Samuel Fleischacker

Oh, thank you very much for having me, David.

So I'm tempted to say it's totally inaccurate and has his picture of human beings exactly reversed, but that's not entirely fair.

There is some truth to the picture.

Smith was very insistent throughout The Wealth of Nations on the advantages of having individuals make their own economic decisions

about what to invest in, how to run their business, and what to buy.

This is, again, sumptuary laws that restricted especially the purchases of luxury goods among the poor.

On all these things, he thought government should leave people alone and let them do what they think is best in their own situation.

So that...

idea and the idea that governments actually just don't have the knowledge base to run an economy, that isn't Smith.

And if that's libertarianism, that part of it is correct.

But his picture of human nature is perhaps the most socially constructed or the most socially shaped that you're going to find among the thinkers of his time and place in mid-18th century Scotland and England.

Well, philosophers think we do.

And he was a moral philosopher first.

And in his theory of moral sentiments, which is his great book of moral philosophy, he says we don't even recognize ourselves as a self until we start interacting with other people.

We're always concerned with how other people are looking at us.

We start incorporating into ourselves a kind of a spectator, an impartial spectator, he says, that watches our actions, which is built on the people around us.

And we want to be the kind of person other people can approve of.

So in that sense, we're very intertwined with other people.

We have connections.

benevolent feelings towards them.