>Has anyone read Emma Rothschild's Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith,
>Condorcet, and the Enlightenment? I'm reading it now and quite
>intrigued by her argument as to how close Adam Smith was to the
>French enlightenment. Is this a new argument, or old hat to economic
>historians?
I haven't read Rothschild on Smith, though I'm looking forward to doing so. And a lot turns on what you mean by "the French Enlightenment", which is an ever-contested term, or what it means to be "close" to it. But sure: Smith spent 1764-6 in France; he was fluent in French -- as were the polite and academic classes in general: Smith translated passages from Rousseau for the Edinburgh Review, for whom he served as an anonymous Paris correspondent of sorts. Among the leading political economists before Smith (including the leading mercantilists, whom The Wealth of Nations attacked) were French writers, and so on. Scottish university culture was finely attuned to what was coming out of France, and Smith was a central part of that.
(Nor was he alone: many major Anglophone Enlightenment figures spent significant amounts of time in French-speaking Europe: Hume, Jefferson, Gibbon, etc.)
And in turn, Smith was closely studied by the French: there were three separate translations of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, for example, in French before the end of the 18th century, and The Wealth of Nations was frequently reprinted. And -- odd as it may seem to our generation, who grew up on the odd "Smith is right-wing" myths propagated by the New Right -- I think I'm right in saying that Smith's work was widely appreciated among the French revolutionaries, many of whom saw him as an ally. This, above all, owed to his strong anti-corporatist views, which resonated with the political theories of the revolutionaries themselves as they set about dismantling the corporate structures of ancien regime France, and which nicely supplemented the similarly (sometimes violently) anti-corporate thinking of his fellow modernists, e.g., Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant -- which make them all splendidly pertinent thinkers for today's anti-corporate movement to read and ponder.
I suspect Rothschild does a more thorough job than anyone's done hitherto working on the specific connections between Condorcet and Smith. But the thought that Smith is intimately bound up with an intellectual context which had Paris as one of its centres is a familiar one.
Chris --
Phone: +44 (0) 1865-286793 Email: <chris.brooke at magd.ox.ac.uk> Web: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368