Judith Shklar was uncomfortable grounding liberalism on a “summum bonum toward which all political agents should strive” since she believed that monistic impulses are fundamentally incompatible with an individual's freedom, and by extension a political community's freedom, to chose its own ends. She also insisted that positive goods make for necessarily precarious foundations since they are subject to endless contestation and violence. And yet, eager to prevail over relativity and unthinking acquiescence to culture and tradition (read: eager unequivocally to condemn Nazism and regimes that resemble it), Shklar wanted to identify a moral minimum that was incontrovertible. Instead of assuming a more conventional liberal posture and positing an abstract summum bonum like justice or equality, she reflected instead on human psychology and experience and identified a universal aversion to cruelty, a summum malum “which all of us know and would avoid if only we could.”

Smith's portraits in the last chapter of the “weak man” and the “wise and virtuous man” are ideal types. Most people fall somewhere in the middle. Like Cicero's De Officiis, which Smith characterized as a doctrine of “imperfect, but attainable virtues,” the Moral Sentiments seeks to describe the morality of ordinary people, to whom Smith variously referred as “tolerably good soldiers,” “commonly honest men,” the “mean,” the “many,” the “greater part,” the “crude,” the “mass,” the “vulgar,” the “coarse clay of mankind.” Cicero described the nature of his project in the following way:

In this chapter, I do four things. First, I argue that Smith was primarily concerned in the Moral Sentiments with describing and legitimating the morality of ordinary people for its stabilizing effects on modern society. This will mean, ultimately, that much of the perfectionist rhetoric in his thought should be bracketed from, or at least interpreted within, the central thrust of his practical morality, which was oriented around social order. Here I fundamentally agree with Joseph Crospey, Charles Griswold and Douglas Den Uyl, among others, that Smith was primarily concerned in the Moral Sentiments with social coordination.

Until very recently, philosophers tended to ignore Adam Smith. They acknowledged his idea of sympathy in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, but generally regarded it as superficial and unsophisticated, and tended to dismiss Smith as a minor figure in the shadow of David Hume. Moreover, he was regularly cast aside as a crass materialist who reduced human motivation to selfishness and corrupted the world with a moral justification for capitalism. In this environment, Smith scholarship was left to the mercy of economists and historians of economics who because of their training and pressing worldly concerns tended to subordinate or ignore Smith's moral philosophy.

I begin with several assumptions. First, let's assume that Smith was right about our moral sentiments – that, as we discovered in Chapter 5, we are likelier to sympathize with the physically proximate, with the familiar, and with the beloved and “peculiarly connected”; and that we generally have difficulty sympathizing with that which is distant and unfamiliar without assuming facts and foisting alien criteria upon them by assimilating them to very particular, incomplete meanings and frames. Second, let's invert Pascal's wager, and assume that there is no God intervening in the world, invisibly directing human happiness through a “divine œconomy.” For Smith, “the very suspicion of a fatherless world” was “the most melancholy of all reflections.” But let's be melancholy and assume such a world. Relatedly, third, let's assume that Smith's commercial cosmopolitanism, which we characterized in Chapter 6 as a moral philosophic attempt to harmonize relations among distant peoples in a world that lacked an effective apparatus to enforce good-will, failed to hit its mark – that we still observe deep mistrust and horrific conflict among nations, among peoples, among peoples within nations, and so on; and that many people are not made “happier” (however we might conceive that) through the commercialization of modern life.

In our attempt to understand what Smith meant by “conscience” we have, so far, examined his thoughts on sympathetic judgment, and have noted the self-referential nature of the criteria spectators use when they judge. But we need to move beyond this conventional understanding of Smith's idea of sympathy “as judgment” to consider the socializing function of sympathy in Smith's larger argument. Moral life is not only about judgment, but about action and the reasons for action. No account of ordinary morality in Smith's thought is adequate if it overlooks the disciplinary effects the spectator's surveillance and judgment have upon the agent, the extent to which the spectator motivates her to modify her conduct, to act in a “proper” way, in a way the spectator can indulge, in what Smith often referred to as a “moral” way.

The idea of the kosmou politēs is very old, dating back at least to the ancient Stoics. But the idea that we might inhabit a realm beyond our own particular clans, nations, and states has re-emerged at various points throughout history, and with particular salience at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Cosmopolitanism has become a signifier of our times – the word is everywhere – though it has come to mean many things. The description “cosmopolitan” evokes a lifestyle that is enlightened, urban and worldly, one able to navigate the languages, tastes and cultures of the world's great cities with ease and panache. For many Americans the word conjures up images of Helen Gurley Brown's ideal of the independent, liberated “Cosmo” woman of the 1970s, an image reinvented for the 1990s in the wildly successful HBO television series “Sex in the City” and its celebration of “girl talk” over a pink martini-like libation known as a Cosmopolitan. The Cosmo woman's independence consisted in thinking for herself, experiencing her sexuality, and moving through the world loosened from the stifling conventions of domesticity and submissive femininity.

