A Little Lower Than the Angels: What the Founders Learned from Adam Smith (Part 1)

This essay will appear in two parts. This is Part 1, Part 2 can be found here.

The Psalmist says (Psalm 8:6): “You have made man a little lower than the angels.” James Madison says, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”[1] 

Madison adds that, since men and not angels are to govern men, every government must build within itself “external and internal controuls” on the people who run it. Since Madison goes on to propose that these controls take the form of ways in which self-interest can check self-interest — “ambition [can] be made to counteract ambition”— he is often read as saying that human beings are a lot less than angelic: that we cannot count on people to aspire to virtue at all. This is a lesson, moreover, that he is thought to have learned from Adam Smith, among others. Insofar as Smith’s influence on the founders has been noted, he is often thought to have encouraged the founders to recognize the pervasiveness of self interest in our interactions with one another and move accordingly away from a politics that relies on virtue — on integrity, public spirit, or concern for others — to a politics of self-interest, in which we can expect leaders only to serve their own interests, and the populace to vote only on the basis of their self-interest. 

I think this is a misreading of both Smith and the founders, including Madison, and want to present a view that emphasizes the word “little” in the quotation from the Psalms with which I began. 

If humankind stands just a little lower than the angels — if we will never be wholly virtuous — we need not conceive ourselves as wholly self-interested, either. Human nature may be best understood as a balance between virtue and self-interest; we need accept the politics neither of a Plato or Savonarola or Rousseau, aiming for communities fully driven by virtue, nor of a Hobbes or Mandeville or Bentham, assuming that people only act for their interests. And that is what Adam Smith taught, and the view that, I believe, he bequeathed to such American admirers of his as Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. 

Let’s begin with the evidence we have for Smith’s influence on the American founders. Much has been written on the role that Smith’s Scottish contemporaries — Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Thomas Reid, especially — played in the thought of the American founders, but until recently, less attention has been paid to their reading of Smith. Yet there is clear evidence that many of them knew both his book on moral philosophy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), and his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Wealth of Nations (WN); there is even some reason to think they may have been acquainted with his unpublished lectures on jurisprudence. [2] 

Within a few years of its original publication, The Theory of Moral Sentiments was warmly advertised in the New York Mercury and it featured prominently in libraries and book catalogues throughout the late colonial period.[3] John Witherspoon incorporated it into his teaching at Princeton (then called the “College of New Jersey”); he had brought a copy of it over for the Princeton library when he emigrated from Scotland.[4] Jefferson included it in a 1771 list of recommendations for a private library,[5] and Adams devoted a chapter of his Discourses on Davila to a long excerpt from it.[6] Benjamin Rush quoted it in the course of both a 1774 and a 1786 lecture, and James Wilson seems clearly to allude to it in his 1790–91 lectures on American law.[7] 

Smith’s lectures on jurisprudence were never published, and, while it is possible that Witherspoon or Rush or Benjamin Franklin knew of them — both Rush and Franklin spent a good deal of time in Scotland, and Franklin knew Smith quite well — there is no direct evidence of this. The content of these lectures may nonetheless have had an impact on the founders by way of Lord Kames’s Historical Law-Tracts. Kames sponsored and attended the first lectures Smith gave, at Edinburgh in 1748–50, and is thought to have been deeply influenced by them.[8] His Historical Law Tracts include such Smithian theories of justice and resentment, the origin and development of property, the four stages of history, and the problems with entail and primogeniture that it is hard to resist the thought that he borrowed from Smith.[9] 

So although Kames’s book was published in 1758, before Smith had published anything, and although Kames never mentions Smith in it, it may well have served as a conduit for Smith’s jurisprudence. And the Historical Law-Tracts were owned at least by Jefferson, Madison, Wilson, and Adams.[10] Wilson relied significantly on Kames in his law lectures at the College of Philadelphia, and Jefferson copied large portions of the tracts into his Commonplace Book — more, indeed, than he copied from any other author except Montesquieu. These extracts include most of the Smithian sections in the Law-Tracts, from the accounts of justice and property to the attacks on entail and primogeniture. 

It has indeed been suggested that the latter informed Jefferson’s drafting of a 1776 bill to ban entail in Virginia.[11] Jefferson may thus have been impressed by Smithian ideas even before he read WN. In any case, the fact that he, and so many of the other founders, were steeped in the jurisprudence of Kames helps explain why they were immediately receptive to the similar views they found in WN. 

