The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [14]
Helpful collections of essays include Skinner and Wilson, eds., Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford, 1975); Montes and Schliesser, eds., New Voices on Adam Smith (Routledge, 2006); and Haakonssen, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge, 2006). Many key essays have also been republished in John C. Wood, ed., Adam Smith: Critical Assessments, 7 vols. (Routledge, 1983); and Haakonssen, ed., Adam Smith (Ashgate, 1998). The Adam Smith Review of the International Adam Smith Society provides a forum for new scholarship.
RYAN PATRICK HANLEY
A Note on the Text
The Theory of Moral Sentiments was first published in 1759. It was subsequently revised with great care and republished in five additional editions in Smith’s lifetime. The version published here is that of the sixth edition, which appeared in 1790, months before Smith’s death.
The standard scholarly edition of Smith’s works is the Glasgow Edition, published in hardcover by Oxford University Press and in paperback by the Liberty Fund. The Glasgow Edition includes Smith’s Wealth of Nations, as well as student transcriptions of his lectures on jurisprudence and rhetoric, his philosophical essays, and his correspondence. Its edition of TMS, prepared by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, is especially valuable for having established a critical edition of the text and for its inclusion of a comprehensive textual apparatus detailing variations across editions. In an effort to present the most accurate text possible, the construction of the present edition included a thorough comparison of its text to the Glasgow Edition and to the 1790 original. In most instances of disagreement, the present edition incorporates the decisions of the Glasgow editors for the compelling reasons set forth in their notes.
The textual apparatus to the present edition includes a set of biographical notes and a set of textual notes. Historical information can be found in the biographical notes. The textual notes are of four types: definitions of words; citations of authors directly referenced or indirectly appropriated by Smith; references to key prior interventions in selected philosophical debates in which Smith is a participant; and references to parallel passages elsewhere in his corpus. Some notes also indicate the key changes that Smith made to the sixth edition; these do not, however, aspire to replicate the labors of the Glasgow Edition’s editors, and readers interested in tracking these changes are encouraged to consult their thorough documentation of such. In preparing my own notes I have relied chiefly on sources with which Smith was demonstrably familiar on the evidence supplied by the catalogues of his library compiled by James Bonar and Hiroshi Mizuta, and by references elsewhere in his corpus; hence my recurrence to Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language , Hume’s History of England, and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, among other sources ancient and modern that seem to have been prominent in Smith’s mind during the long period in which he composed and revised his work. In all instances notes are meant to be explicatory rather than interpretative.
All readers of Smith owe a tremendous debt to the excellent annotations of several previous editions. In addition to those of Raphael and Macfie, these include those to be found in the editions of Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 2002), of Walther Eckstein (Leipzig, 1926; reissued Felix Meiner, 2004), and of Michaël Biziou, Claude Gautier, and Jean-François Pradeau (Presses Universitaires