation was structured by a fundamental opposition between Lockeanism, on the one hand, and Filmerianism on the other. Hume questioned both the internal coherence of contract theory and, more importantly for my purposes, its compatibility with experience and opinion. The Lockean principle that human beings...
