Ebook: The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Description

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 judgement 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.

Description of the book

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is a text of central importance in the history of moral and political thought. This 2002 volume offers a new edition of the text with helpful notes for the student reader, together with a substantial introduction that sets the work in its philosophical and historical context.

Back cover

"In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith assigned himself a difficult and dangerous task: to establish for educated men in an increasingly revolutionary age the reasonableness of morality and the necessity of the fruits of virtue - illustrated by the wisdom of the classical authors of antiquity. This book, Adam Smith's first, is, then, proof to skeptics of the importance of morality; and an antidote to those who think that free-market economics can be divorced from a moral society."--BOOK JACKET.

About the Author

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and began studies at the University of Glasgow. Three years later he entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he remained as a scholarship student until 1746. After leaving Oxford, Smith returned to the University of Glasgow to lecture on English literature and economics. The publication, in 1759, of his Theory of Moral Sentiments led to Smith's appointment as tutor to the third Duke of Buccleuch. In this capacity he lived for nearly three years in France, where he made the acquaintance of several of that nation's leading intellectuals, including Francois Quesnay, the physician and economist, and the renowned philosopher and critic of religion, Voltaire. Returning to Britain in 1766, Smith lived mainly in Kirkcaldy and London, working on his Wealth of Nations, which was published to great accliam in 1776. Adam Smith died in Edinburgh on July 17, 1790.