A broad-ranging 2010 study of Smith's views on moral judgement, humanitarian care, commerce, justice and international law.

Contemporary societies are marked by deep inequalities grounded in collective failures to recognize the histories, needs, and experiences of marginalized social groups. What are the strategies that can help individuals become more responsive to social realities and perspectives that differ significantly from their own? In Reimagining Sympathy,Recognizing Difference: Insights from Adam Smith, Millicent Churcherattends to recent debates over the imagination as a resource for social and political reform, and highlights the central relevance of Adam Smith’s voice to these debates. Smith, best known for his work on economics, may seem an unlikely figure to draw upon in this context. However, his nuanced account of ‘sympathy’—conceived as an imaginative and reflective capacity that develops within and through social experience—greatly enriches the role of imagination in fostering mutual understanding and solidarity among a diverse citizenry. Churcher critically explores and extends Smith’s view that if sympathy is to bind people together across their differences rather than divide them, it requires work at the level of individual practice, as well as the support of wider social structures. By drawing Smith into conversation with contemporary debates in social and political theory, this monograph addresses the pressing question of what is required from individuals and institutionsto remedy abject failures to recognize and respond ethically to difference.

Best known for his revolutionary free-market economics treatise The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith was first and foremost a moral philosopher. In his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he investigated the flip side of economic self-interest: the interest of the greater good. Smith's classic work advances ideas about conscience, moral judgment, and virtue that have taken on renewed importance in business and politics. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

This book revisits the moral and political philosophy of Adam Smith to recover his understanding of morality in a market age.

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.

Modern notions of empathy often celebrate its ability to bridge divides, to unite humankind. But how do we square this with the popular view that we can never truly comprehend the experience of being someone else? In this book, Samuel Fleischacker delves into the work of Adam Smith to draw out an understanding of empathy that respects both personal difference and shared humanity. After laying out a range of meanings for the concept of empathy, Fleischacker proposes that what Smith called “sympathy” is very much what we today consider empathy. Smith’s version has remarkable value, as his empathy calls for entering into the perspective of another—a uniquely human feat that connects people while still allowing them to define their own distinctive standpoints. After discussing Smith’s views in relation to more recent empirical and philosophical studies, Fleischacker shows how turning back to Smith promises to enrich, clarify, and advance our current debates about the meaning and uses of empathy.