The “Adam Smith Problem” and the Retreat of Sentimental Virtue from the World

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s version of moral sentiment is dangerous in that it offers no accommodation with a polite world. In Sentiment and Sociability , John Mullan argues that Samuel Richardson’s novels bear witness to a shift in sentimental discourse, at least in literary terms. The relationship between the polite and primitivist sentimental discourses at the mid-century is vividly illustrated in a case study of Dr William Dodd. “Benevolence” and “humanity” are undoubtedly recognized as virtues of some sort in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). However, as Smith complains of “those Systems which make Virtue consist in Benevolence,” the defect is that they do not take into account the “virtues of prudence, vigilance, circumspection, temperance, constancy, and firmness. Smith’s avoidance of economics in TMS might indeed be understood as a tacit admission that moral-sense theory had really reached its limits in the area of investigation.