As well as providing a brief biography of Sophie de Grouchy, the introduction sets out the aims of the book. It describes how A Republic of Sympathy is the tale of how thought could be produced by an eighteenth-century woman in a time of Revolution: with all the possibilities, limitations, and opportunities that this period offered. It outlines how over this period, Grouchy developed her own, unique form of republicanism, by appealing to sympathy as the glue between the individual and the republic. It emphasises that Grouchy’s thought consisted of a series of shifting, adapting ideas, which nevertheless consistently relied on this sentiment. It describes how Grouchy not only experiment with variations of her theory over this period, but with different mediums of expressing her ideas: including pedagogical treatise, journal articles, translated texts, commentaries, collaborative projects, or embodied in her lived relationships. It also highlights Grouchy’s key interlocutors: from Adam Smith, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from her husband, the marquis de Condorcet to Benjamin Constant, from Thomas Paine to Jacques Pierre Brissot.

Chapter 5 explores the context and reason for the publication of the Letters on Sympathy in 1798 as an accompaniment to her translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. For Grouchy, the Terror and the fall of Robespierre were personally traumatic and led to her decision to divorce Condorcet shortly before his death. However, these events did not introduce any major changes to her philosophy. Deprived of her key intellectual partner, she attempted (more or less unsuccessfully) to recreate the partnership she had shared with Condorcet with her lover, Maillia Garat, and her brother, Emmanuel de Grouchy. Moreover, the publication of the Letters was intended to be a reminder of the ideals of the early revolution, in the face of the increasingly elitist politics of the Directory regime and her allies in the republican centre. Nevertheless, the uncertain political atmosphere of 1795–8, in which a fear of left-wing plots combined with an increasing suspicion of female political outspokenness, led her to package her message together with the less controversial Theory of Moral Sentiments. This allowed her ideas to be dismissed by some, at least publically, as purely dealing with moral, as opposed to political matters.

Chapter 1 focuses on the first draft of Grouchy’s Lettres on Sympathy, the only text to be published under her name in her lifetime. In contrast to commonly received historical wisdom, it argues that Grouchy did not, in fact, begin writing this treatise between 1791 and 1793. Rather, it suggests that it was first composed around 1786, in response to an Académie française competition to produce the best elementary moral treatise on the duties of the man and the citizen. It goes on to reconstruct the contents of the original text. Her aim, in this first draft, was non-political: she wanted to demonstrate how individuals, rather than regurgitating a catechism, could learn to discern moral truths for themselves through a reasoned reflection on the sentiment of sympathy. She predominantly engaged with the ideas found in the moral, pedagogical, and epistemological works of Rousseau, Smith, and Locke. Despite the circumstances of its eventual publication as an accompaniment to her translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, it is argued that Grouchy demonstrated significant disagreements with Smith, and instead hewed closely to the ideas of Rousseau.

This chapter introduces the idea of a competition–democracy nexus as the object of inquiry of the book and traces its intellectual trajectory across six centuries of legal, economic, and political thought. It shows how early manifestations of the idea of a competition–democracy nexus (competition–democracy nexus 1.0) took shape in the late 16th and early 17th century with the critique of monopoly by Thomas More, the early common lawyers and the English Leveller movement. It also recounts how early liberal thinkers, most notably Adam Smith, James Steuart and Montesquieu, celebrated the advent of competitive markets as a driving-force behind the transformation of the feudal order into a republican society. The chapter also analyses how the idea of a competition–democracy nexus (competition–democracy nexus 2.0) lay at the origin of US antitrust law and had an important bearing on various antitrust paradigms until the 1970s. The chapter further describes the emergence of the idea of a competition–democracy nexus as the central tenet of the German Ordoliberal School before and during the Second World War and its influence on the early days of EU competition law (competition–democracy nexus 3.0).

Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of the modern concept of the reasonable person in nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that this development resulted from the legal and economic needs of the industrial revolution and was informed by the metaphysics of the Scottish sentimental Enlightenment. The chapter’s point of departure is the case known as Blyth v The Company of Proprietors of the Birmingham Waterworks, one of the first cases to discuss explicitly modern law’s reasonable person. Distinguishing between a rational Enlightenment and a sentimental Enlightenment, the chapter then shows that the underlying rationale of the reasonable person relies heavily on the sentimental Enlightenment, namely on David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s thought on the importance of empathy, judgement making in relation to the feelings of others, the incomplete understanding of morality that can be gained from objective reason, and the importance of a human common sense. The third section explains how the industrial revolution and the sentimental Enlightenment influenced the life of Baron Alderson, the judge who oversaw Mr Blyth’s case against the Birmingham Waterworks.

