ABSTRACT
A recent wave of scholarship has challenged the traditional way of understanding of self-command in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as ‘Stoic’ self-command. But the two most thorough alternative interpretations maintain a strong connection between self-command and rationalistic moral views, and thus apparently stand opposed to Smith’s overt allegiance to sentimentalism. In this paper I argue that we can and should interpret self-command in the context of Smith’s larger sentimentalist framework, and that when we do, we can see that self-command has been ‘sentimentalized’. I offer an interpretation of Smithian self-command, arguing that it has its motivational basis in the natural desire for the pleasure of mutual sympathy; that it is guided by the sentimental standard of propriety; and that it works through the psychological mechanism of the ‘supposed’ impartial spectator.
