Given the centrality of the profit imperative faced by corporate executives, one wonders if corporate beneficence could ever be more than wishful thinking. Chapter 8 provides reason for optimism. It contrasts Milton Friedman’s neoliberal understanding of human nature with the notions of stoic virtue advanced by Adam Smith. Friedman contends that beneficence should play no role in corporate settings. Smith, by contrast, emphasizes the need for prudence, beneficence, and self-command in all human endeavors. The chapter examines a survey of 145 corporate responses to COVID-19, showing that during a pandemic, beneficence offers a better explanation for many corporate compliance actions than profit motive alone.

This chapter examines how the local issue of notes, wage payments, and the brokerage of bills of exchange over longer distances came together in the form of county banks after 1760. Certain tradesmen and industrialists moved from financing their own businesses to providing finance on a more exclusive basis to their communities in the form of institutions they then decided to call banks. This chapter will show how trust in individual local brokers was gradually transformed into institutions that their owners termed banks, and how they became a part of local society. They emerged out of local practice, and did not generally copy London institutions such as Child’s or Hoare’s banks. It will also examine just how important the payment of industrial wage labour was in the formation of county banking. The chapter will end by placing Adam Smith’s advocacy of banking and his discussion of capital in the context of the developments described in this book. It was Smith’s contention that the value of labour converted into abstract capital was the wealth of a nation. His was a ‘capitalism’ based on the ethics needed to create the conditions to make capital keep its value.

Chapter 5 explores the context and reason for the publication of the Letters on Sympathy in 1798 as an accompaniment to her translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. For Grouchy, the Terror and the fall of Robespierre were personally traumatic and led to her decision to divorce Condorcet shortly before his death. However, these events did not introduce any major changes to her philosophy. Deprived of her key intellectual partner, she attempted (more or less unsuccessfully) to recreate the partnership she had shared with Condorcet with her lover, Maillia Garat, and her brother, Emmanuel de Grouchy. Moreover, the publication of the Letters was intended to be a reminder of the ideals of the early revolution, in the face of the increasingly elitist politics of the Directory regime and her allies in the republican centre. Nevertheless, the uncertain political atmosphere of 1795–8, in which a fear of left-wing plots combined with an increasing suspicion of female political outspokenness, led her to package her message together with the less controversial Theory of Moral Sentiments. This allowed her ideas to be dismissed by some, at least publically, as purely dealing with moral, as opposed to political matters.

In Chapter 2, I discuss the moral foundation for capitalism provided by Adam Smith. The great philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment is frequently invoked by economists as the father of their discipline, yet Smith’s life and writings have been widely distorted. In contrast to his popular caricature today, Smith was a moral philosopher of the highest caliber who incorporated important moral perspectives throughout his writings. Smith presented his moral theory based on social norms and culture in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and maintained it as the moral foundation for his economic theory in The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s moral theory is based on the principle of sympathy and the behavioral norms that arise due to past social experiences that reveal standards of right and wrong behavior. Similar to the other philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, he attributes moral judgment and the moral conscience to the impartial spectator, but he also reserves important roles for religion and moral codes such as the Stoic virtues. When nineteenth-century classical economists adopted narrow self-interest as the first principle of their discipline, therefore, they adopted a principle that Smith and the other Scottish Enlightenment philosophers had adamantly rejected.

This chapter challenges the view that The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) is concerned with analyzing modern commercial society – a view that is especially prominent amongst those who turn to Adam Smith to help identify the malaises of capitalist societies today and their potential remedies. The chapter proceeds by, first, examining what both Adam Smith and Smith scholars mean by commercial society, and whether this concept has any place in TMS; second, assessing whether TMS should be read as response to other theorists of modern commercial society (Bernard Mandeville and Jean-Jacques Rousseau); and, third, analyzing whether Smith’s reflections on moral corruption, inequality, and prudence in TMS should be associated with commercial society. The chapter concludes with some brief reflections on why many Smith commentators superimpose the concept of commercial society onto TMS, speculating that this can be partially explained by the broader tendency in much recent scholarship to read TMS and the Wealth of Nations as forming a coherent whole, rather than as independent works that mostly address distinct questions.

Every edition of the French translation of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments published between 1798 and 1981 was accompanied by the Letters on Sympathy: the philosophical text of Smith’s French translator and interlocutor, Sophie de Grouchy (1763–1822). Grouchy declared that she intended to massage the message delivered in TMS for a French audience. Yet there has been little attempt to analyse the political motivations for the changes she made to Smith’s theory. This chapter describes two key critiques that Grouchy made of TMS: her rejection of the impartial spectator and her attack on hierarchy. Based on a redating of the drafting of the Letters to the mid-1780s, it argues that Grouchy focused on these elements due to two parallel contexts: her desire to write an educational treatise for an Académie française competition, and her involvement in an ancien régime legal scandal. After exploring how Grouchy constructed an Epicurean and egalitarian theory which she saw as better suited to these contemporary demands, the chapter concludes by arguing that seeing Grouchy as an “activist commentator” on Smith leads us to re-interpret the reception of his TMS in France.

Friendship across a society includes the mild manners of doux commerce. Aristotle ranks economic exchanges according to increasing levels of friendliness: from cash on the barrel, to giving the partner extra time to repay, to a loan, to a gift with strings attached. Instead of reducing each to self-interest (like modern economists do), he finds commodity exchange has a tincture of the goodness of the next level up (interest-free loans), just as loans retain some of the goodness of outright gifts. Across a chasm of differences, we can still observe similar passions today: affection for customers, pride in one’s economic contribution (“gift”), wanting societal recognition (honor) for it. Adam Smith thought this vanity was the root of morality. Full morality is not required for civic friendship but only middle-class “virtues” (Politics, Books 3-4). Fair markets help maintain liberal civic friendship. When free markets are replaced by rent-seeking (crony capitalism, regulatory capture, lobbying), the game becomes rigged and we leave behind win-win assumptions for zero-sum assumptions, in which anyone else’s gain must be my loss. Our mild manners degenerate into resentment and discord.

The first chapter ( ‘Divine Sympathy ‘) examines theories of the theatre and its role in society as articulated in the moral philosophy and literary criticism of the second half of the eighteenth century. It considers theatre’s unique moral function as epitomized in its ability to elicit sympathy, using the works of Scottish Enlightenment figures such as Henry Home, Lord Kames, David Hume, and Adam Smith, especially Smith’s influential Theory of Moral Sentiments. As this chapter demonstrates, the stated goal of drama – and of art in general – was to prompt a sympathetic identification with the events represented. In the eighteenth century, drama ‘s ability to inspire this response within its audience was the source of its moral power; the experience of sympathy prompted the exercise of virtue because identifying with the distress or pleasure of the characters on stage led spectators to moral actions outside theatre. Thus theatre became an important building block for the moral society that Smith described. Because of its ability to inspire sympathy, theatre taught virtue more effectively than any other art form, more so even than the pulpit.