ADAM SMITH’S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY SOURCES
John A. TAYLOR
PhD, Docent, Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Saint Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia
PhD, Docent, Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Saint Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg, Russia
TERRA ECONOMICUS,
2019, Vol.
17
(no. 3),
Joseph Schumpeter said that Adam Smith was sincere and very influential, but
Schumpeter also said that Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” nevertheless was neither
original nor brilliant. As for moral philosophy, Schumpeter hardly read “The Theory
of Moral Sentiments”. Smith was an Aristotelian and a scholastic, Schumpeter said.
These interpretations of Smith became standard, but were they correct? This paper
argues instead that Smith was brilliant and original because his moral philosophy provided a capstone or crowning argument for seventeenth-century political
economy. This connection of Smith to seventeenth-century sources is not entirely
new of course. Karl Marx already said that “Wealth of Nations” depended largely
on seventeenth-century writers such as Sir William Petty. Yet Marx saw only part
of the picture because he, like Schumpeter later, undervalued Smith’s moral philosophy. Predecessors in seventeenth-century political economy deeply influenced
Smith, true, but he was not a passive recipient of this seventeenth-century influence. Instead, this paper argues, Smith labored to free political economy from its
seventeenth-century reputation for atheism and immorality. Petty and his friend
Thomas Hobbes and many other seventeenth-century practitioners of political
economy had an infamous reputation as being empiricists who were hostile to
moral philosophy in general and to Christian theories of right action in particular.
Smith freed empirical political economy from its reputation for atheism.
Citation: Taylor, J. A. (2019). Adam Smith’s seventeenth-century sources. Terra Economicus, 17(3), 78–88. DOI: 10.23683/2073-6606-2019-17-3-78-88
Keywords:
Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments”; Joseph Schumpeter; Karl Marx; Sir William Petty
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Publisher:
Southern Federal University
Founder: Southern Federal University
ISSN: 2073-6606
Founder: Southern Federal University
ISSN: 2073-6606