ABSTRACT
Adam Smith aspired to be a systematic thinker, and to a large extent realized his goals. By his own account, however, he never fulfilled his dream of a comprehensive system, though to the end (in the Advertisement to the sixth edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), 1790) he entertained the hope of completing the ‘long projected theory of jurisprudence’. As Ian Ross notes in his ‘“Great works upon the anvil” in 1785: Adam Smith’s projected corpus of philosophy’ (Ross 2004), other branches of the corpus too remained unfinished. Speculations as to the cause of Smith’s inability to finish his system range from his absorption in other tasks, to the onset of old age, to the impossibility of completing the system in the terms in which he finished it. As every student of Smith knows, he had the manuscripts of incomplete works, including presumably that on jurisprudence, consigned to the flames shortly before his death.
