Ryan Hanley 2:03
Yeah. Sure, of course! And I’ll start by just saying thanks. I appreciate the kind words about the book, and I appreciate the fact that you think it’s packed with wisdom. As far as Smith the man goes, you know, I think Smith is probably famous to most people as the author of The Wealth of Nations; the book that he’s famous for; published in 1776. And you know, the truth is that Smith was a deeply influential thinker and influential in political circles, but he really was a man that lived through his books. The story of his life is pretty quickly told. He was born in 1723, in the town of Kirkcaldy, just north of City of Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth, and he grows up in this small town and has the good fortune to get a great, good education when he’s young. And then he is sent to the extraordinary University of Glasgow, which is a very progressive, urban institution at a very dynamic time in Glasgow and indeed Scotland’s history. He studies at Glasgow except for a few years away at Oxford. He comes back to Glasgow as a professor. From 1751 to 1764, he serves as the professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. And so the economics that he taught and that he became famous for really is an outgrowth of his work as a moral philosopher. He publishes his first book and the only other book, Beyond the Wealth of Nations. And that’s the book that I concentrate on in my book. Smith’s book is The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is his main work on moral philosophy that he publishes in 1759. At the same time that he’s lecturing on some of these questions of economics, and law, and jurisprudence. Smith really loved his time at Glasgow. By all accounts, he was a beloved professor, but he was also sort of caught the attention of the movers and shakers of his day. And he got the opportunity that he couldn’t pass up, which was to serve as the tutor and the accompanying traveler for a young Scottish Lord, when he went on his grand tour of Europe. He resigned his post as Smith does. And from 6–1764 to 66, he goes to France as the tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch. And that turns out to be a really important moment in Smith’s life. It’s the only time he ever leaves the United Kingdom. And it also gives him a chance to be at the heart of the Enlightenment in Paris, and he gets to meet there all the intellectual movers and shakers. And he comes back to Scotland in 1766, full of new ideas, in addition to new economic ideas. He’s got a funny little line that said he was a little bored in the south of France and Toulouse, and he started writing a book to while away the time. Well, the book went on to be the thing he worked on for the next ten years. He comes back to Scotland; continues his research and publishes, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776. And this is what makes his fame both then and now. He becomes influential in London circles and spends some time in London. And he also is granted a position, and it would be this position he would have for the rest of his life. He served as the Commissioner of Customs For the British Crown in Edinburgh. It meant essentially that he was the collector and imposer of import/export taxes; great irony given that he had championed the free market and the dangers of tariffs in his work. But in any case, he spends the last 13-14 years of his life in Edinburgh as sort of a man about town; a man of letters; hosting, visiting dignitaries and intellectuals; doing dutifully his work for the crown; and revising his first book on moral philosophy. But he really is for all of his public service, he really is a man who lived through his books. And indeed, in my book, I try and encounter him through his thought that he’s left us through these two texts.

Sean Murray 5:39
And his legacy that’s passed down to many of us today is, as you mentioned, The Wealth of Nations; as the author of The Wealth of Nations. That’s certainly how I was introduced to Smith in college. I was unaware that he had written a second book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, until, until just a few years ago. I was actually introduced to the book through the EconTalk Podcast, and Russ Roberts did a episode with Dan Klein, the Smith dollar, which was sort of a book report on the Theory of Moral Sentiments. And I was, I was surprised to hear about the book. It caught my interest. Many of us today think of Smith as, you know, the father of economics; his treatise on The Wealth of Nations, obviously; a champion of free trade; a champion of the market economy. If one was to assume he was going to write a book about providing advice about living the good life, it would be maybe about wealth, or accumulating wealth, or growing rich, something like that. But it really couldn’t be further from the truth, right, as you introduce early in the book; as far as his theory about how to live the good life?

