Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue

by Ryan Patrick Hanley

Recent years have witnessed a renewed debate over the costs at which the benefits of free markets have been bought. This book revisits the moral and political philosophy of Adam Smith, capitalism’s founding father, to recover his understanding of the morals of the market age. In so doing it illuminates a crucial albeit overlooked side of Smith’s project: his diagnosis of the ethical ills of commercial societies and the remedy he advanced to cure them. Focusing on Smith’s analysis of the psychological and social ills endemic to commercial society – anxiety and restlessness, inauthenticity and mediocrity, alienation and individualism – it argues that Smith sought to combat corruption by cultivating the virtues of prudence, magnanimity, and beneficence. The result constitutes a new morality for modernity, at once a synthesis of commercial, classical, and Christian virtues and a normative response to one of the most pressing political problems of Smith’s day and ours. Ryan Patrick Hanley is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. His research in the history of political philosophy has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Review of Politics, History of Political Thought, the European Journal of Political Theory, and other academic journals and edited volumes. He is also the editor of the forthcoming Penguin Classics edition of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, featuring an introduction by Amartya Sen, and a co-editor, with Darrin McMahon, of The Enlightenment: Critical Concepts in History.

242 pages, Hardcover

First published June 22, 2009

About the author

Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College, he was the Mellon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, and held visiting appointments or fellowships at Yale, Harvard and the University of Chicago.

He is a specialist on the political philosophy of the Enlightenment period. His books include Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life (Princeton, 2019) and The Political Philosophy of Fénelon (Oxford, 2020).

Reviews

[Joseph Steinberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I would have preferred in Hanley’s account was less of the setup required to prove that we should take Section VI seriously and more of the diagnosis and the remedy. Of course, I missed the chance to read Smith for his argument. Still, more Smith and less academic politics would have convinced anyone why they should plow into dense philosophical text. Dealing with capitalism is a very intimate, pressing issue. A more intimate guide is an interesting prospect.

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[Waseem Naser · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Adam Smith problem for a long time was why he didnt explicitly tackle the question of "wherein does virtue consist?", one of the two questions he begins the TMS with. This book brilliantly paints the way Smith went about tackling it. Refreshing as well was Hanley's approach of explaining it by bringing in Rousseau into the picture.