ABSTRACT
As readers of this Review and members of this Society know all too well, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) long lived in the shadow of its author’s other book. But that, happily, has changed in recent years. The publication of the Glasgow Edition of Smith’s works in hardback by Oxford University Press in 1976 and their subsequent republication in paperback by the Liberty Fund of Indianapolis soon after made high-quality editions of all of Smith’s works, including TMS, widely available. This was an event that had important implications for Smith’s legacy. Where earlier generations of readers often knew Smith’s work only through abridged or excerpted versions of his writings, the publication of the Glasgow Edition made possible direct access to complete versions of Smith’s texts. And this, in turn, had important implications for scholarship. As Jonathan Wight demonstrated in his excellent quantitative analysis of scholarly citations to Smith’s works between 1970 and 1997, in the wake of the release of the Glasgow Edition, the ratio of citations of TMS to WN shifted from 1:10 to 1:3 – leading Wight to suggest that ‘these numbers support the hypothesis that citation interest in Smith’s moral philosophy is growing faster than interest in his political economy’ (Wight 2002: 68). Whether one regards this shift as a matter of correlation or of causation, it
remains the case that English-language scholarship on TMS – which was essentially moribund prior to the publication of the Glasgow edition, with only a few important exceptions – has flourished since. But, for present purposes, what bears mentioning is that there is some evidence that would seem to suggest that the same shift that English-language Smith scholarship experienced after publication of the Glasgow Edition is now occurring worldwide. In particular, the past few years have seen a remarkable proliferation of new translations of TMS into a range of languages, from French and Spanish and Italian to Greek and Finnish and Chinese. In some cases, the new translations offer improvements and refinements on earlier translations, often including new apparatus making them especially useful to scholars. In other cases the translations are firsts in that language, making it possible not only for scholars but also for students and popular audiences to access TMS. But in all cases it seems reasonable to expect that these new translations will continue to stimulate interest in TMS worldwide and will contribute to an increasingly global reassessment of Smith’s contributions as a moral philosopher.
