ABSTRACT
The genesis of the symposium was a joint meeting of the International Adam Smith Society and the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Association that was designed to foster further work on the intellectual connections between the two great thinkers by bringing together the two scholarly communities. The symposium takes as its broad organisational principle the desire to include a new approach to each of the key points where Smith directly engages with Rousseau’s thought. Rousseau and Adam Smith are two of the foremost thinkers of the European Enlightenment, thinkers who made seminal contributions to moral and political philosophy and who shaped some of the key concepts of modern political economy. Most famously Smith’s close friendship with David Hume brought him into the quarrel between the latter and Rousseau following Rousseau’s stay in England in 1766. Smith also discusses Rousseau in some of his less well-known writings such as the Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages.
