Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Citations and Abbreviations
- Series Editor’s Introduction
- Part I Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Part II Self-interest and Sympathy
- Part III Moral Sentiments and Spectatorship
- Part IV Commercial Society and Justice
- Part V Politics and Freedom
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
14 - ‘Savage Patriotism’, Justice and Cosmopolitics in Smith and Rousseau
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Citations and Abbreviations
- Series Editor’s Introduction
- Part I Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Part II Self-interest and Sympathy
- Part III Moral Sentiments and Spectatorship
- Part IV Commercial Society and Justice
- Part V Politics and Freedom
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
In Politics in Commercial Society, originally given as the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford University and published posthumously, Istvan Hont compares the usually contrasted writings of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on a range of issues including sympathy and pity, sociability, morality, law, government, revolution and commerce, and he concludes his discussion by noting their shared recognition of the need to address the problems posed by nationalism, especially with regard to war. Both writers, Hont remarks, acknowledged ‘a tension between global and national societies and their attendant social psychologies’ (2015: 132) that led them to plan future works to respond to these conflicts. As we know, Rousseau's Social Contract was to comprise the first part of a treatise entitled Political Institutions, the second part of which presumably would have addressed international law and the rights of war and commerce. Although, after extracting the Social Contract, Rousseau burned the remainder of his writing for this book, some of the political fragments, particularly The State of War, along with the first two chapters of the Geneva Manuscript (the initial draft of the Contract) and, more significantly, the Digest and Judgement on the Abbe de Saint-Pierre's Perpetual Peace have been taken to indicate the issues Rousseau would have developed in the unfinished project. In the case of Smith, the proposed work was a discourse on ‘natural jurisprudence, or a theory of the general principles which ought to run through and be the foundation of the laws of all nations’, as he announces it in the last paragraph of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS VII.iv.37: 341). The papers for this unfinished study, too, were consumed by flames at the author's behest; yet his Lectures on Jurisprudence survive in the form of student notes, and sections of The Wealth of Nations and especially The Theory of Moral Sentiments have been considered to provide sufficient evidence of Smith's views on war, and international justice and morality. Indeed, Charles Griswold (1999: 258), for one, contends that the general principles with which Smith wanted to found the laws of nations could be nothing other than the moral and intellectual sentiments he had already presented in the latter work, given the historical basis of his philosophy.
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- Information
- Adam Smith and RousseauEthics, Politics, Economics, pp. 284 - 312Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018