The impact of WN can be clearly shown. It has been found in 28% of American libraries in the period from 1777–90, a larger number than owned Locke’s two Treatises or any work of Rousseau’s except Émile.[12] Thomas Pownall’s 1780 “Memorial” on the American conflict, which displays Smith’s influence throughout and paraphrases several sections of WN, had a profound effect on Adams, who read it in the year it was published and summarized it in a letter to Congress.[13] The financier Robert Morris owned a copy of WN by December 1781, when he lent it out to Edmund Randolph, a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress.[14] While similarly a delegate to the Congress in 1783, Alexander Hamilton is said to have written an extended commentary on WN; he certainly knew it well by the end of the decade, since he relied heavily upon it, while also rejecting its central teaching in favor of economic nationalism, in his 1791 “Report on Manufactures.”[15] Madison put the book on his list of core items to be included in the proposed Congressional library in 1783, and his cousin, the Bishop James Madison, who presided over William and Mary, incorporated it into the college curriculum in 1784.[16] James Wilson used the book to prepare for a Pennsylvania speech on banking in 1783,[17] and used a long extract from it for his defense of the Bank of North America in 1785.[18] (Later, in a 1791 speech to Congress, Madison was to use Smith’s authority to oppose banks.)[19] Noah Webster is said to have “devour[ed]” the book in the spring of 1784 [20]; in 1785, he paraphrased Smith’s analysis of the mentally debilitating effects of an advanced division of labour in his Sketches of American Policy.[21]

We find at least two explicit references to Smith in the debates over the Constitution. One supporter of the Constitution listed Smith’s book as one of the great sources for “political architects” to consult.[22] Another defender of the Constitution, writing under the name “Civis Rusticus,” cited Smith in support of the proposition that a standing army, judiciously controlled by a civilian government, need not endanger liberty.[23] I have argued at length in the past that Madison alludes several times to WN in his Federalist papers,[24] although he does not mention Smith’s name explicitly until 1791. In a 1789 speech, he did, however, explain the advantages of “a very free system of commerce” in terms obviously borrowed from WN,[25] and his House colleague Fisher Ames was well enough acquainted with the book to pick up the allusion.[26] And Jefferson, in 1790, twice recommends WN on lists he sends his relatives of basic reading material, calling it “the best book extant” on political economy.[27]

What, now, might the founders who read Smith have learned from him about human nature? On the view of Smith that was once common even among Smith scholars, and remains common in popular invocations of him, Smith reduced all human motivations to self-interest in much the way that Hobbes did. That is, however, clearly untrue, as the following passage from TMS is enough to demonstrate: 

Smith also devotes an entire section of his history of philosophy at the end of TMS to a critique of Hobbes, for “deduc[ing] all sentiments and affections from self-love” (TMS VII.iii.1.4, 317). WN says much less about benevolence, but it too does not reduce human motivation to self interest. Smith speaks disapprovingly of relationships among adults that depend purely on benevolence, saying that only a beggar “chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens” (WN I.ii.2, 27) — but that very remark implicitly recognizes that people can and do sometimes act on benevolence. 

Elsewhere in the book, he notes that certain people have “a more liberal or generous spirit” than others (WN II.iii.42, 349; see also IV.ii.20, 461–2). Even the famous sentences about appealing to the self-love of our butchers and bakers are misread when taken to express a theory of human beings as always acting on self-interest. “We address ourselves, not to [the] humanity [of our butchers and bakers] but to their self-love,” says Smith (WN I.ii.2, 27; my emphasis): the point here is that we know how to address ourselves to one another’s self-love, not that we are ourselves, necessarily, self-loving. “We,” the butcher’s customers in this passage, may be buying food for a friend in need or a soup kitchen: nothing about the passage pre-supposes that the “we” in it are self-loving when we address the butcher.[28] 

What is true of Smith is that he regarded our benevolent affections as limited, as going out most strongly to people very close to us and fading as regards more and more distant circles of people (TMS VI.ii.1.4–16, 219–224). Benevolence is a virtue by which we care about the good of individual others with whom we sympathize — share feelings. But sympathy works, on Smith’s account, primarily in relation to concrete, individual others, whose situations we know in detail.[29] Caring for the good of anonymous others, whom we know, at best, only in some abstract way, is an emotion Smith believes we can muster only weakly and occasionally, and that we are likely to direct poorly (TMS VI.ii.2–3, 227–37). 

