Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction -- One Rousseau's Unhappy Vision of Commercial Society -- Two Smith's Sympathy with Rousseau's Critique -- Three The European Peasant and the Prudent Man -- Four Progress and Happiness -- Conclusion -- References -- Index

This volume centers on an annotated edition of a short, controversial work that Adam Smith wrote on the last days, death, and character of his closest friend, the philosopher David Hume. It also includes several related texts as well as an extensive editor's introduction.

This article explores Adam Smith's attitude toward economic inequality, as distinct from the problem of poverty, and argues that he regarded it as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, as has often been recognized, Smith saw a high degree of economic inequality as an inevitable result of a flourishing commercial society, and he considered a certain amount of such inequality to be positively useful as a means of encouraging productivity and bolstering political stability. On the other hand, it has seldom been noticed that Smith also expressed deep worries about some of the other effects of extreme economic inequality—worries that are, moreover, interestingly different from those that dominate contemporary discourse. In Smith's view, extreme economic inequality leads people to sympathize more fully and readily with the rich than the poor, and this distortion in our sympathies in turn undermines both morality and happiness.

This article examines the conclusion of Book 4 of Rousseau's Emile, which consists of a description of how Rousseau would choose to live if he were rich, and seeks to situate it within Rousseau's thought more broadly. This important passage, which has gone virtually unnoticed in the literature, offers an evocative account of a life of leisure and simple pleasures, enjoyed in the country with a few select friends - a life of happiness that Rousseau claims virtually anyone can afford, whether rich or not. The passage thus provides a guide to 'the art of living', demonstrating that true happiness requires moderation, decency towards others, and above all the avoidance of vanity. The model of the good life outlined here diverges in crucial respects from the other model human types in Rousseau's corpus, including the natural man of the Discourse on Inequality, the citizen of The Social Contract, the solitary dreamer of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, and Emile himself. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThe thinkers of the French Enlightenment are frequently depicted as political rationalists, meaning that they advocated subjecting all laws, institutions, and practices to the withering light of reason, and discarding those found wanting by its standards. However, two of the most prominent philosophes, Voltaire and Diderot, were in factopponentsof the kind of political rationalism that they are often thought to have embraced. Both of these thinkers rejected the idea of a single "rational" political order, advocated gradual reform rather than wholesale change, and denied that the steady application of reason could produce inevitable or endless progress. In effect the Enlightenment was a "revolt against rationalism" (as Peter Gay has called it) not only in the epistemological, psychological, and ethical spheres, but also in the political one.