ABSTRACT
Inherent in that recognition is an acknowledgement that self-interest is an ineluctable feature of a society where, in Smith’s phrase, ‘everyman is in some measure a merchant’. For Hobbes the fact about humans is that they are concerned with their own well-being to the exclusion of others. Many critics of Hobbes, like Samuel Clarke, took the rationalist road but another route was travelled by Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. Pre-eminent among the defenders of Shaftesbury against Mandeville was Francis Hutcheson. Compared to the more forgiving environment of family and friends, where sympathetic concord requires less negotiation, in the relatively anonymous setting of the marketplace more effort is needed to achieve the desired state of harmony between the actor and the spectator. Moreover, for all the self-interestedness they embody, modern societies exhibit other virtues that further mark them out as superior.