Since we normally can give effective help only to people immediately around us, and whose situation we know well, nature has equipped us to care most about them, not either to understand or to feel strongly about distant, anonymous others. We know our fellow citizens, and can help them, somewhat better than we know or can help humankind as a whole, and we correspondingly feel love for our nation somewhat more strongly than love for all humanity, but benevolence is paradigmatically directed towards our friends, relatives, and close neighbors, and becomes a shadow of itself when extended to our whole society. Accordingly, Smith regarded civic virtue — “public spirit” — as generally quite weak in us and thought it should not be relied on to do much work in either the economic or the political sphere. Famously, he said that he had “never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the publick good.” (WN IV.ii.9, 456) 

In the context of his time, this view of self-interest was an extremely moderate, unremarkable one. That people are by nature “restless and selfish” was a commonplace in the eighteenth century,[30] and if we were to arrange a spectrum of early modern views on the importance of self-interest, with Hobbes and Mandeville at one end, Smith would belong much closer to the other end. Locke, who rejected much of Hobbes, did not disagree with him over the centrality of self-interest to human motivation: he simply thought that our extended self-interest (incorporating, among other things, God’s rewards and punishments into the calculation about whether to be good) would make clear that our bread is buttered on the side of virtue, even in the absence of a political sovereign.[31] 

Locke’s pupil, Lord Shaftesbury, certainly read him this way, and criticized him for having such a self interested conception of human nature. Shaftesbury posited instead that we have a natural, ultimate “moral sense,” by which we approve and disapprove of actions without regard to our self-interest, and that we act morally to achieve the sui generis pleasure that comes when we win the approval of this moral sense.[32] 

Hutcheson took up this notion, producing a series of arguments to prove that both moral approval and moral motivation are irreducible to self-interest; he felt that Shaftesbury had yielded too much to the claims of self-interest in holding that the goal of our being moral is to achieve self-approval. Smith belongs somewhere between Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. He takes on board Hutcheson’s arguments that concern for others is a basic feature of our nature, but argues against assimilating the desire for self-approval to self-interest (TMS III.2.8, 117; III.6.13, 178).[33] Even if we were to place Smith together with Shaftesbury rather than Hutcheson, however, he would be less a promoter of self-interest than Locke, let alone Hobbes. Far from being the great spokesman for the centrality of self-interest in human life, Smith thus joins those who argue against this claim. Certainly, none of the founders ever cites him to show the importance of self-interest. 

Moreover, even Hutcheson, the most enthusiastic promoter of benevolence in the entire eighteenth century, remarked that “general benevolence alone, is not a Motive strong enough to Industry, to bear Labour and Toil, and many other Difficultys which we are averse to from Self love.”[34] We are benevolent, Hutcheson believed, but not benevolent enough to work hard, for which reason “Self-Love is really as necessary to the Good of the Whole, as Benevolence.” It is particularly difficult to get people to work on the basis of “general Benevolence.” The “nearer ties,” the feelings we have for our close relatives and friends, may well lead “a fine spirit … to bear all toils for [another] with joy,”[35] but care for our whole society is too weak to play that role. Smith follows Hutcheson in this distinction between general benevolence and the nearer ties, and he also follows Hutcheson in regarding self-love as central to the economic sphere, where we primarily deal with anonymous others, while not seeing it as basic to our relationships in other realms of life. 

So to turn to Smith for one’s philosophy of human nature is not to move from a conception of human beings as virtuous to a conception of them as self-interested, but to move from one conception of virtue to another. A respect for Smith does suggest a move away from a belief that people are capable of a strong concern for the well-being of their polity as a whole — of sacrificing themselves to the whole in the way that civic republican thinkers seem to have wanted people to do.[36] 

On Smithian views, one needs instead to distinguish sharply between those realms of human life in which people know each other intimately, and can therefore be expected to behave virtuously, and the larger-scale, more anonymous realms in which self-interest, or at best “private” loves and concerns, are likely to predominate over identification with the common good. Human virtue will extend far enough to hold families together, to ensure that people generally avoid dishonesty and cruelty to each other in their daily transactions, and to motivate neighbors to help each other out on local projects. This amount of virtue is useful to the polis. It is just not enough to ensure that people will vote for political representatives out of a concern for the good of the whole nation, or that those representatives will serve their constituents’ good. We need to enlist self-interest, as well as virtue, to achieve political goods. 

