Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment or A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century

Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment

Author: Charles L Griswold

Although Adam Smith is often thought of today as an economist, he was in fact (as his great contemporaries Hume, Burke, Kant, and Hegel recognized) an original and insightful thinker whose work covers an immense territory including moral philosophy, political economy, rhetorical theory, aesthetics, and jurisprudence. Charles Griswold has written the first comprehensive philosophical study of Smith's moral and political thought. Griswold sets Smith's work in the context of the continuing debate about the nature and survival of the Enlightenment, and relates it to current discussions in moral and political philosophy. Smith's appropriation as well as criticism of ancient philosophy, and his carefully balanced defense of a liberal and humane moral and political outlook, are also explored. This is a major reassessment of a key figure in modernity that will be of particular interest to philosophers and political and legal theorists, as well as historians of ideas, rhetoric, and political economy.

Jerry Z. Muller

[Griswold's] book is written for an audience of professional philosophers. But it is also exemplary in spelling out many of Smith's arguments and subjecting them to analytic scrutiny. If reading it requires effort, the reward is substantial. -- The Wall Street Journal

What People Are Saying

Stephen Darwall
With one eye on the 18th century and the other on our current predicament, Charles Griswold's Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment is wonderfullyinteresting and informative, philosophically stimulating and acute, and beautifully written. -- University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Table of Contents:

	Texts and Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
1	Rhetoric, Method, and System in The Theory of Moral Sentiments	40
2	Sympathy and Selfishness, Imagination and Self	76
3	The Passions, Pleasure, and the Impartial Spectator	113
4	Philosophy and Skepticism	147
5	The Theory of Virtue	179
6	Justice	228
7	The Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations	259
8	Philosophy, Imagination, and the Fragility of Beauty: On Reconciliation with Nature	311
	Epilogue	355
	Bibliography	377
	Index	401

Interesting textbook: If Democrats Had Any Brains Theyd Be Republicans or Human Factor

A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century

Author: Roger Owen

This important book on economic development in the modern Middle East examines, for the first time, the separate national economies of the Arab states, including the Gulf, Israel, and Turkey, from 1918 to the present. It describes the main trends within each economy based on the best available statistical data, and answers larger questions concerning the long-term growth of the countries, first in the colonial period, then in the periods characterized by planning and development, followed by the first steps toward liberalization and structural adjustment. It evaluates government policy in promoting the protection of imports and in advancing market economies. Policies employed by the oil-producing states to build new institutional structures based on near unlimited supplies of capital and labor are also examined. The Middle East economies are placed in their proper international context, and questions of colonialism and labor migration are discussed. The authors evaluate where the Middle Eastern economies are now, and speculate about how they may develop in the future.