Adam Smith’s moral philosophy in the context of eighteenth-century French fiction

Adam Smith was a professional British philosopher engaged with the stoic tradition as well as a European Enlightenment figure who drew on sources beyond his immediate national and disciplinary contexts. In particular, Smith identified the fiction of Pierre Marivaux (1688-1763), Crébillon fils (1707-1777), and Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni (1713-1792) as an appropriate corpus of ethical theory with which to complement stoic teachings. These novelists answered the reductive view of human nature in which all human action is necessarily determined by the single principle of amour-propre by emphasizing the countervailing process of sympathetic love. In varying degrees their work can be seen as a response to La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes (1665-1678), challenging first his reductive claim, and then his deterministic assertion of universality. Sympathetic love as an alternative to amour-propre was presented in an equally deterministic manner, but the romanciers worked autonomy back into the process in the form of générosité, an other-regarding aspect of love outside the deterministic process of the coup de sympathie. Smith took up their alternatives to La Rochefoucauld’s model, and supplemented the idea of sympathy with an informed Impartial Spectator.