Overview

Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and was strongly influenced by his critique. In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith's sympathy with Rousseau's concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend commercial society against these charges. These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmatic in nature, not ideological: it was Smith's view that, all things considered, commercial society offered more benefits than the alternatives. Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith's approach can be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons of commercial society today and thus contributes to a debate that is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.

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9780271033495

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Reviews

Rasmussen offers what will likely be the definitive account of Smith's grappling with Rousseau for years to come. He presents systematic and compelling evidence to defend the hypothesis that Smith was deeply affected by Rousseau's deconstruction of commercial society.... Rasmussen's Smith is revealed to be a more complex thinker than he is often portrayed, and we can all learn, especially amidst our own commercial crisis, from Smith's judicious and fair-minded prescriptions for such challenges. - David Lay Williams, Political Studies Rasmussen has produced a concise, carefully organized, and insightful work that illuminates the thought of Rousseau and Adam Smith. - M. Coulter, Choice We have hitherto lacked a systematic and sophisticated book-length analysis of the relation between Smith and Rousseau. These two near-contemporaries addressed many of the same issues - such as the emergence of capitalism, the relation between the free market and morals, the relation of commerce to politics, the nature of sympathy or empathy, and the relation of the philosopher to the modern liberal order - and yet often came to opposing conclusions. Dennis Rasmussen's beautifully written book will be important reading for anyone concerned with these two figures and, more broadly, the Enlightenment and its critics. - Charles Griswold, Boston University

Author Information

Dennis C. Rasmussen is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston.

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