Early forerunners of political economy, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, worked largely within a paradigm shaped by Machiavelli’s approach to politics. Setting aside the customary constraints of Judeo-Christian morality, this Machiavellian approach was more like an expansion and normalization of the old Roman dictum salus populi, suprema lex—the salvation of the people is the...
This paper uses Smith’s corpus to explore the role that idealizations play in providing us with normative leverage on our practices. In particular, it is interested in whether a general account can be provided of why some degree of idealization seems needed to get leverage on our practices, while too much idealization seems to diminish the weight or significance of our normative assessments....
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...
