Adam Smith & Moral Sentiments.

 

Adam Smith was not an economist. He was a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University. 

I have read his Wealth of Nations and I am currently reading his book 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments'. He mentions the "invisible hand" just once in Wealth of Nations and once in Moral Sentiments. Smith never used the term "capitalism" and he was in favour of free education and poverty relief. He was deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might remain in an otherwise successful market economy. He believed the purpose of political economy was to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply a state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public service.

Smith believed that man can subsist only in society and that all members of human society, stand in need of each other's assistance and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. In Moral Sentiments, Smith says:

"This disposition to admire and almost worship the rich and powerful, and to despise, of, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments..."

Although Adam Smith saw that people pursuing their own self-interest did produce a beneficial outcome for society that was not their intent, he would have recognised that a society made up of an aggregate of self-interested egoists, is no society at all. 

Society works as well as it does, because we co-operate and are not necessarily just interested in our own self-interest. If we were all self-interested individuals, we wouldn't have life boat crews or the Samaritans. 

Many people who cite or quote Adam Smith are highly selective in what they choose to quote and what they choose to leave out. Some of the things that Adam Smith says do not fit in with the neo-liberal capitalist narrative.