Three more points about Smith on virtue before we move to the affinities between his views of human nature and those of the founders. 

First, Smith rejected the idea that religious teaching is essential to developing virtue. In this, he agreed with his agnostic friend David Hume and disagreed, sharply, with his teacher Hutcheson. Hutcheson was a brave and forthright defender of religious liberty, but he believed at the same time that governments could foster virtue by underwriting university positions, like the one he himself occupied, dedicated to showing how moral principles are anchored in a religious framework.[37] Smith was a successor of Hutcheson’s in the same academic position, but for the most part he de-coupled moral virtue from religious teaching in TMS, and he recommended in WN that governments spread “science and philosophy” as an antidote to the dangers of overly fervent religious beliefs (WN V.i.g.14, 796). In addition, he omitted the teaching of religion and moral theory from his recommendations for the curriculum of both public schools and the university. 

Smith also argued, famously, for governments to disentangle themselves altogether from supporting churches, maintaining that a profusion of small religious sects would give the teachers of each sect an incentive to promote social harmony, and eventually lead them all to teach “that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established” (WN V.i.g.8, 793). Among other things, this religious disestablishment would have had the effect of abolishing the government-underwritten position that Hutcheson and he had occupied. 

Second, and relatedly, Smith saw everyday social interactions as shaping our characters far more than any formal ethical teaching. “Do you wish to educate your children to be dutiful to their parents, [and] … kind and affectionate to their brothers and sisters?” he asks. Don’t send them to a college or boarding-school for that. Instead, “educate them in your own house”: “Respect for you must always impose a very useful restraint upon their conduct; and respect for them may frequently impose no useless restraint upon your own.” (TMS VI.ii.1.10, 222). He adds that children enter “into the great school of self-command” as soon as they first start to play with other children — that is what most teaches them to moderate their passions. (TMS III.3.22, 145). The great school of self command continues, moreover, in our market interactions as adults. “The ordinary commerce of the world” and “the bustle and business of the world” teach us to discipline our passions, says Smith (TMS III.3.7, 139; III.3.25, 146), and he maintains that for people “in the middling and inferior stations of life, the road to virtue and the road to fortune ... are very nearly the same” (TMS I.iii.3.5, 63). The discipline of the marketplace, in addition to promoting efficiency, leads to “prudent, just, firm, and temperate conduct.”[38] 

By contrast, Smith thinks that formal programs of ethical education tend to be ineffective. The Greeks had a formal program designed “to humanize the mind, … and to dispose it for performing all the social and moral duties … of publick and private life,” Smith tells us, while the Romans did not, but “the morals of the Romans, … both in private and publick life, seem to have been … a good deal superior to those of the Greeks.” (WN V.i.f.40, 774) We acquire virtues more from the situations we are in, especially our occupational situations, than from formal education. A ploughman is likely to have a livelier and more imaginative mind than a factory worker, says Smith, because the “instruments” he works with (horses, oxen) and the materials he works on are very variable, while the “whole attention” of the factory worker “is commonly occupied in performing one or two simple operations.” (WN I.x.c.24, 144). An independent worker is likely to develop habits of self-respect and self-command that tend to atrophy in a dependent one, who needs constantly to conciliate the employer on which he or she depends (WN II.iii.12, 335–6; III.iv.12, 420). Everyone in a commercial society, but especially the lower classes, is likely to suffer from a diminution of courage, since they have no opportunity to develop martial virtues (WN V.i.f.50 and 59–60, 781–2 and 786–8). 

It follows from this view of moral development as arising from our everyday interactions that anyone, including people with little or no formal education, can achieve virtue. And Smith indeed has a much higher regard for the virtues of people “in the middling and inferior stations of life” than did most of his predecessors and peers. His respect for poor people, in particular, was remarkable. Against a view of the poor as indolent, profligate, and given either to drink or to joining fanatical religious sects, Smith advances a view of them as hard-working, fully capable of prudence and sobriety, and not unreasonable in their religious choices, however problematic those choices may look to their better-educated contemporaries.[39]

All these features of Smith’s understanding of virtue find echoes in the writers of many American founders, sometimes accompanied by explicit allusions to Smith. This essay turns to Smith’s connections with three important founders: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, in Part 2.

