The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [276]
14 Cicero’s inquiry of the relationship of the right to the expedient concludes with his pronouncements on a series of practical examples; see, e.g., De officiis 3.89-116, which also encompasses the discussion of promise-keeping referenced by Smith above.
15 Cicero describes justice in terms of obligation and benefit in De of ficiis 1.20-41 and 3.40-49; Aristotle describes justice as a mean in Nicomachean Ethics 5.
16 Smith further develops this distinction in Jurisprudence A 1.1-4 and 6.1-2 and B 5 and 203.
17 Smith has in mind Rights of War and Peace, whose point of departure is the insufficiency of the attempts of Aristotle to define justice in terms of a mean; see his Preliminary Discourse 43-45.
CONSIDERATIONS
1 The Considerations was first published in 1761 in The Philological Miscellany, a London periodical. Smith subsequently instructed his publisher to append it to TMS. Its first appearance in TMS came in the third edition of 1767, and it was included in all following editions of TMS published in Smith’s lifetime, including the sixth edition of 1790, whose version is reprinted here. Despite Smith’s solicitude for the piece, it has rarely been reprinted in modern editions of TMS, and has only recently begun to garner the scholarly attention it deserves; helpful treatments include Christopher Berry in Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974); James Otteson in Smith’s Marketplace of Life, ch. 7; and Marcelo Dascal in Cambridge Companion to Smith, ch. 3.
2 Smith’s essay is an intervention in an eighteenth-century debate over the origin of languages; central participants included Condillac (Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 1746); Rousseau (Discourse on Inequality, 1755; and Essay on the Origin of Languages, published posthumously); and Monboddo (Of the Origin and Progress of Languages , 1773). Smith’s own treatment focuses as much on the progress and development of language and its relationship to the progress of the mind as on language’s origin, as has been noted (see esp. Dascal’s comparison of Smith to Condillac in the Cambridge Companion, pp. 84-85). Smith’s treatment here is also in keeping with his focus elsewhere on the stages and conditions of social development (see e.g. Jurisprudence A 1.27-35 and 5.2 above).
3 Smith’s reference is presumably to vol. 1 of the two-volume 1760 “Amsterdam” edition of Rousseau’s works; pp. 376-77 thus refer to what is in modern editions paragraph 29-30 of Part 1 of the Discourse on Inequality. Throughout the Considerations Smith engages several of the claims Rousseau sets forth in Discourse on Inequality 1.25-32 and notes 13-14, and particularly Rousseau’s claims regarding “abstraction” and “metaphysics.”
4 In a contemporary letter (to George Baird, 7 February 1763), Smith volunteered that he was indebted to two works for his principal “instruction” in and “entertainment” on grammatical topics: Abbé Girard, The True Principles of the French Language (1747), and the grammatical articles of the Encyclopédie (of which vols. 1-7 had appeared between 1751 and 1757; the remaining vols. 8-17 were not published until 1765). Each work’s prominently advertised aspirations to provide “systematic” treatments of its topics (see esp. Girard’s “Preface”) would likely have appealed to Smith, and their treatments of several topics, including the parts of speech, are likely to have been in his mind during the composition of this opening section of the Considerations. The tree example is likely drawn from Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality 1.30.
5 The elaboration of the specific qualities perceived by each of the senses is a key theme of Smith’s essay on the “External Senses”; see e.g. 13-17.
6 Smith’s discussion here of the derivation of general rules from generalized actual practices recalls his parallel discussion in TMS 7.3.2 above. It also parallels several treatments in Wealth of Nations, as has been noted;