The Recovery of Liberalism: Moral Man and Immoral Society Sixty Years Later

1993 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 171-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Little
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Collective Good ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Sharp Distinction ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
National Life ◽  
Individual Self

This essay is a discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr's 1932 classic Moral Man, which critiques the Liberal Movement up to the 1930s. Little reviews some of the books fundamental conclusions. First, according to Niebuhr, to believe that individual self-interest is fulfilled in a collective good is to subscribe to a “utopian illusion”. He faults liberals for allowing themselves to be victims of the Enlightenment, i.e. being incurable optimistically rational about morals and politics. Second, he addresses the issue of the will for power inevitably dominating the will for good. Liberalism, in the sense of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Locke, lends itself as a venue for this to occur through its condonation of egoism as the intrinsic element of total social harmony. Little develops on Niebuhr's theory of conscience where there is a sharp distinction between individual and collective morality, the latter being much less susceptible to liberal morality than the former. Where individuals are endowed with an emotional sense of sympathy and consideration toward their kind, groups or nations would find this difficult, if not impossible due to their inclusive nature. Finally, he points out the mixture of morality and power in national life: where politics, while being inseparable from virtue and legitimacy, still abuses those beliefs in the interests of “national egoism”. When moral language is used in international politics without application of self-criticism, it diverts attention from the real motives of the statesmen who use it. Little does indicate deficiencies in Niebuhr's attempts to recover liberalism in his later writings toward the end of the essay.

Origins of British Enlightenment Rhetoric

2014 ◽  
pp. 522-534
Author(s):  
Arthur Walzer
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Traditional Theory ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
George Campbell ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
Literature History

British rhetorical theory in the eighteenth century departs from classical theory in significant ways. First, influenced by the empiricism of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and especially David Hume, Joseph Priestley and George Campbell recast traditional theory in psychological terms. Second, influenced by the belles lettres tradition, Adam Smith and Hugh Blair shift the focus of rhetoric from composition to criticism and create a theory intended to account for literature, history, philosophy, and oratory. Furthermore, in terms of rhetoric’s formative ideal, Quintilian’s ideal orator would share his place of privilege with the polite person of “taste” and “sensibility,” who would speak in a conversational register, as the coffeehouse emerged as a venue to rival the forum. Some scholars have welcomed these innovations; others have seen them as a radical wrong turn. This chapter discusses this transformation of rhetoric during the Enlightenment and reviews and attempts to resolve the scholarly debates the transformation has prompted.

Ethics in the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
pp. 298-350
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Important Development ◽  
Philosophical Ethics ◽  
Naturalistic Account

Philosophical ethics in Britain was (and is) at least as much a contribution to as a reaction against the naturalism of the Enlightenment. This chapter examines Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham. Like Kant, Hamann, and Jacobi, Reid responds to Humean scepticism. But unlike their response, his is entirely naturalistic. Its strengths and weaknesses are examined. Ethics in Scotland was strongly sentimentalist. It culminated in Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments, a naturalistic account of the epistemology of evaluative and practical normativity that bases it on a phenomenology of the sentiments. It remains a contender against German accounts of will and reason. In England the most important development was the growth of utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham was by far its most influential exponent. The third section of this chapter examines the principle of utility and considers what Bentham meant by his rejection of natural rights.

The Novel of Sensibility in the 1780s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Franklin
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Epistolary Novels ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter studies the novels of sensibility in the 1780s. The philosophy of John Locke, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson had influenced the first wave of epistolary novels of sensibility beginning in the 1740s. These explored the interaction between emotion and reason in producing moral actions. Response to stimuli was minutely examined, especially the relationship between the psychological and physiological manifestations of feelings. Later in the century, and, in particular during the late 1780s when the novel enjoyed a surge in popularity, the capacity for fine feeling became increasingly valued for its own sake rather than moralized. Ultimately, sensibility should be seen as a long-lasting literary movement rather than an ephemeral fashion. It put paternal authority and conventional modes of masculinity under question.

scholarly journals HOW SHOULD WE RECONCILE SELF-REGARDING AND PRO-SOCIAL MOTIVATIONS? A RENAISSANCE OF “DAS ADAM SMITH PROBLEM”

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-102
Author(s):  
Natalie Gold
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Crowding Out ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Intrinsic Motivations ◽  
Social Motivations ◽  
Motivation Crowding ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Selfish Agents

