Hume Studies

Hume Studies Volume 33, Number 1, April 2007, pp. 183-185 Leónidas Montes and Eric Schliesser, eds. New Voices on Adam Smith. London: Routledge, 2006. Pp. xxi + 364. ISBN 0-415-35696-2, Cloth, $145. Recent years have seen a great upsurge in scholarly interest in Adam Smith. This exceptionally wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection of essays, by a group of scholars who have recently finished doctoral dissertations on Smith or a closely related topic, is perfectly timed to complement the more authoritative Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (2006). The multidisciplinary diversity of their various contributions once again confirms that Smith is much more than the father of political economy, with just five economists amongst the fourteen—this despite the volume's rather counter-intuitive inclusion in Routledge's Studies in the History of Economics. As Knud Haakonssen points out in a lucid foreword, such diversification is entirely appropriate to Smith himself, for whom "moral philosophy is first of all a grand anthropological theory within which language and literature, arts and sciences, politics and law, and, of course, economics are to be studied with the aim of establishing empirically—mainly historically—the balance between nature and culture" (xviii). After a concise introduction in which Montes and Schliesser summarise Smith scholarship to date, emphasising their own interdisciplinary approach and handily signposting potential areas of future research, the volume is divided into four parts. These deal successively, though rather arbitrarily as the editors admit, with Smith's sources and influence, his moral theory, economics, and theory of knowledge. Part 1 kicks of f with an engaging revision of the view that Smith was a latter-day Stoic by Ryan Patrick Hanley, who argues that Smith's emphasis on the education of character was actually heavily influenced by his reading of Aristotle. Edith Kuiper focuses instead on Smith's relationship with more recent writers, assessing his positions on gender, work, and education in a comparative framework provided by the "feminist" texts of Mary Collier, Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, Priscilla Wakefield , Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft—though admitting that there is no evidence that Smith actually read any of them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, Kuiper argues that Smith largely ignored their claims in his own work, thereby losing sight "of the division of labor in the family and the contribution of women's economic work more generally" (56). Robert Mitchell turns in chapter 4 to Smith's influence on a diverse group of British Romantics, arguing that Smith's comments on "systems" had a formative impact on the way writers like Burke, Coleridge, and Godwin conceived the role of "systems" in political and literary thought and action . Mitchell highlights Smith's own evolving views on the matter through close analysis of the 1790 edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Hume Studies 184 Book Reviews The essays in part 2 reveal the extent to which Smith's writings can contribute to fundamental topics in contemporary moral theory. Fonna Forman-Barzilai explores the strengths and weaknesses of Smith's account of cultural impartiality , speculating how Smith might have come to terms with what she sees as the cultural relativity that emerges from his description of moral judgement. Carola von Villiez takes a quite different track, interpreting Smith's account of moral judgement as a forerunner of the method of reflective equilibrium developed by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice. In the most imaginative essay in the collection , Patrick Frierson explores how Smith's ideas can be profitably recycled in contemporary environmental ethics, while Chad Flanders asks what his account of the incipient rationality of our moral sentiments might contribute to contemporary debates on moral luck. Also in part 2, Lauren Brubaker argues that Smith rejected both Stoic resignation and Utopian hubris, explaining that his complex understanding of nature requires the prudent assistance of philosophical and political statesmanship. Though it is pointedly the least substantial section, the essays in part 3 undertake a substantial re-reading of Smith as economist, arguing that he is less familiar and more profound than traditional economic theory would have us believe. Jimena Hurtado-Prieto exploits the student notes on Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence to argue that Smith's...