The Essays of Adam Smith
1776
Long before he became the father of economics, Adam Smith was a philosopher obsessed with the messy, complicated business of being human. This collection, the foundation of his moral thought, asks what most economists never bother to ask: Why do we care about each other? Smith argues that sympathy, our capacity to feel alongside others, forms the invisible architecture of moral life. We judge ourselves and others by imagining how our situations would feel from the inside, a process that gives rise to conscience, justice, and the possibility of virtue. What emerges is a portrait of human nature startlingly different from the calculating self-interest of popular caricature. Smith shows that genuine benevolence is not an irrational afterthought but a sophisticated product of the imagination, one that enables us to build societies where millions of strangers can cooperate peacefully. For anyone who has reduced Smith to a cheerleader for greed, this book is a revelation: the same mind who understood markets also understood that no one is an island, and that our deepest interests are bound up with the fortunes of strangers.
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“The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.””
— Adam Smith
“Never complain of that of which it is at all times in your power to rid yourself.””
— Adam Smith
“Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did and never can carry us beyond our own persons, and it is by the imagination only that we form any conception of what are his sensations...His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have this adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.””
— Adam Smith
“Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.””
— Adam Smith
“The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the confident assertions of a superficial and imprudent pretender. He is not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves into public notice and reputation.””
— Adam Smith
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.””
— Adam Smith
“How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew's-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden.””
— Adam Smith
“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.””
— Adam Smith
“We are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it.””
— Adam Smith
