The Theory of Moral Sentiments
By Adam Smith
Foreword by C. William Pollard
(2009)Discussion Guide Included
What can constrain our self-interest and greed? Selections from Smith’s classic text help us make the connections between virtue and free markets.
The headlines blame “greed” for the worldwide economic crisis, but greed is nothing new. The real failure lies deeper, in our growing disconnect between moral and economic concerns.
Many people know Adam Smith as the economic genius whose 1776 Wealth of Nations helped us see the potential of the free market system. But his famous “invisible hand” actually appears first in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, 1790), which Smith considered his best and most important work. Here he lays out the personal moral foundations necessary for a free market economy—and a free society.
Society, he argues, is not held together just by rules and regulations. It is connected by sympathy—by a principled and empathetic regard for the interest of others. The “invisible hand” of the market economy may direct our self-interest to produce economic good, but it is not intended to replace the virtuous conduct necessary for a healthy society. As we have seen in recent months, without something like Smith’s “impartial spectator” guiding our conscience, firms, markets, and even governments themselves will collapse under the weight of unfettered self-interest.
The Spring 2009 edition of The Trinity Forum Reading introduces selections from this classic text. In his Foreword, C. William Pollard, Chairman Emeritus of The ServiceMaster Company, draws on his extensive experience confronting these issues at a public company. He helps us ask the critical questions that connect Smith’s ideas to the issues confronting responsible leaders of business and other enterprises in the twenty-first century.
“We either approve or disapprove of the conduct of another man according as we feel that . . . we either can or cannot entirely sympathize with the sentiments and motives which directed it. And, in the same manner . . . we endeavor to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it.” —Adam Smith
48 pages + cover (gold foil lettering on “Persian Blue” grooved stock).
“As Peter Drucker has often noted, leaders must recognize that management is a liberal art, requiring an understanding of the human condition and a recognition that our humanity cannot be defined solely by its physical or rational nature. . . . Our spiritual dimension is the driver for developing a philosophy of life, a worldview, that can provide a moral and ethical framework and standard that is not relative and functions even in the absence of prescribed rules. In Adam Smith’s terms that spiritual dimension is ‘the man within’.” —Bill Pollard, from the Foreword
