Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue

FAIN: FA-52307-06

Ryan Patrick Hanley
Marquette University (Milwaukee, WI 53233-2225)

Recent scholarship has shown that Adam Smith defended commercial society on the grounds that its material benefits outweigh its moral deficiencies. But less emphasized has been his diagnosis of the ethical ills of market-based societies and the remedy he proposed to cure these deficiencies. My book argues that his normative remedy is to be found in the revisions he made to his "Theory of Moral Sentiments" after publishing the "Wealth of Nations." In particular, his new study of the "character of virtue," I claim, was intended to promote within modernity a recovery of the classical ethical virtues of prudence, magnanimity and beneficence, the virtues that Smith considered threatened by commercial society yet necessary for its ennoblement.

Associated Products

Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Book)
Title: Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue
Author: Ryan Patrick Hanley
Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a renewed debate over the costs at which the benefits of free markets have been bought. This book revisits the moral and political philosophy of Adam Smith, capitalism's founding father, to recover his understanding of the morals of the market age. In so doing it illuminates a crucial albeit overlooked side of Smith's project: his diagnosis of the ethical ills of commercial societies and the remedy he advanced to cure them. Focusing on Smith's analysis of the psychological and social ills endemic to commercial society – anxiety and restlessness, inauthenticity and mediocrity, alienation and individualism – it argues that Smith sought to combat corruption by cultivating the virtues of prudence, magnanimity, and beneficence. The result constitutes a new morality for modernity, at once a synthesis of commercial, classical, and Christian virtues and a normative response to one of the most pressing political problems of Smith's day and ours.
Year: 2009
Primary URL: http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item6037328/Adam%20Smith%20and%20the%20Character%20of%20Virtue/?site_locale=en_US
Primary URL Description: Cambridge UP press site
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780521188234

Prizes

2010 Templeton Enterprise Book Award
Date: 6/1/2010
Organization: Intercollegiate Studies Institute

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