The Theory of Moral Sentiments

In 1759 Smith Published his first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Didactic, exhortative, and analytic by turns, The Theory lays the psychological foundation on which The Wealth of Nations was later to be built. In it Smith described the principles of "human nature ", which, together with Hume and the other leading philosophers of his time, he took as a universal and unchanging datum from which social institutions, as well as social behaviour, could be deduced. One question in particular interested Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This was a problem that had 
attracted Smith's teacher Hutcheson and a number of Scottish philosophers before him. The question was the source of the ability to form moral judgements, including judgements on one's own behaviour, in the face of the seemingly overriding passions for self-preservation and self-interest. Smith's answer, at considerable length, is the presence within each of us of an "inner man" who plays the role of the "impartial
spectator", approving or condemning our own and others' actions with a voice impossible to disregard. (The theory may sound less naive if the question is reformulated to ask how instinctual drives are socialized through the superego.) 

The thesis of the impartial spectator, however, conceals a more important aspect of the book. Smith saw humans as created by their ability to reason and - no less important - by their capacity for sympathy. This duality serves both to pit individuals against one another and to provide them with the rational and moral faculties to create institutions by which the internecine struggle can be mitigated and even turned to the common good. He wrote in his Moral Sentiments the famous observation that he was to repeat later in The Wealth of Nations: that self-seeking men are often "led by an invisible hand... without knowing it , without intending it, to advance the interest of the society." It should be noted that scholars have long debated whether Moral Sentiments complemented or was in conflict with The Wealth of Nations, which followed it. At one level there is a seeming clash between the theme of social morality contained in the first and largely amoral explanation of the manner in which individuals are socialized to become the market-oriented and class-bound actors that set the economic system into motion. The Theory quickly brought Smith wide esteem and in particular attracted the attention of Charles Townshend, himself something of an amateur economist, a considerable wit, and somewhat less of a statesman, whose fate it was to be the chancellor of the exchequer responsible for the measures of taxation that ultimately provoked the American Revolution. Townshend had recently married and was searching for a tutor for his stepson and ward, the young Duke of Buccleuch. Influenced by the strong recommendations of Hume and his own admiration for The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he Approached Smith to take the Charge. The terms of employment were lucrative (an annual salary of Ј300 plus travelling expenses and a pension of Ј300 a year after), considerably more than Smith had earned as a professor.