This chapter explores some central features of morality in terms of what are commonly regarded as virtues. A virtue is a disposition that is an important feature of one’s character. As such, a virtue endures over an extended period of time, not just for a brief moment. Still, a virtue such as honesty implies its regular exercise. However, one can occasionally behave dishonestly without this undermining its standing as one’s virtue. The notion that some emphasis on basic moral virtues should be included in K-12 and college education has long received strong public support. However, there has also been widespread disagreement about just how this should be done and with what ends in mind. Presumably, some general uncertainty, if not disagreement, about the nature and foundation of morality accounts for much of this. This uncertainty is discussed in terms of reasonableness.

This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s engagement with narratives of property and property society in Smith and Rousseau, as reflected in her A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). In political economy’s imaginary, the figure of property encapsulates the ambivalences at the heart of late eighteenth-century modernity and poses questions of affective response and social relation which were fundamental to political economy’s account of social origin. Wollstonecraft’s attention to property of many kinds on her travels is read as an on-going critique of the contemporary political economic order, as well as attempts to imagine alternatives to it, such as the independent, comfortable existence suggested by the farmstead or cottage. Literary form emerges as a means through which questions of human personality and identity in commercial modernity might be framed, and as a means of insisting on ‘something’ more than the mediated social relations of market society’s ‘society of strangers’.

This chapter opens with an account of the Bank Restriction Act (1797) as marking a crisis in the British credit system on which the economy depended. It reads Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), as investigating the gendered systems of affect, belief, and credit which underwrote both political economy and social relations. Against Adam Smith’s attempt to regulate potentially disruptive forms of affect, including credulity and sensibility, the ‘extreme credulity’ of Wollstonecraft’s protagonist, Maria, rewrites the usual story of irrational femininity as the binary other to masculine rationality. Demonstrating the mutual imbrication of financial and sexual economies in late eighteenth-century commercial society, Wollstonecraft attempts to mobilise an alternative economy of social feeling to reform a selfish, sexualised world of commerce based on self-interest, and to reformulate the relations between morality and commercial society – between affect and money – by asking what else might circulate to social advantage.

When Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was first published, it was categorised in Joseph Johnson’s Analytical Review as a work of political economy. The introduction asks what this term meant for Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries, and argues that it was used to understand the nature and operation of modern commercial society, as well as the potential for its reformation. Wollstonecraft’s relation to this project is explored, both through a survey of her engagement with Adam Smith and through her lived experience as an unmarried, often indebted woman in a society organised around possession of property. Wollstonecraft is presented as a writer engaging throughout her career as a critic of the connected material, economic, moral, psychological, and social conditions of modern commercial contemporaneity, and as anticipating the opposition to political economy of later Romantic writers.

This chapter covers: historical theorizing about what role the state ought to play in an economy; from the mercantilist to the market role; historical fear of a Leviathan government role; government role in France and the origin of the term “laissez faire”; Adam Smith’s alternative view of the “wealth of nations”; the role of the “invisible hand”; Weber’s view of mercantilism and of its role in the growth of the capitalist system; advent of the Industrial Revolution and its need for energy, and also for better use of time; Adam Smith’s view of the role of the state in regulations and also in some redistribution; and the importance of empathy in communities.

In Chapter 2, I discuss the moral foundation for capitalism provided by Adam Smith. The great philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment is frequently invoked by economists as the father of their discipline, yet Smith’s life and writings have been widely distorted. In contrast to his popular caricature today, Smith was a moral philosopher of the highest caliber who incorporated important moral perspectives throughout his writings. Smith presented his moral theory based on social norms and culture in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and maintained it as the moral foundation for his economic theory in The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s moral theory is based on the principle of sympathy and the behavioral norms that arise due to past social experiences that reveal standards of right and wrong behavior. Similar to the other philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, he attributes moral judgment and the moral conscience to the impartial spectator, but he also reserves important roles for religion and moral codes such as the Stoic virtues. When nineteenth-century classical economists adopted narrow self-interest as the first principle of their discipline, therefore, they adopted a principle that Smith and the other Scottish Enlightenment philosophers had adamantly rejected.

This chapter examines the attempts of Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith to reconcile war with their theories of progress. Both made impartiality a touchstone of enlightened judgement, and so found that the national partiality aroused by war was deeply problematic. Humes optimistic view of progress was undermined by his pessimistic account of the passions released in war, and by the evidence of the destructive waste entailed in contemporary war-making. His desire to moderate contemporary bellicosity led him, in his History of England, to emphasise medieval magnanimity in victory, in a way that was at odds with his progressive agenda. Adam Smith encountered a comparable problem. His attempts in his Theory of Moral Sentiments to provide improving models of public responses to war were at odds with his later conviction that the public was dangerously insulated from the destructive realities of war.

