On Moral Sentiments: Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith

This unique anthology brings together for the first time the reactions that greeted the publication of Adam Smith's major philosophical work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Spanning over a hundred years of critical responses, the collection includes three different sections: the initial reply from Smith's friends David Hume, Edmund Burke and William Robertson; the more considered opinions put forward by Smith's contemporaries, fellow Scots philosophers such as Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson or Dugald Stewart; and, finally, the later nineteenth-century, largely critical, views expressed by a new generation of philosophers.

The book reclaims Adam Smith as a major eighteenth-century moral philosopher, giving a rare insight into the atmosphere in which his ideas emerged and evolved.