Ryan Hanley 6:42
Yeah, and I think it’s fun to hear your story of your exposure to Smith because I think that Sean your story is pretty typical. I think that the way most people encounter Smith, to the degree that they have encountered him, is through sort of their textbooks and their introductory macro/micro economics sequence, where dutifully Smith is trotted out on the first page of these as the father of the discipline. And indeed, there’s a new book out by Jesse Norman, a member of parliament in the UK; a very good book called, “Adam Smith: Father of Economics.” And that really does capture, I think, truly an important side. And I don’t think we should ever minimize Smith’s contributions there. They are not, however, the full story. While Smith is a genuine friend of the free market, there’s much more to his economics than simply a defense of the mutual gains based upon the pursuit of self-interest. That’s a part of it, but it’s not the entire story. Not only is that only part of the side of his story of economics, but also his economics is only part of the larger story of his contributions as a whole. And Smith indeed–as you mentioned now, and as Russ Roberts himself has done a great, great service in helping to spread the word about Smith–is also the author of this other extraordinary book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. As I mentioned, he was a professor of moral philosophy, and his economics was an outgrowth of his commitments as a moral philosopher. And so I think that very reductive Smith that we get in the Econ textbook: father of economics; author of the invisible hand, it’s a big part of the story. But that story is itself a much richer story, when we see it in the larger context of his intentions, and especially his moral intentions.

Sean Murray 8:20
Well, let’s dive into the book. It has a unique format, which works very well. Each chapter begins with a quote from Smith. And then, you translate it, so to speak, because he’s writing in English, obviously. But you restate Smith’s idea in plain modern English that we can all understand. And then you repack it, or unpack it, and explain what Smith is trying to teach us. There are 29 chapters each relatively short, so just a few pages each. So maybe I’ll ask you to start by just reading one of the passages. How about one of my personal favorites, Chapter Number 16.

Ryan Hanley 8:53
Yeah, this is one of my favorites in the entire book. Every time I teach it, I love this particular passage, and writing about it was really a joy because it really challenged me in many ways to figure out what exactly might be behind it. I’d be happy to literally read what he has to say. This is one of Smith’s shortest lines that I quote in the book. Very direct, very pithy. And I think in many ways, very deep reflection. Smith’s line is, “Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely.” And then, Sean, as you mentioned, I give my own sort of translation of this, and it always begins with “or,” and I try and be equally pithy with Smith, but to put in 21st century language. And so, I gloss Smith’s line, “Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely,” as we don’t just want to get love, we also want to be someone who deserves it. And this I think really speaks to one of Smith’s key themes in the book, which is we’re sort of hardwired to use a very 21st century formulation to desire certain things. And Smith says, among others, the familiar things. We all want to have some degree of wealth. We want to have some degree of recognition. We want to have some degree of esteem from our peers. We want also more deeply to have some degree of love from others. And that is an important part of the story for Smith about how we’re actually made; how we’re natured. This too is part of who we are and what we were meant to be. But there’s also that “but,” and I always think that Smith is really interesting, when he not just puts out a claim, but then he goes on to refine it. And the claim again is that we not only naturally desire “to be loved,” but we also naturally desire to be “lovely.” And this is something a little bit different than simply getting. He’s actually suggesting here: it’s not just that we want to get love from others, but we want to be a certain way. We want to be the sort of being that deserves to be loved. And that opens up a much different question than simply: who are we? And what do we want by nature? Now the question is: What do we need to be to become, and indeed to do if we hope to deserve to be loved? Now, I think that that’s really the beginnings of an interesting and much deeper reflection than just saying that human beings are this way. Now it becomes–if indeed we are that way, and if indeed that love is something that we naturally want, what sorts of things ought we do to be loved? And to be worthy of being loved? And Smith goes–this becomes a turning point in the book, and he says a lot about this, but most proximately, and in the first place, if we want to, in fact, be deserving of love; if we want to get the love of others, at least one of the first things that we can do is to be loving in our own right. If we hope to get something, we ought to give something. And Smith emphasizes to a great degree that this is–we’re hoping to move in that direction, not just to be takers. There’s also some degree that we need to be givers. And I find that interesting for a lot of reasons, both actually for economic reasons, but also in terms of how it speaks to Smith’s larger idea of–he’s not just describing who we are, but starting to point us in a direction of what sorts of things ought we to do if we want to fulfill our natures, and move in the direction of becoming happy, flourishing individuals.

Sean Murray 12:20
What I found very deep and meaningful about this passage is something I’ve just observed in my own life, which is when we receive praise; when we seek attention, it’s really only meaningful if we deserve it. And there’s something–there’s almost this duality inside us that says–that kind of judges us. And he kind of talks about this in, in another way later in the book, but we sort of judge ourselves and say, “Well, do I really deserve that?” If you go and seek attention or status, or power, and false pretenses; or try to be someone you’re not and not authentic, it’s just not going to bring you deep happiness. And that love is not going to fulfill you. I find that to be so true.

Ryan Hanley 12:59
Yeah. I think it’s one of the things that makes Smith so interesting and how he goes beyond the popular reputation. If you only knew the popular reputation, the sort of, “Greed is good, Smith,” or it’s all about self-interest and what we can get. That I think misses his much deeper reflections on both how we’re made and how we ought to live. Smith is really explicit in saying that we desire not simply to be praised, but as he says, but also to be praiseworthy. We naturally have within us this desire to be the sort of thing that other people if they knew all about us would say, “Yes, they are indeed deserving of praise for their character and their actions.” And that, you know, opens up really a different horizon. I’m glad that you have–so the personal reflection because I think about this a lot too, as a, you know, living in the 21st century in a world of social media; all these sorts of things. We all know the familiar image of people sort of self curating, and, you know, taking 20 selfies but only posting the best one of them; trying to put forth an image so that we appear a certain way. That’s very similar to what Smith has in mind, when he says that people are acting in such a way as to try to garner praise. We call them now, you know, likes or Instagram followers or Twitter followers. And so it says that that’s natural. That’s not a bad thing. The danger is if we only start caring about how we appear, and no longer care about who we are, and what our character is. The danger is that in trying to get those praises, we start becoming something false; artificial. We not just put the best side of ourselves. We essentially spin a little bit of a story in which we don’t tell the whole truth about ourselves and become obsessed with what we look like on the exterior, and try and hide what we may or may not be on the interior. And Smith thought that that’s both dangerous for society in which everyone is inauthentic as it were, but also deeply dangerous for a human being. We become fake; plastic. There’s all kinds of ways that we can describe that today. So Smith thought that we’re both hardwired to want praise and praise worthiness, and that in a genuinely decent life. It wasn’t enough just to pursue empty praises. He called that a life of real vanity. What we really want at the end of the day is to pursue praises that we know are deserved, and that we earn on the basis of our actions. And so we both want to be praised and praiseworthy. It’s worth also noting though, that Smith goes one step further, too. He does recognize that there’s a certain rare kind of person, who goes to the other extreme; that is someone who is indifferent to praise and doesn’t care about praise anymore, and cares only about being praiseworthy; the kind of person who–even if they’re despised by others, ridiculed by others, or simply never known to others in obscurity–still does what they ought to do simply because they want at the end of the day to see themselves as praiseworthy. Now, those are really rare figures. Smith says on some degree that could be worrisome. It’s almost–could be pathological if you stop caring at all about what other people think, and you only care about what you think. But he also thinks that there’s a certain human greatness that comes in transcending that love of praise, and acting simply from the basis of conscience, and in accord with praise worthiness. So it’s sort of the horizon for the few that Smith thinks is unique. And really talking about that as perfection and something that human beings can properly aspire to.

Sean Murray 16:28
And Smith may have witnessed something close to perfection in his friend, David Hume. He talks about that and writes about it. And you, you write about it in the book. And I found the passage about Hume also deeply touching. But before we go to the Hume passage, there’s one stepping stone between here and there. And as you mentioned, Smith says, “Man naturally desires to be both loved and lovely.” And it does beg the question: Well, what do we do? We have to give love to get love. But he also takes it further and says, “Well, what actions are you going to take? What are you going to do with your life to attain this love or attain this attention that we so desire?” Maybe we could go to Chapter 20. That was also one of my favorites, where he talks about the two roads or the two paths we can take in life to attain happiness and fulfillment.

Ryan Hanley 17:20
Yeah. I have to say, I love all of these quotes from Smith. I wouldn’t have chosen them if I didn’t. And there’s so many others I would have liked to cram into a much longer book and have crammed into longer books. But I think this is one that really speaks to us instead of lays out the options. And he says, “To deserve, to acquire, and to enjoy the respect and admiration of mankind are the great objects of ambition and emulation. Two different roads are presented to us equally leading to the attainment of this so much desired object. The one by the study of wisdom and the practice of virtue; the other by the acquisition of wealth and greatness.”

Sean Murray 17:57
Yes, and I like your translation, too, where we need to choose between the road admired by the world and the road less traveled.

Ryan Hanley 18:06
Yes, indeed. I will, by the way, give credit where credit is due. You mentioned earlier Russ Roberts and his wonderful podcast. Russ also wrote a wonderful book that goes over some of the similar territory here; that was really meant to be a popular introduction to Smith in which he too focuses on this particular line. And as I noted in the book, he mentions this language as “the road less traveled,” Russ does. Russ and I have very different, I think, pictures of what Smith is doing in many places. But here, I think we’re on relatively the same page, whereas Smith is putting forth this idea. There’s two ways to go. Two lives to live. And indeed, we should have the Frost poem in mind about the roads diverging in the snowy woods. This idea that there’s what the world admires, and then there’s this other life that some people have chosen to lead. Wealth and greatness are the familiar rewards for living in ways that the world approves of. And then there’s this other weird thing: this life of the “study of wisdom and the practice of virtue.” And Smith is pretty clear that that might not get as much attention, reward, remuneration, approbation. That life of wisdom and virtue, it’s gonna fall somewhat short of what the world value(s) [SIC]. But Smith really does seem to think that that life lived in a very particular way; a life of wisdom and virtue is one that has great potentiality for both, not just personal and individual happiness, but also for genuinely contributing to the well-being and happiness of those around us. So there’s something really special in this life of wisdom and virtue that is both good for ourselves and good for others. And even more interestingly, to go back to your earlier point, it was that life that he thought Hume–his good friend, Hume–embodied as well as anybody ever has.

Sean Murray 20:01
How do we study wisdom and practice virtue?

Ryan Hanley 20:05
I mean, one is–I really like the fact, among other things, that it’s wisdom and virtue. And indeed, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he describes this peak figure that he calls the wise and virtuous man. And I think it’s really important that there’s that coordinating conjunction there. There’s an ancient debate about the best life. Is the best life the life of the wise person: the philosopher? Or is the best life that of the active gentlemen–as the ancients would say in the city–engaged in the business, and affairs, and politics of the city? What might be better or worse of one of those? And they were seen as two very rival conceptions. And so if one reads, Aristotle say, you see a choice to be made between these. Smith thinks that wise and virtuous person combines both of these; that is it’s both a life of active engagement in practical affairs and living with others, as well as a life of reflection and occasional seclusion. But Smith is so interesting because he’s one of the ones, who goes further than anybody else in describing why you need to have these two things together: a life of simply being secluded; simply being philosophical; simply being–to use the language of Hume, and Smith, and their friends–”a life of the monkish virtues.” That life removed from the world, Smith, for various reasons, thinks isn’t what we’re necessarily called to be. There’s this really interesting balance that Smith thinks the best of us are able to achieve in being able to be engaged practically; to be engaged in bettering the lives of others; to be engaged even in pursuing one’s self-interest–a life of virtue. But also a life that stands back, and reflects on that, and sees both its opportunities and its limits, and puts things in perspective. And you need to have both sides of that, I think, is one of Smith’s great lessons in one of the sort of his comparative advantage as a theorist of the good life. The idea that it’s not either or; that we need to balance this practical and active life in the world with a reflective and more tranquil life of wisdom that we try and lead simultaneously.

Sean Murray 22:13
Absolutely. And you’d think that, you know, Smith being a scholar; someone who lived through his books would run the risk of being more the monkish, reflective, wise person; but he emphasizes again and again that it’s not just enough to think good thoughts, you have to take action. So many of the quotes that you provide in the book are about taking action in the world in a virtuous way. It could be about friendship. It could be about serving others, but action is required for practicing real virtue.

Ryan Hanley 22:46
This is one of the things that first attracted me to Smith because he was so clear about this point. The distinction between “mere good feelings,” as he says, and “actual good doing.” For philosophers, sometimes make the distinction between benevolence and beneficence. And with a little bit of Latin there, those who remember their schoolboy Latin or schoolchild Latin think in terms of the difference between a good will and good deeds or good acts. And Smith really privileges the latter over the former. It’s really about what have you done at the end of the day. Not simply, did you have all those good feelings and warm sentiments and pats on the back. And again, social media, I mean, Smith would see this as sort of an exacerbation of everything he was talking about. We all know the sort of familiar–people pile on, when there’s a moral cause to be discussed. And there’s a lot of virtue signaling that happens on social media, when people show how much they’re on the right side of issues. It doesn’t cost much; that costs, you know, a couple of keystrokes. That’s very different from actually taking the effort, maybe even sacrificing self-interest to–in genuine terms as we would like to say today–make a difference. Now, the ways in which that difference is made, Smith leaves a lot of latitude. He certainly doesn’t call for people simply to renounce themselves; renounce all their interests; leave their families; and go all of the sudden to work for distant others. I think Smith would be profoundly admiring for people that do do these sorts of things. Today, I, I advise lots of undergraduates, some of whom, many of whom have gone on to go into the Peace Corps. I think Smith would admire this profoundly. But when he talks about beneficence, he’s not simply talking about familiar acts like that that are very dramatic voting with feet. But even the much simpler acts that happen in daily life around immediate others; the people that we live with every day. Being conscious about how our actions affect them, and asking at the end of the day: What have we done to actually make a tangible difference in the well-being of those who are especially in our immediate surroundings; in our immediate communities?

Sean Murray 24:57
Absolutely. We touched on this earlier, but I want to, I want to go back to it–that Adam Smith was a good friend of David Hume. They had this friendship. Hume passed away first. And Smith was asked to write, write a little note to his editor; became known as The Letter to Strayhan. The wonderful book about this, by the way, by your friend, Dennis Rasmussen, I read before I read your book. Again, it just sort of piqued my interest about Smith. Maybe we could read from that letter? One more passage from the book because it’s so beautiful. And I think it sums up in many ways many of the chapters that come before it because this is towards the end.

Ryan Hanley 25:32
Yes, I will join you in giving a plug for Dennis Rasmussen’s excellent book; is a book that was published, I think, just two years ago called, The Infidel and The Professor. And I believe that what comes after the colon is, the Friendship That Changed Modern Thought. Dennis traces out in wonderful detail–and he’s a great storyteller, in addition to being a great historian–the story between these two men. And they’re two very different men as Dennis shows. Hume was in many ways the–we think of him as the bon vivant. He was a high liver. He was active and ebullient in society. Smith was much more reserved both in his correspondence; as a person; even in his writing. So they had different temperaments, but they really had a deep, deep friendship that Dennis shows is really an exemplar. And perhaps, Dennis makes the argument, perhaps, the best example that we have in western civilization of a philosophical friendship. And so that friendship then is, Sean, as you said, and as Dennis notes, really reaches its peak in the later stages of Hume’s life, and especially with Smith’s public acknowledgment of Hume’s virtues upon his death. Dennis’ book again was called, The Infidel and The Professor. While Hume was the infidel; Smith, of course, is the professor. And when Hume died, he was wildly reputed, fairly or unfairly, as being at best a religious skeptic. There’s at least this popular perception that Hume was really a dangerous man, when it came to religious orthodoxy. Smith’s own religion is really a very interesting and contested question for scholars right now. I’ll leave that a bit to the side here as well. I think Smith personally, just say very briefly, may have been a little bit more amenable to certain religious claims than Hume. But that’s a very big claim, and one that should be worked out, and I’ve tried to work out in detail elsewhere. Suffice it to say, whatever religious personal differences there might have been between them, Smith didn’t hesitate for a moment to celebrate Hume’s virtues. And he goes out of his way and writing this very public letter that ended up getting published. This is the letter, Sean, that you mentioned to his editor. It ends up getting published along with Hume’s very short autobiography, which is unto itself a wonderful read. It’s called, My Own Life. Hume’s autobiography is all about ten pages, and it tells his own story about his rise from, essentially, his early life to fame and fortune. It’s a great read. It’s a story of a philosopher on the way up. But anyway, it was published after Hume died. This particular text was often republished with it–Smith’s letter. And in Smith’s letter, Smith makes this extraordinary tribute, for which he took a lot of grief; taking the side and praising a reputed atheist could and did get a person into a lot of trouble in the late 18th century. But Smith thought the obligations were such a friendship that he had to celebrate his friend’s virtue. And he writes and in closing this letter in a line that has become very famous and has echoes of some things that were said about Socrates and one of the platonic dialogues. Smith says, “Upon the whole, I have always considered him,” Hume, “both in his lifetime and since his death as approaching is nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” It’s a remarkable line, and I translate it, and then go on to gloss it as, “Or we may be flawed and frail, but we can aim high.” Hume’s example shows us how. And I think Hume showed for Smith, and Smith meant to show through Hume what a wise and virtuous life might look like–that is even as he describes in the abstract the wise and virtuous man in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Hume really wanted to give us a living exemplar; somebody of flesh and blood that we could get our heads around; that we could see; that we could compare ourselves to, and ask: Have we measured up? And Smith in describing what makes his good friend this pinnacle of wisdom and virtue is the fact that in the first place, he was a great philosopher, and he was able to have a certain degree of tranquility. We see that this is the philosopher, who was able to face his death with resignation, and indeed “cheerfulness,” and who was free–from anxiety–that’s the great word that comes up again and again in the letter. And Smith thinks that Hume’s philosophy and his wisdom enabled him to courageously, nobly, calmly face his demise. But there’s also this other side of him, which is the virtuous side, in addition to the wise side. Smith interestingly says–here’s a little other note that he says in that same letter, he says of Hume that–”Even in the lowest state of his fortune, Hume’s great and necessary frugality never hindered him from exercising, upon proper occasion, acts both have charity and generosity.” And so, Smith goes on to say that then Hume had these “great and amiable qualities,” in addition to these qualities of fortitude and magnanimity that he used to face his demise. So there’s something about Hume for Smith, in which he’s able to really live these ideas of practical charity and generosity at the same time that he has these virtues of self-command and fortitude. He lives then for Smith as a real example of what it means to be both good for oneself and able to be self-contained, but also what it means to be good for others; able to not simply go so far into the self that one loses sight of charity and generosity. And it’s that balance; that happy balance that Smith calls it that really makes Hume such an admirable figure, and why I think he holds his friend up–ideal as it were, but not an abstract ideal; but one that we can aspire to today.