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——

1. Madison,” Federalist 51, in Bernard Bailyn (ed The Debate on the Constitution (New York: Library of America, 1993), Part Two, 164.

2. See Fleischacker, “Adam Smith’s Reception Among the American Founders, 1776–1790,” William and Mary Quarterly, October 2002, and Glory Liu, Adam Smith’s America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 18–42. 

3. See Liu, Adam Smith’s America, 18–19. 

4. Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal, (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1971), 111, 125. Further evidence that TMS was used in college curricula may be gleaned from the fact that George Washington bought it in 1773 for his ward John Custis to use at King’s College. (The Papers of George Washington, WW. Abbot and D. Twohig, eds., [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994], vol. 9, 343–5). 

5. Letter to Robert Skipwith, in Julian Boyd (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1950, vol. I, 79. 

6. “Discourses on Davila,” § VIII, in The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little & Brown, 1851), volume VI, 257–62. The quotation is from TMS I.iii (52–57). 

7. Rush, “Medicine Among the Indians of North America,” in The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, ed. Dagobert D. Runes, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 260, and “An Enquiry Concerning the Influence of Physical Causes Upon the Mental Faculty.” (See also Glory Liu, Adam Smith’s America, 26n40.) Wilson cites, albeit with an odd variation, the story Smith tells in TMS (III.3.30, 149) about Count de Lauzun and the spider, for which the editors of TMS find no other source (Robert Green McCloskey (ed.), The Works of James Wilson, [Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1967], vol. I, 228). Compare also the distinction between the pleasures of praise and the pleasures of praise-worthiness in ibid, 237 with TMS III.2.1–8, 113–117. 

8. Ian Ross, a biographer of both men, writes that the importance of Smith’s Edinburgh lectures to Kames “cannot be overestimated.” Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), 94. see also 193. 

9. Further, indirect evidence that Kames borrowed from Smith and not the other way around may be found in the fact that none of the Smithian views in the Law-Tracts appeared in Kames’ earlier legal work, Essays Upon Several Subjects Concerning British Antiquities (London: M. Cooper, second edition, 1749). Kames there mentioned primogeniture and entail (131–4, 146) but does not question their legitimacy, and while he does give a proto-Smithian account of the history of inheritance (127 and following), he does not develop anything like the full-scale history of property he would include in the later work. Nor do any of the Smithian points I have mentioned appear in Kames’ 1751 Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion. 

10. Ross, Lord Kames, 218–19. 

11. Ross, Lord Kames, 218–19. 

12. David Lundberg and Henry May, "The Enlightened Reader in America," American Quarterly 28 (1976), statistical appendix. 

13. Gregg L. Lint (ed), Papers of John Adams, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996), vol. 9, 157 ff. For paraphrases of Smith, see especially 172–5 and 186–9. Adams also “owned not one but two copies of it (one in English, and one in French), as a well as a condensed version and commentary of it.” (Liu, Adam Smith’s America, 21). 

14. E. James Ferguson (ed.), The Papers of Robert Morris, (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), vol. 3, 447.

15. The evidence for Hamilton’s interest in Smith in 1783 is presented in Clinton Rossiter, Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964), 306, note 26. For the “Report on Manufactures,” see Harold C. Syrett (ed.), The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), 231 ff, and editor’s introduction, 8–9. For a close study of the similarities and differences between Hamilton and Smith on political economy, see McNamara, Political Economy. 

16. Richard Teichgraeber notes this (Teichgraeber, “’Less Abused than I had Reason to Expect’: The Reception of The Wealth of Nations in Britain, 1776–1790,” Historical Journal, 30 (1987), 344), but downplays its importance. 

17. Papers of Robert Morris, vol. 6, 660, 664, 666. 

18. McCloskey (ed.), Works of James Wilson, volume II, 835–6. 

19. “Speech opposing the National Bank,” February 2, 1791, in Madison, Writings, ed. Jack Rakove, (New York: Library of America, 1999), 481. 

