ABSTRACT
The first Italian edition of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) was published in 1991, by Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, one of the main Italian cultural institutions. In the following years, the new edition has been deemed as a point of reference and a stimulus for a new and more updated research on Smith’s philosophical and economic thought in Italy. The translation has been considered as accurate and the interpretation advanced by the editor in his Introduction1 has been widely discussed by scholars with different interests. Eugenio Garin stated that the publication represented an ‘event’ in the Italian philosophical landscape (Garin, 1991). Nevertheless, such an ‘event’was made easier and viable because, in the period spanning the end of 1980s and the early 1990s, the Italian philosophical scene showed an increasing acceptance of empirical philosophy and ethics (Lecaldano 1991), which led also to the rediscovery of Adam Smith’s philosophical work. In the same period of time, the seminal works by John A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner were translated, making it possible to extend the diffusion of a very ‘different’ interpretation of the Western political historiographical canon to a wider educated audience. Until that moment, however, although Smith’s economic work was well known
among Italian scholars, TMS did not enjoy any significant fortune, nor was it regarded as worthy of notice by the large majority of Italian philosophers. This depended, first of all, on the particular climate of the Italian cultural scene during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century – a scene very sceptical with respect to any form of philosophical empiricism, in particular, if applied to moral theory. Thus, in Italy, for almost two centuries, the foundations of an empiricist (and thus also the Smithian) ethical theory was considered as if it were based on unacceptable theoretical terrain, when not devoid of any interest whatsoever. It is true that the ‘dialectics of distincts’ advanced by Benedetto Croce (1900) entailed an interesting argumentation addressed to evaluate – rather than to set against – the differences between economy (matter of fact) and ethics (matter of value). In this way, however, the formal character of moral theory, its relationship with transcendental conditions, was simply reasserted, whereas the comprehension of the Smithian perspective, in particular, would have required a very different approach.