The political theorist and intellectual historian Istvan Hont argued that the term ‘commercial society’ was used by Adam Smith in ways that were distinct from any of his peers. Smith, Hont claims, ‘stretched’ the term in order to ‘make it a theoretical object for moral and political inquiry’. This chapter engages with this argument using computational methods for interrogating datasets of varying sizes.

The first, a custom-produced ‘Adam Smith’ corpus, is compared with a ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ corpus, both of which have been extracted from the larger Eighteenth Century Collections Online dataset. For the second of these datasets, a list of publishers’ names has been collated, from existing scholarly enquiries by Richard B. Sher and Andrew Hook, to construct a dataset that enables one to inspect and interrogate what might be thought of as the distinctively Scottish history of ideas in the period within which Smith wrote his seminal works.

The comparative method allows us to test Hont’s assertion that Smith deployed the concept of ‘commercial society’ idiosyncratically by charting the extent to which the features of Smith’s thinking were adopted by his contemporaries, firstly within the Scottish context, and secondly within anglophone culture of the period as represented by Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

The relationship between capitalism and nationalism escapes easy generalization – hardly surprising given the many conceptions of nationalism, and the many stages and varieties of capitalism. Let us begin, then, with some ideal-typical definitions.

Nationalism is a form of politicized ethnicity in which a self-identified cultural group seeks to create or succeeds in creating a nation-state of its own. It also refers to ideological goals and tangible policies oriented to the preservation or strengthening of the nation-state.

There are as many ways of defining capitalism as there are of nationalism. For our purposes, this definition is most useful. Capitalism is a political-economic system in which property rights are legally protected by the state, in which prices are set primarily by supply and demand in a market composed of profit-seeking entrepreneurs or companies, usually (but not always) employing free wage labor.

Social philosophers and theologians prioritize the demands of justice whenever they conflict with agape’s claims. They do so based on the following implicit rules, namely: (1) Perfect duties take precedence over imperfect duties. (2) Subsistence test—whatever is critical for society’s existence has primacy. (3) Legal debt takes priority over moral debt. Both economic history and praxis validate the need to prioritize the claims of justice. After all, it provides critical legal institutional preconditions for the creation and protection of markets. It provides the economic guardrails to prevent anti-social preferences and transactions. It is essential to getting around collective-action problems.

The last Fifty years have witnessed the rediscovery of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy and an increasing exploration of his conception of himself as a moral philosopher. Recent scholarship has dwelt on the eclectic nature of this thinking. Scholars have suggested that Smith draws on and combines elements drawn from across the ancient and modern schools of philosophy, and that the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment is characterised by an awareness of and response to the fact of moral pluralism. This leaves open the possibility that different modes of moral thinking can issue in incommensurable conclusions: that in some cases there might be no way to decide what is the ‘right’ thing to do. I explore the implications of these readings for Smith’s understanding of the role of philosophy in moral decision-making and, more particularly, what this means for teaching moral philosophy. Smith saw philosophy as a specific and limited activity that formed but a small part of the moral life of the individual. Moreover, Smith cautioned against over-ambition in philosophical thinking and warned of the intellectual, social, and political dangers of too much philosophy.

In the final edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), Smith recommends several literary authors – Racine and Voltaire, Richardson, Marivaux, and Riccoboni – as “much better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus,” specifically in their illustrations of relationships of love and friendship as well as the “private and domestic affections,” like “parental tenderness” and “filial piety” (III.3.13-4). Smith does not here explain how literature performs this instructive function, and his remarks on the function of literature are scattered across TMS and the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. This chapter contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Smith and literature by focusing closely on this recommendation, elucidating the instructive potential of the early novel, and showing how well suited the techniques of that form are to the goals and challenges of Smith’s sentimentalist moral philosophy. By examining shared themes and formal features of the novels of Samuel Richardson, Pierre Marivaux, and Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, I show how a reader’s engagement with these novels helps to enable and train their skills as an impartial and sympathetic spectator.

Adam Smith argued that, as the monopoly provider of religious services, the medieval Church represented a formidable impediment to economic development. How did the Church maintain its monopoly; and how did that monopoly break down in the Reformation? Further, given that the secular lords had a substantial comparative advantage in violence relative to the Church, how did the Church maintain its power? In addressing these questions, Smith developed a rich and systematic approach to the incentives, institutions, and competition surrounding the medieval Church.