ABSTRACT
What I find most exciting about Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments is its detailed, convincing recovery of the profoundly egalitarian character of Adam Smith’s (and Condorcet’s) thought, the nature and significance of which began to be obscured by the conservative reaction to revolution in Europe, almost at Smith’s death in 1790, as Rothschild also brilliantly illustrates, and has been insufficiently appreciated ever since. Smith’s critique of regulation, corporation spirit and apprenticeship was concerned as much with equity and equal dignity as it was with economic efficiency. And Smith believed that the accumulation of British wealth itself depended ‘above all [on] that equal and impartial administration of justice which renders the rights of the meanest British subject respectable to the greatest’ (Smith 1976b, Wealth of Nations (WN) IV.vii.c.54).
