Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment. By Emma Rothschild. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. ix, 353. $45.00.

Extract

“This book is about laissez-faire when it was new,” says Emma Rothschild at the outset of a provocative series of intertwined essays dealing with the relationship between the emerging economic science and the moral and political aims of the Enlightenment. The book is dedicated to Amartya Sen, whose influence can be seen in several places: for in-stance in the third chapter (“Commerce and the State”), which compares Turgot's, Condorcet's, and Smith's views on famines, and more generally in Rothschild's insistence that political economy cannot and should not be separated from ethics and politics. Rothschild's basic argument is that Smith and Condorcet proposed a comprehensive view of human life. The differences between the two are less important than their common allegiance to a “liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.”