Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life
ISBN: 9780691197753
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Princeton University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Smith Adam 1723–1790; Conduct of life; Life;

Hanley (Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue), professor of political science at Boston College, explores how to live a good life using the work of Adam Smith as a guide--particularly his 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments--in this informative but unfocused work. Hanley argues that Smith, though best known as an economist, was a social theorist as well and was deeply concerned with how to live a happy and beneficial life. Hanley selects 27 quotations from Moral Sentiments and two from Smith's better-known 1776 Wealth of Nations, strung together in no particular order to illustrate Smith's thinking. Each quote is concerned with a single topic--with titles such as "On Self-Interest," "On Jesus," and "On Hume"--and is presented with Hanley's brief paraphrase, which he follows with a longer analysis. Hanley makes it clear from the outset that he does not consider this volume either a scholarly endeavor or a self-help book, making it difficult to tell whom he expects his audience to be. Lacking sufficient analysis to be of interest to scholars or a convincing new case about how Smith's thinking is relevant to today that might attract general readers, this will appeal only to devoted acolytes of Smith. (Sept.)

Ryan Patrick Hanley is professor of political science at Boston College. He is the author of Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue and the editor of Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy (Princeton) and the Penguin Classics edition of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

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