Interlude: The What and the How of TMS VI

Ryan Patrick Hanley

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511581212.005

3 - Interlude: The What and the How of TMS VI

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 November 2009

Ryan Patrick Hanley

Show author details

Ryan Patrick Hanley: Affiliation:
Marquette University, Wisconsin

Book contents

Get access

Summary

THE WHAT: SMITH'S “PRACTICAL SYSTEM OF MORALITY”

To this point our focus has been diagnostic; our aim, that is, has been to identify the two principal ills, one political and the other philosophical, that con-cerned Smith with regard to the question of virtue. Now we must turn from the diagnostic to the therapeutic. Smith's study of the character of virtue in TMS VI seeks to propose remedies for both the political problem of commercial corruption and the corruption of modern ethics. To appreciate these proposed remedies, it is necessary to examine briefly the context and intentions of the sixth edition revisions.

TMS VI is the longest of the five major revisions and additions to which Smith calls his readers' attention in the Advertisement prefaced to the 1790 publication of the sixth edition (see TMS Advertisement.1). Yet scholars have reached differing assessments of the significance and sophistication of these revisions. The least charitable view holds that the sixth edition revisions are the pointless pottering of an “elderly and unwell” Smith who wrote in an elliptical style even in his prime (a view that seems to vindicate Smith's own claim that “very little can be either expected or hoped from the old man” (TMS VI.ii.1.3)). Others have argued that the sixth edition merely brings into even greater relief claims already present, if less developed, in earlier editions.

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue , pp. 82 - 99

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511581212.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Hollander, Jacob et al., Adam Smith, 1776–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 138Google Scholar

Griswold, , “On the Incompleteness of Adam Smith's System,” Adam Smith Review 2 (2006): 181–86Google Scholar

Ross, Ian S., “Reply to Charles Griswold: ‘On the Incompleteness of Adam Smith's System’,” Adam Smith Review 2 (2006): 187–91Google Scholar

Harkin, Maureen, “Adam Smith's Missing History: Primitives, Progress, and Problems of Genre,” English Literary History 72 (2005): 429–51CrossRef Google Scholar

Dickey, Laurence, “Historicizing the ‘Adam Smith Problem’: Conceptual, Historiographical, and Textual Issues,” Journal of Modern History 58 (1986)CrossRef Google Scholar

Scott, , Adam Smith as Student and Professor (Glasgow: Jackson, Son and Co., 1937), 79Google Scholar

Devine, T. M., “The Urban Crisis,” in Glasgow, ed. Devine, T. M. and Jackson, Gordon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), vol. 1, pp. 402–16Google Scholar

France, Peter, “Rousseau, Adam Smith and the Education of the Self,” in Moy Qui Me Voy, ed. Craig, George and McGowan, Margaret (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 40–41, 49Google Scholar

McKenna, Stephen J., Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006)Google Scholar

Kalyvas, Andreas and Katznelson, Ira, “The Rhetoric of the Market: Adam Smith on Recognition, Speech, and Exchange,” Review of Politics 63 (2001): 549–78CrossRef Google Scholar

“Adam Smith and the Virtues,” Adam Smith Review 2 (2006): 245

MacIntyre, , Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), esp. 328–29Google Scholar

Sherman, Nancy, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle's Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 13ff.Google Scholar

Kelly, Christopher, “‘To Persuade Without Convincing’: The Language of Rousseau's Legislator,” American Journal of Political Science 31 (1987): 321–35CrossRef Google Scholar

Thomism and Aristotelianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 79–80

Tessitore, , Reading Aristotle's Ethics: Virtue, Rhetoric, and Political Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), esp. 19Google Scholar

Lerner, , “Love of Fame and the Constitution of Liberty,” in Geschichte und Recht: Festschrift für Gerald Stourzh zum 70 Geburtstag, ed. Angerer, T. et al. (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1999), 65Google Scholar

The Individual in Society (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), 54, 72

Morrow, Glenn R., The Ethical and Economic Theories of Adam Smith (New York: Longmans, Green, 1923), 51Google Scholar

Fitzgibbons, Athol, Adam Smith's System of Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue: The Moral and Political Foundations of The Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 104–6Google Scholar

Adams, Robert Merrihew, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 95–111CrossRef Google Scholar

Kraut, Richard, What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 48–57CrossRef Google Scholar

Prieto, Jimena Hurtado, “The Risks of an Economic Agent: A Rousseauian Reading of Adam Smith,” Columbian Economic Journal 1 (2003): 217Google Scholar

“Bernard Mandeville's Heir: Adam Smith or Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Possibility of Economic Analysis,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 11 (2004): 1CrossRef

Hume, , “Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene F. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 86Google Scholar