Our Great Purpose
Adam Smith on Living a Better Life
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
Invaluable wisdom on living a good life from the founder of modern economics
Adam Smith is best known today as the founder of modern economics, but he was also an uncommonly brilliant philosopher who was especially interested in the perennial question of how to live a good life. Our Great Purpose is a short and illuminating guide to Smith's incomparable wisdom on how to live well, written by one of today's leading Smith scholars.
In this inspiring and entertaining book, Ryan Patrick Hanley describes Smith's vision of "the excellent and praiseworthy character," and draws on the philosopher's writings to show how each of us can go about developing one. For Smith, an excellent character is distinguished by qualities such as prudence, self-command, justice, and benevolence—virtues that have been extolled since antiquity. Yet Smith wrote not for the ancient polis but for the world of market society—our world—which rewards self-interest more than virtue. Hanley shows how Smith set forth a vision of the worthy life that is uniquely suited to us today.
Full of invaluable insights on topics ranging from happiness and moderation to love and friendship, Our Great Purpose enables modern readers to see Smith in an entirely new light—and along the way, learn what it truly means to live a good life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hanley (Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue), professor of political science at Boston College, explores how to live a good life using the work of Adam Smith as a guide particularly his 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments in this informative but unfocused work. Hanley argues that Smith, though best known as an economist, was a social theorist as well and was deeply concerned with how to live a happy and beneficial life. Hanley selects 27 quotations from Moral Sentiments and two from Smith's better-known 1776 Wealth of Nations, strung together in no particular order to illustrate Smith's thinking. Each quote is concerned with a single topic with titles such as "On Self-Interest," "On Jesus," and "On Hume" and is presented with Hanley's brief paraphrase, which he follows with a longer analysis. Hanley makes it clear from the outset that he does not consider this volume either a scholarly endeavor or a self-help book, making it difficult to tell whom he expects his audience to be. Lacking sufficient analysis to be of interest to scholars or a convincing new case about how Smith's thinking is relevant to today that might attract general readers, this will appeal only to devoted acolytes of Smith.
