Abstract

The work is a primarily textual exposition of Adam Smith's thought that examines both his own writings and the surviving notes from his jurisprudential lectures. The work centers on the idea of social development: it claims that social institutions, including laws, mores, and structures of authority, are for Smith the result of an evolutionary process whereby social development is the unintended consequence of individual human actions. Social development is the non-cognitive result of various selfish and sentimental human passions, unintentionally resolved through human interaction into an ever-adapting system of social order. ;With these considerations in mind, the work examines the development of morals, of political systems of authority, and of laws. Smith is seen to offer an alternative both to theories of progress that focus of mankind as morally and materially perfectible and to social contract theories that view human society as the product of a rational and deliberate exercise of will. Reason, religion, and individual moral virtue become pendent concepts, incidental to the process by which social relations unconsciously adapt to changing circumstances. ;The work argues that Smith's empirical, descriptive analysis emphasizes the process of change over its possible outcomes. Although social development is historically successional and tends naturally toward increasing complexity, it has no terminus; therefore, Smith's system properly cannot be called teleological. His description of social evolution has some normative weight, but it leaves open the question of society's ultimate destiny