(1999). Hume, Smith and Ferguson: Friendship in commercial society. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 2, The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity, pp. 33-49.

Adam Smith (1723–90) provided a novel and subtle account of the new social physics that emerged to accommodate the economic changes taking place in his time. This article explores Smith’s views on the effect of commercialization on friendship, and then questions one prominent interpretation of his approach, that of Allan Silver. Against the contested reading, we argue that the new ‘strangership’ described by Smith is not warm, but rather, cool-friendship enhancing. We suggest that Cicero’s treatment of friendship illuminates Smith’s views (...) on this topic. (shrink)

A critic of minoritarian criticism. McCarthy has adopted de Certau's appellation for the dispossessed for a new cant in criticism that fails to adopt any real position. The 'new marginalism' he argues is the mantle of a new band of critics who suffer a kind of infantile disorder that fails their own test of critique and the reflexivity required to undertake it.