In this book I have provided an interpretation of sympathy in Adam Smith's thought that opens itself quite naturally to questions about ethics in a global age, in an age marked by dramatic changes in the spatial arrangement of human life. In brief, I have argued that Smithian sympathy is best understood as a social practice through which morality is intersubjectively produced in shared physical spaces. Challenging a frequent assumption that sympathy is an emotion for Smith, or a virtue, I have emphasized the dramatic activities of surveillance and discipline, concluding that Smith's description of sympathetic activity is also a rich anthropology of culture formation. Understanding sympathy as such will help us now, in the present chapter, as we inquire into the spatial texture and the cosmopolitan significance of sympathetic activity as Smith presented it.

Smith's account of sympathy in the Moral Sentiments surely ranks among the subtlest accounts we have of the nature of sympathetic activity and of its prominence in human life. It is certainly the best known dimension of his moral thought among both students and casual consumers of Smith. And yet, in a time when so many of us are thinking about globalization and various cosmopolitical conundrums, there has been little exploration of Smith's thoughts on sympathy and proximity.