ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Smith's sympathy concept, almost completely overlooked by IPE scholars, can provide a complex and compelling perspective on contemporary market-oriented behaviour while still remaining attentive to the historicised meaning of his work. It considers Smith's key statements regarding his thoughts on sympathy and self-love as it reveals his distance from Mandeville and his proximity to Rousseau. Hutcheson's notion of 'moral sense', which held that moral judgments were not primarily matters of 'reason' or 'self-love' as commonly supposed, was a key concept on which Smith and others could develop their views about individual moral behaviour. The chapter focuses Smith's sympathy that remains attentive to his intentions in writing and his socio-linguistic context. Smith's 'intentions' and his 'politics' are understood in relation to his immediate socio-linguistic context. The chapter concludes by reiterating the point that it provides a promising way of conceiving market-oriented behaviour in a distinctly different way to economistic understandings.
