The Edifying Discourses of Adam Smith: Focalism, Commerce, and Serving the Common Good

Abstract

Smith’s discourses aim to encourage mores, practices, and public policies in service to the common good, or that which a universally benevolent spectator would approve of. The Wealth of Nations illustrates how in pursuing our own happiness within the bounds of prudence and commutative justice we may be said, literally or metaphorically, to cooperate with God in furthering the happiness of humankind. The Theory of Moral Sentiments elaborates an ethic, here called “focalism,” that instructs us to proportion our beneficent efforts to our knowledge and ability. The relationship between political economy and focalism is bidirectionally reinforcing. In one direction, the ethic of focalism contributes to the moral authorization of self-love, thereby invigorating and dignifying honest commercial activities. In the other direction, the insights of political economy reinforce the ethic of focalism by elaborating how through prudent commerce and focal beneficence we cooperate, even if only metaphorically, in a grand social enterprise.

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“…Goods and services have been exchanged for millennia. Capitalism as a formal concept appeared in Adam Smith's seminal 1776 book, Wealth of Nations, but he never called it "capitalism" (Matson, 2020). The Oxford English Dictionary (n.d.) finds the word being used in 1830-1840 as a socialist critique of the wealthy, and in its modern meaning of private ownership for profit by 1919.…”