Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, first edition title page, 1759. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Penguin Classics
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
The book Smith thought was his important one.
$18.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Adam Smith
- Publisher
- Penguin Classics
- Published
- January 2009
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Paperback
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
Sympathy Came Before the Market
Seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith published this account of how morality actually works, and he is said to have thought it the better book. Its engine is sympathy, our capacity to enter one another's feelings, and its governor is the impartial spectator, the imagined fair observer whose approval we learn to seek over the crowd's. Conscience, in Smith's account, is social experience turned inward.
First published in 1759 while he held the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow, the book was revised by Smith through six editions, the last completed in 1790, the year he died. Read beside its famous sibling it corrects a caricature; the theorist of self-interest built his whole system on fellow feeling first.
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