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Among his circle of acquaintances were not only remembers of the aristocracy, many connected with the government, but also a range of intellectual and scientific figures that included Joseph Black, a pioneer in the field of chemistry, James Watt, later of steam-engine fame, Robert Foulis, a distinguished printer and publisher and subsequent founder of the first British Academy of Design, and not least, the philosopher David Hume, a lifelong friend whom Smith had met in Edinburgh. Smith was also introduced during these years to the company of the great merchants who were carrying on the colonial trade that had opened to Scotland following its union with England in 1707. One of them, Andrew Cochrane, had been a provost of Glasgow and had founded the famous Political Economy Club. From Cochrane and his fellow merchants Smith undoubtedly acquired the detailed information concerning trade and business that was to give such a sense of the real world to The Wealth of Nations.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
In 1759 Smith Published his first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Didactic, exhortative, and analytic by turns, The Theory lays the psychological foundation on which The Wealth of Nations was later to be built. In it Smith described the principles of “human nature “, which, together with Hume and the other leading philosophers of his time, he took as a universal and unchanging datum from which social institutions, as well as social behaviour, could be deduced.
One question in particular interested Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This was a problem that had attracted Smith’s teacher Hutcheson and a number of Scottish philosophers before him. The question was the source of the ability to form moral judgements, including judgements on one’s own behaviour, in the face of the seemingly overriding passions for self-preservation and self-interest. Smith’s answer, at considerable length, is the presence within each of us of an “inner man” who plays the role of the “impartial spectator”, approving or condemning our own and others’ actions with a voice impossible to disregard. (The theory may sound less naive if the question is reformulated to ask how instinctual drives are socialized through the superego.)
The thesis of the impartial spectator, however, conceals a more important aspect of the book. Smith saw humans as created by their ability to reason and - no less important - by their capacity for sympathy. This duality serves both to pit individuals against one another and to provide them with the rational and moral faculties to create institutions by which the internecine struggle can be mitigated and even turned to the common good. He wrote in his Moral Sentiments the famous observation that he was to repeat later in The Wealth of Nations: that self-seeking men are often “led by an invisible hand . without knowing it , without intending it, to advance the interest of the society.”
It should be noted that scholars have long debated whether Moral Sentiments complemented or was in conflict with The Wealth of Nations, which followed it. At one level there is a seeming clash between the theme of social morality contained in the first and largely amoral explanation of the manner in which individuals are socialized to become the market-oriented and class-bound actors that set the economic system into motion.
Travels on the Continent
The Theory quickly brought Smith wide esteem and in particular attracted the attention of Charles Townshend, himself something of an amateur economist, a considerable wit, and somewhat less of a statesman, whose fate it was to be the chancellor of the exchequer responsible for the measures of taxation that ultimately provoked the American Revolution. Townshend had recently married and was searching for a tutor for his stepson and ward, the young Duke of Buccleuch. Influenced by the strong recommendations of Hume and his own admiration for The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he Approached Smith to take the Charge.
Реферат опубликован: 24/11/2006