Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life by Ryan Patrick Hanley, and: Being Me Being You: Adam Smith and Empathy by Samuel Fleischacker (review)

These two new books on Smith as a guide to contemporary ethical practice mark the continuing rise of his stock. The earlier twentieth-century estimate of Smith's contribution to intellectual history as largely a theorist and apologist for capitalism has been effectively displaced over the last few decades by a new version of Smith as a thinker and ethicist of much greater breadth, depth, and sophistication. Building on this thorough re-evaluation of Smith's place, a development to which Samuel Fleischacker and Ryan Hanley have themselves been important contributors, the authors take things a step further in these two texts, evidently designed not only to make the case for Smith's philosophical contributions but to significantly expand the audience for his work.

Hanley and Fleischacker present differently premised but related arguments that the formerly underrated corpus of Smith's work offers an unrivaled, indeed indispensable, guide to the moral and political demands of modern life. Hanley's introduction presents Smith as "an excellent guide" to big questions about standards of judgment to apply and paths to take (1). Fleischacker, positioning his book in the context of recent critiques of empathy by Paul Bloom and Jesse Prinz, offers his work as both a challenge to these critiques and a needed clarification of Smithian sympathy, here replaced by the term empathy (a substitution that is discussed below). His aim is to establish the necessity of empathy, with its ability "to do crucial moral work for us" that other ethical models cannot (xii). Smith ascends in these two studies to the significance of a Marcus Aurelius: not just an important writer on ethics, but a truly popular one, whom everybody should read.

To take Hanley first: as the subtitle clearly indicates, this is a book evidently aimed at a wider audience than is usual for a philosophical study, with references to The Wall Street Journal's "Off Duty" column and Wall Street's own Gordon Gekko interleaved with accounts of Smith's arguments on how to live a satisfying and responsible life. In thirty short and very reader-friendly chapters that survey Smith's insights on such topics as wealth, friendship, love, pleasure, and tranquility, Hanley makes a case for Smith as an author—the author—uniquely fitted to offer an ethics for a capitalist age. Smith offers guidance not only on the sometimes difficult kinds of virtue that benefit the larger community, such as self-command, the desire to be worthy of public praise, and so on, but also, in an Aristotelian spirit, to encourage "human flourishing" and general well-being (73). According to Hanley's account, Smith is exceptionally well-positioned to operate as "a useful guide for us today," thanks to his undeniable foresight about the workings of about what Smith terms commercial society and we call capitalism (134). Smith's ambition and (rhetorical) ability to engage with large audiences, his fusion of ancient philosophical work with that of later Christian thinkers, and, above all, his unsurpassed insight into the particular kinds of moral challenges and opportunities that this new form of social organization would bring along with it, gives him in an ethical vantage point unmatched by any other writer on modernity (7, 134–37).

The tone is serious but informal, well-judged in light of Hanley's project to make engaging with Smith an inviting prospect for a broad range of readers. The brevity and straightforwardness of Hanley's thirty chapters (daily readings for a month?), each a self-contained unpacking of a quotation from Smith, does not prevent him from building a cumulative argument for Smith as guide throughout the book. Most of these quotations are drawn from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but one of the best...