Adam Smith Quotes on Politics
Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776), supplemented by the surviving Lectures on Jurisprudence, give Scottish Enlightenment political thought its most ambitious philosophical synthesis. The framework treats the political conditions of commercial society as the historically specific institutional outcome of long social evolution rather than as the deliverance of abstract natural-rights theory, with the consequent attention to the concrete political problems — public works, the administration of justice, education, national defence, the balance between centralized and local authority — that commercial society characteristically generates. The impartial spectator of the Theory of Moral Sentiments supplies the parallel philosophical infrastructure of moral and political judgment.
Quotes
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Attributed to Adam Smith:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
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“All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
Chapter IV, p. 448. -
“Defence is of much more importance than opulence.”
Chapter II -
“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”
Chapter VIII, p. 94. -
“I perfectly agree with your Lordship too, that to crush the Industry of so great and so fine a province of the empire, in order to favour the monopoly of some particular towns in Scotland or England, is equally unjust and impolitic. The general opulence and improvement of Ireland might certainly, under proper management, afford much greater resources to the Government, than can ever be drawn from a few mercantile or manufacturing towns.”
Letter to Henry Dundas (1 November 1779), quoted in Adam Smith, The Correspondence of Adam Smith , eds. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (1987), p. 241