ABSTRACT
I have deliberately avoided the word ‘sources’ in the title of this article, because what I will discuss are not sources in a technical sense, so much as ideas of classical origin, elaborated on considerably by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century scholarship. I have already devoted a great deal of work to the classical sources of Adam Smith: up to now this has consisted of researching, as reliably as possible, what Smith could have derived from his outstanding knowledge of the classical authors. In this article it is my intention to postulate a possible, but unverified, influence of classical origin on Adam Smith. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it modern, since it goes back to the seventeeth-century treatment of classical subjects. I will offer an account – hypothetical but, I hope, well grounded – of the origin of an expression used by Adam Smith, found not in his principal works but in what we might call a ‘minor’ text: an original manuscript fragment on justice, unearthed in 1831 and published by Raphael and Macfie in ‘The passage on atonement, and a manuscript fragment on justice’ (TMS Appendix II: 383-401). The editors date the manuscript fragment to the period when Smith was teaching in Glasgow, between 1751-2 and 1764.
