THE UNDERLYING THEORY OF SMITH’S PHILOSOPHY
At Smith’s hands, however, many of the traditional subjects received new treatment and development. In 1759, Smith published his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” a treatise on ethics which immediately won for him international fame as a philosopher. This work presented the doctrine that the moral judgment is, in the last analysis, an expression of impartial sympathy with the motives and result of human action. From sympathy Smith derives the sense of justice, which is “the main pillar of the social structure.” Underlying the book is the common eighteenth-century theory of a beneficent natural order, by which it was held that a benevolent Creator had so ordered the universe as to produce the greatest possible human happiness. In this view of the matter the problem of philosophy, including politics and economics, is to discover the natural laws which make for the happiness of God’s creatures. Of these laws the chief seems to be that Providence has commended the welfare of every man chiefly to his own keeping, not to that of others; and has so ordered things that men, in pursuing their own welfare within the limits set by justice, are ordinarily contributing to the general welfare. Upon this doctrine of a natural harmony of interests, Smith based his theory of natural liberty, according to which every man, “as long as he does not violate the laws of justice,” is naturally free to pursue his own welfare in his own way.
Smith projected, but never published, a treatise on jurisprudence and government, subjects which in his lectures had naturally followed ethics. His “Wealth of Nations,” which was published in 1776, treated of political economy which in his lectures had followed the subject of government.