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de France, 1999). Their notes have proven to be the inevitable and indispensible foundation for many of my own, and I wish particularly to record my great appreciation for and reliance on the careful work of Eckstein as well as Raphael and Macfie in documenting Smith’s changes across editions, for Haakonssen’s and the French editors’ references to parallel passages in Smith’s corpus and especially his jurisprudence lectures, and for the French editors’ comprehensive efforts at documenting Smith’s eighteenth-century philosophical context. To spare readers from having to witness the pedantic quarrels of editor with editor, I have not registered my own agreements and disagreements with their annotations in individual notes, but these agreements, as well as those several instances where I have added to or felt compelled to depart from their judgments, will be evident to any who compare my annotations to theirs. I’m also pleased to record here my debts to Igor Borba, Patty Rodda, Ethan Bercot, and Alan Kellner for their invaluable assistance, and to Leon Montes, Eric Schliesser, and Doug Den Uyl for their many helpful comments.

Preparing this edition has taught me a great deal, and only further increased my admiration for and interest in Smith. Readers of this work are always very welcome to contact me if I can be of any assistance in contributing to their own study of his work: ryan.hanley@marquette.edu.

RYAN PATRICK HANLEY

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Facsimile title page of the first edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments

ADVERTISEMENT

Since the first publication of THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS, which was so long ago as the beginning of the year 1759, several corrections, and a good many illustrations of the doctrines contained in it, have occurred to me. But the various occupations in which the different accidents of my life necessarily involved me, have till now prevented me from revising this work with the care and attention which I always intended.1 The reader will find the principal alterations which I have made in this New Edition, in the last Chapter of the third Section of Part First; and in the four first Chapters of Part Third. Part Sixth, as it stands in this New Edition, is altogether new. In Part Seventh, I have brought together the greater part of the different passages concerning the Stoical Philosophy, which, in the former Editions, had been scattered about in different parts of the work. I have likewise endeavoured to explain more fully, and examine more distinctly, some of the doctrines of that famous sect. In the fourth and last Section of the same Part, I have thrown together a few additional observations concerning the duty and principle of veracity. There are, besides, in other parts of the work, a few other alterations and corrections of no great moment.

In the last paragraph of the first Edition of the present work, I said, that I should in another discourse endeavour to give an account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions which they had undergone in the different ages and periods of society; not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else is the object of law. In the Enquiry concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, I have partly executed this promise; at least so far as concerns police, revenue, and arms. What remains, the theory of jurisprudence, which I have long projected, I have hitherto been hindered from executing, by the same occupations which had till now prevented me from revising the present work.2 Though my very advanced age leaves me, I acknowledge, very little expectation of ever being able to execute this great work to my own satisfaction; yet, as I have not altogether abandoned the design, and as I wish still to continue under the obligation of doing what I can, I have allowed the paragraph to remain as it was published more than thirty years ago, when I entertained no doubt of being able to execute every thing which it announced.3

PART I.