ABSTRACT
This chapter is interpretive and asks critical questions to guide discussion of the relevance of Smith’s thought today. I ask why we should bother with the religious aspects of Smith’s thought, whether such perspectives are just part of the history of ideas or do they have contemporary relevance, and whether there is in Smith a latent theodicy of economics that can help us make sense of the difficult contemporary economic situation of the West.
This discussion then leads to the overall conclusion of the work that the religious dimension of Smith’s thought is important.
This chapter continues to reflect as to whether there is a way for the theological and economic perspectives to reconnect. We can inquire into the possibility of an account of the economic subject which makes economic agents appear more like human beings rather than little utility machines that fit so nicely into those equations. True love of self involves self-abandonment in benevolence. Only such a love involves a genuine self-interest. Such a love is not some peripheral element of our behaviour that can be accounted for in a separate and subsidiary economic theory of altruism. More mature philosophical approaches will locate self-love into a framework that accounts for the whole person and rejects a narrow reduction to egoism as Smith did with Mandeville. Such approaches will also attempt to form an account of how economic processes are implicated with evil in the world. Self-interest will then itself be seen as an open-textured notion, both sin and saviour the engine of economic development and social injustice.
