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"Fleischacker, Samuel"
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On Adam Smith’s Wealth of nations
Adam Smith was a philosopher before he ever wrote about economics, yet until now there has never been a philosophical commentary on the Wealth of Nations. Samuel Fleischacker suggests that Smith's vastly influential treatise on economics can be better understood if placed in the light of his epistemology, philosophy of science, and moral theory. He lays out the relevance of these aspects of Smith's thought to specific themes in the Wealth of Nations, arguing, among other things, that Smith regards social science as an extension of common sense rather than as a discipline to be approached mathematically, that he has moral as well as pragmatic reasons for approving of capitalism, and that he has an unusually strong belief in human equality that leads him to anticipate, if not quite endorse, the modern doctrine of distributive justice.
eBook
“DISMEMBERING THE HUMAN CHARACTER”: ADAM FERGUSON’S CONCEPTION OF CORRUPTION
This essay lays out three kinds of corruption—personal, structural, and civic—stressing the differences among these phenomena. It then explores civic corruption via the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish thinker Adam Ferguson. Civic corruption occurs when the citizens of a republic lose interest in defending their shared institutions, and pursue their private wealth alone; avoiding it, according to Ferguson, requires placing limits on these private pursuits and getting citizens to participate in the public realm instead. By way of a comparison with Ferguson’s contemporary and friend Adam Smith—who agreed with Ferguson on many issues, although not on what was corrupting about the acquisition of wealth—the essay argues that Ferguson, for all his emphasis on participatory government, was a liberal, not a collectivist. With that in mind, the essay endorses many of Ferguson’s suggestions from a liberal perspective, and argues that, to preserve liberal republics, it is often necessary to expand what governments do, so as to maintain the commitment of citizens to their public institutions. This prescriptive implication brings out sharply how civic corruption differs from personal corruption, which may best be limited by shrinking the role of government, rather than expanding it.
Journal Article
A third concept of liberty
Taking the title of his book from Isaiah Berlin's famous essay distinguishing a negative concept of liberty connoting lack of interference by others from a positive concept involving participation in the political realm, Samuel Fleischacker explores a third definition of liberty that lies between the first two. In Fleischacker's view, Kant and Adam Smith think of liberty as a matter of acting on our capacity for judgment, thereby differing both from those who tie it to the satisfaction of our desires and those who translate it as action in accordance with reason or \"will.\" Integrating the thought of Kant and Smith, and developing his own stand through readings of the Critique of Judgment and The Wealth of Nations, Fleischacker shows how different acting on one's best judgment is from acting on one's desires--how, in particular, good judgment, as opposed to mere desire, can flourish only in favorable social and political conditions. At the same time, exercising judgment is something every individual must do for him- or herself, hence not something that philosophers and politicians who reason better than the rest of us can do in our stead.
eBook
Adam Smith's Impartial Spectator: Symposium Remarks
I argue that Adam Smith's impartial spectator should be regarded as an eminently human figure, not an ideal beyond ordinary people's reach, let alone an emblem of the divine. This reading makes best sense of how the figure functions in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, enables Smith to construct a plausible version of moral sentimentalism, and gives him a response to a problem he saw in David Hume's sentimentalism. The reading also makes it somewhat difficult for Smith to give a satisfying response to the dangers of cultural relativism, but that problem, I argue, his system shares with most other moral philosophies.
Journal Article
A Short History of Distributive Justice
Fleischacker argues that guaranteeing aid to the poor is a modern idea, developed only in the last two centuries. By examining major writings in ancient, medieval, and modern political philosophy, he shows how we arrived at the contemporary meaning of distributive justice, distinguishing it from the historical concept of charity.
eBook
