ABSTRACT
Adam Smith, known as the founder of political economy was, together with David Hume and Henry Home, Lord Kames, one of the second generation of the Scottish Enlightenment whose aim was to realize the purpose of the enlightenment as the central theme of their moral philosophy. In brief, this was to build up a free, civilized society by way of increasing the wealth of nations through the commercialization of society and through the formation of independent subjects free from feudal relations and religious delusions. An outcome of this aim was that one of their main themes was criticism of the remaining feudal aspects of modern society, and the mercantile system. Individual studies of these thinkers has already amounted to a fair number of volumes, even in Japan. However, as far as I know there has not yet been any major study that grappled with the theoretical relations between Hutcheson, Hume, Kames and Adam Smith, especially concerning the relationship between the formation of secular and empirical theories and the theological presuppositions of the Scottish Enlightenment. In particular, this chapter will focus on the theoretical lineage between Kames’s essay on ‘Liberty & Necessity’ in his Essays on the Principles of Morality & Natural Religion (1751) and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, TMS hereafter), which previously have only been the subject of some shorter fragmentary comments or reviews.1 Spotlighting their dynamic successive relationship is, I believe, an indispensable key to understanding the essence of Smithian liberalism.
