The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Published seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations and revised until the end of his life, this is Smith’s account of how moral judgement works. We approve of conduct, he argues, by imagining ourselves in the position of an impartial spectator, and sympathy, the capacity to feel with another, is the mechanism. Read alongside the later book, it complicates the caricature of Smith as a theorist of self-interest.