This volume provides an integrated and wide-ranging set of primary-source readings on the relationship between moral values and economic activity, as articulated by some of the leading figures in Western civilization.

Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) is the most important French liberal that most casual liberals have never heard of. Everyone knows something about Montesquieu because checks and balances and the separation of powers are household terms. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution are both established classics. But Constant is largely terra incognita even for those with a university degree—to their loss.

This paper aims to do two things. First, it describes the place that Adam Smith actually occupies in current research occurring at the boundaries of new interdisciplinary social-science fields such as evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, neuro-economics and behavioral economics. Second, it suggests a way in which Smith's place in the debates with which these subjects are concerned may be more properly defined and conceptualized. Specifically, the paper focuses on the controversial new theory of strong reciprocity, and on the reputation effects (...) that its critics think that theory neglects. (shrink)

In this book, Charles Griswold attempts to make Adam Smith speak to a postmodern generation by taking an extended detour through antiquity. The frames of reference that pervade his long, thoughtful, unfailingly engaging, though not concisely written book include next to nothing about the significance of a "sympathy" theory for modern social psychology, or about evolutionary theory or modern economic theory. Nor is much effort made to pin down the eighteenth-century context of Smith's enterprise. Instead, the book takes Smith primarily (...) as a moral philosopher in the grand Western tradition, while nonetheless arguing for the deep meaningfulness of such a Smith to a postmodern audience. (shrink)