Adam Smith' Sentimentos morais

Adam Smith, Communitarian

Adam Smith’s Pluralism, Jack Russell Weinstein, Yale University Press, 341 pages

Legend has it that at the age of four, Adam Smith was kidnapped from his Scottish home by a traveling band of gypsies. A gentleman passing the gypsies on the road noticed the crying baby and alerted town officials, who rescued young Adam hours later. Of this near tragedy, Smith’s 19th-century biographer John Rae sardonically commented that it was very fortunate because Smith “would have made … a poor gipsy.”
This story is where Jack Russell Weinstein begins a fascinating examination of Smith’s moral philosophy. He is convinced that in a way Smith’s philosophy continues to be held hostage by political pundits and intellectuals on the right and the left. In his academically rich study, Weinstein argues that the significance of Smith’s sweeping exploration of human virtue has been eclipsed by countless oversimplified readings of his economics. Weinstein believes, however, that in the modern world of diversity and multiculturalism it is Smith’s moral philosophy that we need more than his economics.
Ever since 1776, the first year of its publication, The Wealth of Nations has proved more popular than Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith’s emphasis on free markets, his colorful metaphors like the invisible hand, and his farsighted expectations for the industrial revolution have made Wealth of Nations essential reading in our market-based, technologically-driven world.
This favoritism for Wealth of Nations has made Smith a “widely misunderstood” thinker, according to Weinstein. Smith is too often positioned as the godfather of “unfettered markets, libertarian governments, interactions solely for the purpose of satisfaction, and atomistic cosmopolitanism.” What has been lost is Smith’s “clarion call for personal relationships” as the basis for human society and his advocacy for a functioning pluralism—though Smith did not use the term—that is at the heart of Theory of Moral Sentiments.
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