Sentimentality, communicative action and the social self: Adam Smith meets Jürgen Habermas

History of the Human Sciences 22 (3):75-99 (2009)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

There is a long and tortuous history of misinterpreting Smithian social theory. After rehearsing that history we offer here a way of understanding Smith that, unlike much of recent revisionist Smith scholarship, does not further add to this confusion. Our proposal is to understand the relation between moral and economic behaviour in Smith as analogous to the way in which Habermas makes strategic (and normatively oriented) behaviour parasitic on a more basic communicative competence. Given this analogy, it is ironic that Habermas's own understanding of Smith's theory also leaves much to be desired

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 101,795

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life.James R. Otteson - 2002 - Cambridge University Press.
Adam Smith on vanity, domination, and history.Daniel Luban - 2012 - Modern Intellectual History 9 (2):275-302.
Adam Smith and the Cambridge Platonists.Nuno Ornelas Martins - 2021 - Philosophica: International Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (58):69-92.
Adam Smith and the Law.Fabrizio Simon - 2013 - In Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli & Craig Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Das Adam Smith Problem - A Critical Realist Perspective.David Wilson & William Dixon - 2006 - Journal of Critical Realism 5 (2):251-272.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-11-22

Downloads
38 (#599,063)

6 months
9 (#509,115)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

William Dixon
University of Western Australia

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations