
Contents
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Spreading ‘enlightenment’ Spreading ‘enlightenment’
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Markets and morals Markets and morals
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Liberty and citizenship Liberty and citizenship
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The progress of society The progress of society
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References References
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3 Adam Smith and Rousseau: Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment
Get accessDennis C. Rasmussen is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. He is the author of The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith's Response to Rousseau (Pennsylvania State University Press 2008), as well as articles in the American Political Science Review, History of Political Thought, Review of Politics, and the Adam Smith Review. His current book project seeks to defend the Enlightenment against recent complaints about its alleged hegemonic universalism, blind faith in reason, and atomistic individualism, drawing especially on the thought of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire.
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Published:01 July 2013
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Abstract
Adam Smith was arguably the first great Enlightenment thinker to offer a thorough and considered response to the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the first great Counter-Enlightenment thinker. As recent scholarship has stressed, Smith sympathized with many aspects of Rousseau’s wide-ranging critique of commercial society. In the end, however, their differences were far more fundamental. This essay examines four key areas of divergence between the two, namely their views on the popular dissemination of the arts and sciences (and popular ‘enlightenment’ more generally); the moral effects of commerce; the nature of liberty and citizenship; and the idea of progress. In each case, Smith stood closer to the leading figures of the French Enlightenment—thinkers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot—than he did to their great critic Rousseau.
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