Pursuing Sympathy without Vanity: Interpreting Smith’s Critique of Rousseau through Smith’s Critique of Mandeville

Abstract

This chapter tries to reconstruct Smith’s philosophical attitude towards Rousseau almost solely on the basis of the TMS passages on Mandeville. The first section fleshes out the position on human nature and human sociality that Smith attributes to both Mandeville and Rousseau. The second section explicates Smith’s explicit response to Mandeville’s version of this position. The third sections attempts to reconstruct a Smithian response to Rousseau on the basis of this response to Mandeville. Invoking Smith’s sympathy-based account of approval, the chapter argues that his disagreement with Rousseau can be understood as centering on the very nature of our concern with winning sympathy from others. The chapter concludes that we should understand the sincere love of virtue, to which Smith appeals in response to Mandeville’s reduction of such motives to vanity, in terms of a non-egocentric way of loving sympathy that Smith would charge Rousseau with overlooking.

The Pleasure of Exchange: Adam Smith’s Third Kind of Self-Love

“…10 See alsoFleischacker (2004, p. 66), who suggests that love of virtue can be understood as a kind of selflove. 11 See alsoBee (2014) andMcHugh (2016 and, where, however, the focus is more on the difference between love of virtue and vanity than on love of true glory and its distinction from both vanity and love of virtue, as it is in this article. See Walraevens (2019) for vanity possibly entailing love of true glory, and especially on the difference between vanity and pride.…”