The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [265]
7 The relationship between self-interested behavior and the distribution of material goods is a principal theme of Smith’s economics; in the present context see esp. Wealth of Nations 3.4.
8 Smith’s famous “invisible hand” was invoked by many other writers; Rothschild has noted it in Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Ovid; Force in Defoe, Rollin, and Charles Bonnet; and Hont in Rousseau. To these can be added (among many others), Swift (“To Lady Betty Berkeley”), Montesquieu (Temple of Gnide) and Fénelon (Telemachus). Smith himself only used the term on two other occasions (History of Astronomy 3.2 and Wealth of Nations 4.2.9).
PART IV, CHAPTER II
1 A précis of Hume’s theory of the four sources of virtue—useful to self, useful to others, agreeable to self, and agreeable to others—summarized at Treatise 3.3.1.30 and Enquiry Concerning Morals 9.1-2, and developed at length in Enquiry Concerning Morals 5-8.
2 See Hume, Treatise 2.2.5.17 and Enquiry Concerning Morals 5.1 and n.
3 See 1.1.4 (p. 25).
4 Smith may have had several such defenses in mind, including d’Alembert’s article on “Géométrie” for the Encyclopédie.
5 Compare to the discussion of the role of “a pleasing consciousness of the actual love, merited esteem or approbation of others” at Shaftesbury, Inquiry Concerning Virtue 2.2.1.
6 See 1.1.3 (p. 21).
7 Smith here intervenes in an eighteenth-century debate over the status of the modern virtue of humanity; compare his criticism here (and of the “the soft power of humanity” in 3.3, p. 156) to, e.g., Montesquieu, Considerations on the Romans 15; and Hume, Enquiry Concerning Morals 9.5-6.
8 “Women rarely make donations.”
9 The Mediterranean island of Minorca, a key strategic outpost, was captured by the British in 1708, lost to the French at the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756, returned to the British by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and then recaptured by the French and given to the Spanish in 1783.
10 See Livy 2.5.
PART V, CHAPTER I
1 The question of whether the proportions of classical architecture were founded on nature or on custom was revived in the 1750s in the debates of the philosophical clubs of Edinburgh, as noted in Peter Jones’s introduction to Kames’s Elements of Criticism. Smith here follows the argument of Claude Perrault, the French architect and translator of Vitruvius, who similarly argued that the proportions established by the ancients were arbitrary, but once established could not be altered (see Perrault, A Treatise of the Five Orders in Architecture 2.7).
2 Among “ancient rhetoricians,” Aristotle examines such questions relative to both poetic meter (e.g., Poetics 24) and prose rhythm (Rhetoric 3.8). Smith’s quotation is from a poem by Swift: “The Grand Question Debated . . . ”
3 Quintilian’s text reiterates and defends his earlier judgments on Seneca; see Institutio Oratoria 10.1.125-131.
4 Buffier, Treatise on First Truths 1.13.94.
5 On the complexion and face, see Buffier, Treatise on First Truths 1.13.101-103 (under the marginal note “beauty arbitrary”).
PART V, CHAPTER II
1 Suetonius, Tacitus (Annals 11-14) and Cassius Dio (60-61) are the chief classical sources for the former’s folly and the latter’s wickedness.
2 Smith’s invocations of various national stereotypes here and below reflect an interest typical of Enlightenment political thought, fueled by a boom in travel literature (including the works of Charlevoix and Lafitau cited below) that provided data on which philosophical inquiries into the ways in which institutions and cultural practices shape national character might draw (see, e.g., Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws 19; and Hume, “Of National Characters”).
3 The transition from savagery and barbarism to civilization was a preeminent theme of the historical and political inquiry of the Scottish Enlightenment and forms a crucial component of Smith’s economic inquiry; see esp.