ABSTRACT
Berry’s piece calls attention to some of Smith’s otherwise overlooked philosophical debts to a Lockean anthropology (cf. my treatment of Pocock below), which equates the savage mind to children (128). Berry also notes the importance of Hume’s essay, ‘Of national characters’, in order to understand the eighteenth-century distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘physical’ causes in Smith’s ‘soft-determinist’, institution-centric explanations (130). Berry, thus, offered, the first serious treatment of Smith’s epistemology and metaphysical framework that could accommodate Nathan Rosenberg’s old and increasingly influential piece on Smith’s institutionalism (Rosenberg 1960).