20. Harlow Giles Unger, Noah Webster: The Life and Times of an American Patriot, (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998), 72. See also Webster’s defense of the Constitution in November 1787, with its Smithian attack on entail and primogeniture, unworried attitude towards standing armies, dismissal of the importance of civic virtue, and emphasis on the importance of an educated populace: “A Citizen of America,” in Bailyn, Debate on the Constitution, Part One, 129–63, especially 150–60. 

21. “A man who makes heads of pins or springs of watches, spends his days in that manufacture and never looks beyond it. This manner of fabricating things for the use and convenience of life is the means of perfecting the arts; but it cramps the human mind, by confining all its faculties to a point. In countries thinly inhabited, or where people live principally by agriculture, as in America, every man is in some measure an artist — he makes a variety of utensils … — he is a husbandman in summer and a mechanic in winter — he travels about the country — he converses with a variety of professions.” Cited in McCoy, The Elusive Republic, (Williamsburg, VA: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 111–12. Compare WN V.i.f.50, 781–2 and I.x.c.24, 143–4. 

22. Nicholas Collin, “An Essay on the Means of Promoting Federal Sentiments in the United States,” in Colleen A. Sheehan & Gary L. McDowell (eds.), Friends of the Constitution: Writings of the “Other” Federalists, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 426. 

23. Bailyn (ed.), Debate, Part One, 361. 

24. Fleischacker, “Adam Smith’s Reception.” 

25. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal (general eds.), The Papers of James Madison, (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1962 – 1991), vol. 13 (C. F. Hobson and R.A. Rutland, eds.), 69–73, especially 71–2. 

26. “[Madison] adopts his maxims as he finds them in books, and with too little regard to the actual state of things. One of his first speeches in regard to protecting commerce, was taken out of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The principles of the book are excellent, but the application of them to America requires caution. I am satisfied, and could state some reasons to evince, that commerce and manufactures merit legislative interference in this country, much more than would be proper in England.” - Seth Ames (ed.), Works of Fisher Ames, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), 49. 

27. Letters to Thomas Mann Randolph on May 30, 1790 and John Garland Jefferson on June 11, 1790. 

28. For an elaboration of this reading, see Fleischacker, “Talking to My Butcher,” in P. Sagar (ed.), Interpreting Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). 

29. See TMS II.ii.3.9, 89–90 and Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 88–9. 

30. Internal quotation from Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1968), 41. 

31. See Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.xxi 38, 43–4, 62, II.xxviii.5–8, Jerome Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 142–55, and Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 149–71. Thus James Kloppenberg misleadingly describes Locke as tempering the pursuit of self-interest by way of “a natural law discernible by reason” (“The Virtues of Liberalism,” Journal of American History 74 [1987], 16). As Kloppenberg’s own quotations show, Locke condemned the pursuit of short-term and purely material self-interest, in favor of the pursuit of an extended self interest that would incorporate such goods as intellectual pleasures, and believed that the latter sort of pursuit would coincide with virtuous living. But virtue bottoms out in self-interest just as much for Locke as it does for Hobbes. 

32. On Shaftesbury and his relation to Locke, see Darwall, pp.176–8. 

33. The desire for self-approval may lead one, after all, to sacrifice everything, including one’s life, that would normally be included under one’s “interests.” 

34. Hutcheson, Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil, (London: J. Darby, 1726), VII.viii, 181. 35 Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, (London: A. Millar, 1755), vol. I, 322. 

36. Gordon Wood defines “public virtue” in the eighteenth century as the willingness of individuals “to surrender all, even their lives, for the good of the state.” — Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), 68–9. 

37. “The civil power should take care that the people be well instructed in [the importance of belief in and piety towards God to the achievement of happiness and virtue], and have all arguments presented to their understandings, and all rational inducements proposed which can raise these persuasions, and confirm these dispositions. … The magistrate should therefore provide proper instruction for all, especially for young minds, about the existence, goodness, and providence of God, and all the social duties of life, and the motives to them.” Hutcheson, System, III.ix.1, volume II, 310. 

On the nature of the academic position that Hutcheson and Smith held, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality, (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 235–57. 

38. Both quotations from TMS I.iii.3.5, 63. I develop this reading of Smith further in A Third Concept: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 152–6. 

39. See Fleischacker, A Short History of Distributive Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 62–68.