ABSTRACT
There is an additional point about motivation that runs through WN, however, which is also signalled in the paragraph the people have been examining. Smith associates persuasion with freedom elsewhere in WN. Now the form of freedom that most matters to Smith is not the bare possession of political rights, but the socio-economic condition that he calls “independency.” In addition, Smith does not think that government support for university education is of much use, and he thinks that ideally governments should not support churches. So there is certainly a case to be made for Smith as a fore-runner of a limited, anti-interventionist approach to government activity. Both the economic well-being and the moral health of a nation can in general be left up to the spontaneous workings of society. The idea that Smith endorses a liberalism for virtue is the reading of his work that best brings his philosophical and his politico-economic writings into a coherent whole.
