Les ‘Lettres sur la sympathie’ (1798) de Sophie de Grouchy: philosophie morale et réforme sociale by Marc André Bernier et Deidre Dawson (review)

Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments was given three French translations in the eighteenth century. The third, published in 1798 and based on the substantially revised sixth edition that Smith completed in 1789, was the work of Sophie de Grouchy, the widow of the mathematician and republican political theorist Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. The translation was accompanied by eight letters on the subject of sympathy by de Grouchy herself that were addressed to a certain C***, who might have been Condorcet, although he had been executed in 1793, but who might also have been the medical philosopher Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, both because he was a close acquaintance (he was married to Sophie de Grouchy’s sister) and because he was to take up several of the concerns of the Lettres sur la sympathie in his own Rapports du physique au moral de l’homme of 1802. Both works addressed the problem of explaining how some sentiments could also be moral sentiments, as, intriguingly, the title of Smith’s book appeared to announce. Both works also went on to present parallel critical assessments of what they took to be Smith’s solution to the problem. The content and direction of these assessments form the basis of this new, skilfully annotated edition of the Lettres produced by Marc André Bernier and Deidre Dawson. It has been complemented by six illuminating essays, by Elisabeth Badinter, Catriona Seth, Daniel Dumouchel, Michel Malherbe, and the two editors themselves, dealing both with Grouchy’s Lettres and the broader subject of the French reception of Smith’s moral theory. As Badinter and Seth note in their contributions, it is likely that Grouchy’s translation and commentary were intended originally to complement the never published (and possibly never written) commentary by her husband on the translation of Smith’s Wealth of Nations published in 1790 by the poet Jean-Antoine Roucher. Grouchy’s assessment of Smith’s moral theory was therefore designed to parallel Condorcet’s assessment of Smith’s political economy. As the well-researched essays by the other contributors help to show, one of the implications of this parallel is that Grouchy’s text amounts to a helpful guide not only to the similarities and differences between her own and Smith’s moral theories, but also between Smith’s and Condorcet’s versions of political economy. Most of the emphasis in recent scholarship has tended to highlight the similarities. With this timely edition, it will be easier to identify some of the differences, particularly in the light of Smith’s treatment of the idea of an impartial spectator and of the imaginative capabilities that this idea presupposed. This, in turn, will help with the still unfinished task of finding out more about the content and shape of European moral and political thought after Rousseau.