Abstract“Das Adam Smith Problem” is the name given by eighteenth-century German scholars to the question of how to reconcile the role of self-interest in the Wealth of Nations with Smith’s advocacy of sympathy in Theory of Moral Sentiments. As the discipline of economics developed, it focused on the interaction of selfish agents, pursuing their private interests. However, behavioral economists have rediscovered the existence and importance of multiple motivations, and a new Das Adam Smith Problem has arisen, of how to accommodate self-regarding and pro-social motivations in a single system. This question is particularly important because of evidence of motivation crowding, where paying people can backfire, with payments achieving the opposite effects of those intended. Psychologists have proposed a mechanism for the crowding out of “intrinsic motivations” for doing a task, when payment is used to incentivize effort. However, they argue that pro-social motivations are different from these intrinsic motivations, implying that crowding out of pro-social motivations requires a different mechanism. In this essay I present an answer to the new Das Adam Smith problem, proposing a mechanism that can underpin the crowding out of both pro-social and intrinsic motivations, whereby motivations are prompted by frames and motivation crowding is underpinned by the crowding out of frames. I explore some of the implications of this mechanism for research and policy.

How the Better Reason Wins

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 540-563
Author(s):  
Anne Pollok
Keyword(s):  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Personal Relations ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Individual Self

AbstractThis paper considers Mendelssohn’s attempt at a definition of Enlightenment in terms of Bildung, comprising the theoretical element of the enlightenment of reason with the practical requirements of culture. To avoid a possible dialectics of enlightenment, where the very methods one uses to enlighten harbour the seeds of new blindness, Mendelssohn advocates considering the lively connections between people, the role of traditions and personal relations in the formation of an individual self, and the connections we should have to our past, present, and future. Thus, his essay from 1784 can be read as an apt defence of a dialogical notion of freedom within the Enlightenment era.

Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Pennington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Baruch Spinoza ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Central Belief

The Quakers were by far the most successful of the radical religious groups to emerge from the turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century—and their survival into the present day was largely facilitated by the transformation of the movement during its first fifty years. What began as a loose network of charismatic travelling preachers was, by the start of the eighteenth century, a well-organized and international religious machine. This shift is usually explained in terms of a desire to avoid persecution, but Quakers, Christ and the Enlightenment argues instead for the importance of theological factors as the major impetus for change. In the first sustained account of the theological motivations guiding the development of seventeenth-century Quakerism, the volume explores the Quakers’ positive intellectual engagement with those outside the movement to offer a significant reassessment of the causal factors determining the development of early Quakerism. Tracing the Quakers’ engagement with such luminaries as Baruch Spinoza, Henry More, John Locke, and John Norris, the volume unveils the Quakers’ concerted attempts to bolster their theological reputation through the refinement of their central belief in the ‘inward Christ’, or ‘the Light within’. In doing so, the study challenges persistent stereotypes of early modern radicalism as anti-intellectual and ill-educated—and indeed, as defined either by ‘rationalist’ or ‘spiritualist’ excess. Rather, the theological concerns of the Quakers and their interlocutors point to a crisis of Christology weaving through the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century, which has long been underestimated as significant fuel for the emerging Enlightenment

Marx y las ciencias sociales: La interpretación de Veblen sobre Das Kapital

Protrepsis ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 61-76
Author(s):  
Victor M. Hernández Márquez
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Thorstein Veblen ◽  
David Ricardo ◽  
Siglo Xx

El presente trabajo se propone exponer y discutir la recepción temprana de Das Kapital en el campo de las ciencias sociales, enfocándose en el análisis que Thorstein Veblen hizo a principios del siglo XX. Con una formación sólida como filósofo y como economista, Veblen era la persona mejor preparada para mostrar las virtudes y defectos de la teoría de Marx. Según su análisis, el cual denomino interpretación holista, la originalidad de Marx recae en la forma como amalgama elementos pertenecientes a dos tradiciones de pensamiento completamente ajenas entre sí; es decir, el idealismo alemán, y en particular, al teoría de Hegel, con la economía política inglesa de Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham y David Ricardo. Por consiguiente, dado que la fuerza de la teoría del capital no recaen en los elementos considerados de manera aislada, sino en la forma en que han sido incorporado en una estructura lógica fuerte, sostiene Veblen, no tiene sentido discutir la teoría de Marx analizando cada uno de sus elementos por separado; proceder de esta forma solo puede dar lugar al tipo de incomprensiones que han provocado por igual criticas desafortunadas y extensos comentarios insustanciales, algunos de los cuales es posible encontrar aún en la literatura.

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