ABSTRACT
We must now examine the positive characterization of moral thought and its relation to the natural world which Smith develops in the remainder of his book. He favours an approach which he dubs ‘radical environmentalism’. This is fundamentally at odds with the modernist world-view, which embodies the postEnlightenment commitment to a neutral, universalist model of reason understood as employed in natural science, analytical philosophy, the legal and bureaucratic structures of the state and capitalist market economics. It is a view of reason that ignores the historical and culture-bound bases of thought which, as we have seen, Smith believes it is the strength of social constructivists to have focused on and illuminated.