In modern ethical discourse, from Immanuel Kant to Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah, the cosmopolitan ideal has embodied an imperative that we think for ourselves, that we become increasingly conscious of why we do what we do, that we resist giving ourselves over wholly to the conventions of time and place.

Throughout I have emphasized Smith's focus on social order, and his desire to harmonize tensions between self and others. I ultimately argued that Smith's reconciliation of this tension through the apparatus of moral psychology yielded an acute localism that is bound to strike twenty-first-century interpreters reflecting on global interconnectedness as an insightful and finely textured theory of social coordination, but also an unsatisfying theory of, even an obstacle to, society in broader spaces.

In this chapter I shall extend my argument in two related ways. First, I will economize the tension Smith described throughout the Moral Sentiments between self and society, describing it here as a tension between economy and ethics. Clearly, this is an old subject. The tension between Adam Smith's ethical and economic thought first became a “problem” for European scholarship in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and turned on the extent that Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) arose conceptually from the ethical framework developed in the Moral Sentiments? (1759).

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.

Dramatis personae

Dates of birth and death given below are conjectural, except for Socrates.

CALICLES His boyfriend Demos, son of Plato's stepfather Pyrilampes, was in Dodds's words (Plato: Gorgias, p.261, relying here primarily on Aristophanes' Wasps 98) ‘a leading beauty about 422’. On usual assumptions about relative ages of lover and beloved, we might infer that Callicles was probably in his mid to late twenties at the same point in time. Although his ambition to succeed in politics makes Socrates describe him as lover of the Athenian demos (punning on Demos), this behaviour must be interpreted as opportunistic on Callicles' part. The views Plato attributes to him are anything but democratic. And it is probably significant that of the friends of Callicles mentioned at 487c, one at least – Andron – is known to have been a member of the short-lived oligarchic regime of the Four Hundred in 411, and the other two probably to be identified with Athenians known from other evidence to have been wealthy men. There is no trace of Callicles in history outside the Gorgias. It seems likely that for whatever reason his ambitions were unfulfilled.

CHAEREPHON (467–401) One of Socrates' oldest and closest friends, and a well-known figure in the Athens of the Peloponnesian War, frequently the topic of jokes on the comic stage, perhaps in part because of his demonic energy (Apology 21a, Charmides 153b).

The translation (by TG) is made in the case of Gorgias from the text in Dodds's edition, and in the case of Menexenus and Protagoras from Burnet's edition in the Oxford Classical Texts series. The few variations from these adopted here are mentioned in notes at the appropriate points. The notes to the translation (by MS, as with the rest of the editorial matter) have benefited in various ways from TG 's scrutiny, and the translations in their final form are the outcome of several rounds of comment from MS and rethinking by TG. Raymond Geuss and Quentin Skinner as series editors made suggestions for improvements to the draft of the introduction, all gratefully implemented. The book is therefore very much a joint production, which owes its origins to a suggestion by Jeremy Mynott, at the time Chief Executive of the Press – to whom also thanks are due.

The Gorgias and the Protagoras

The Protagoras and the Gorgias are not only the longest, but by general agreement the most important among Plato's ‘Socratic’ dialogues (the quixotic Menexenus – on which more later – is another matter). Both present Socrates in argument with leading members of the sophistic movement, questioning the claims to wisdom or expertise that they make. In both Socrates brings the discussion round to his own central preoccupation with living a good life.

But there the resemblances cease. One difference is purely formal. The Gorgias (like the Menexenus) is written as drama, with parts for Socrates, Gorgias, and various other characters, notably Polus (a follower of Gorgias who has authored a book on rhetoric) and Callicles (apparently a rising young Athenian politician). There are few indications of time or place. For the Protagoras, Plato elected for a more complex structure, beginning with a short exchange in direct dramatic form between Socrates and an unnamed companion, which then frames a lengthy report by Socrates, full of circumstantial detail, narrating an early morning visit from a young friend called Hippocrates, and their subsequent encounter with Protagoras and other sophists at the house of the wealthy aristocrat Callias.

The major difference is one of tone. Plato's writing in the Gorgias has little of its usual urbanity.