ABSTRACT

Since the onset of the global economic crisis in 2007, critics of the neoliberal ‘Washington consensus’ have looked to Adam Smith for an alternative to the hitherto prevailing intellectual orthodoxy. Such critics are right to insist that Smith is wrongly portrayed as a precursor of either neoclassical economics or capitalist market fundamentalism-or indeed both. In different ways, economists, philosophers and historians as diverse as Amartya Sen, Knud Haakonssen, David Raphael, Emma Rothschild, Andrew Skinner, Donald Winch and Giovanni Arrighi have all shown that Smith is a theorist of the market that is governed by noncommercial values like prudence and generosity which serve the quest for social justice rather than simply the pursuit of private profi t. The link between the Theory of Moral Sentiments (fi rst edition, 1759) and the Wealth of Nations (fi rst edition, 1776) is the shared ethical foundation of economic activity and social existence1.