The Scottish Enlightenment and Adam Smith

The Scottish Enlightenment, centered on Edinburgh and Glasgow during the second half of the eighteenth century, produced a distinctive tradition combining moral philosophy, economics, and conjectural history, often more empirically grounded and less overtly anticlerical than its French counterpart. Its central figure, Adam Smith (1723-1790), first made his reputation with The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), a work of moral psychology that grounded ethical judgment not in abstract reason alone but in sympathy — the natural human capacity to imaginatively enter into and share the feelings of others. For Smith, moral approval and disapproval arise from this process of fellow-feeling, refined and stabilized through the judgment of an imagined "impartial spectator," a disinterested observer whose hypothetical reactions individuals learn to internalize as a standard for evaluating their own and others' conduct.