Sean Murray 31:43
Yes, and Smith is making the case here that when we are pursuing a life of wisdom and virtue, it helps to have a goal or ideal in mind. And for Smith, he happened to have a close friend in David Hume, who was the epitome of someone who lived a life of wisdom and first. So Smith seem to be telling us, “Look! Find someone in your life that you can look up to; someone you can model your life after.” Imagine that person is looking over your shoulder, when you make a decision or take an action. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a living person. We may find that our mentor lived in the past if we come to know them by reading biography.

Ryan Hanley 32:22
Yeah, I, I like how you brought up biography. Smith is not himself a biographer, but one of the things he does is he really likes to sketch portraits of individuals and have us see them as individuals, and to analyze them, and to compare ourselves to them. He does give us something like a series of biography; the wise and virtuous man gets a sort of biography. He also describes these other great figures. The prudent man is a wonderful picture. He shows this one guy who every day is trying to accumulate a little bit more and more. He’s pursuing his self interest, but never getting swept up in it. He’s honest and frugal in his dealings. So it’s a great sort of thing, where he’s describing what it looks like, not just in the abstract what prudence is or how we should define it. And so, I think Smith is great because he gives these character sketches, and it’s a great way to do moral philosophy. And I think he’s given us a real gift as teachers. It’s a fun way to teach moral philosophy because we can have these things that we evaluate ourselves against. It should also be said, he used the word “perfection” to describe some of these figures. And that’s really an important side of Smith. Smith is not shy about talking about perfection. A lot of modern moral philosophy is a little skeptical of that language. It smacks too much of sort of either ancient or traditional ways of thinking about things. Smith always wants to put forth the possibility of perfection and really wants to have us think about what a truly perfect human being would look like. But he’s also deeply aware that we are indeed in many ways frail; flawed; simply less than perfect. Even though very best among us have their flaws. And one of the things I like about Smith so much is that he always wants to have us think about perfection in two ways. There’s the sort of perfection that’s relative: the people who go so much farther beyond ourselves; the people who really are excellent, when we compare ourselves to them; the people who have done better than most people–the average among us. That’s one way of seeing genuine perfection. But then, there’s this other idea of “absolute perfection.” And Smith wants to temper us, you know, it can be dangerous–people think that they can become absolutely perfect in a sort of transcendent way. And so Smith balances this idea. He’s always talking about two types of perfection; that is becoming the best we can be, especially relative to how far others get, and then there’s this absolute idea of simple perfection as perfection across the board. And he does think that human beings, we might be a little too flawed for that even though we should never stop striving for it because it’ll make it better or make us better than we might otherwise be.

Sean Murray 35:04
Yeah, it’s almost like he’s saying, “It won’t hurt to have that picture of that perfection or ideal in your head as you go around your business and you around your day,” and asking yourself, you know: What would Hume do? What would–so you go to the bumper sticker–what would Jesus do? Or what would Socrates do? It’s pithy. It’s funny, but it also–it can be very practical to help us make the right decision at times. And I think Smith is not afraid to say, “This works. This helps us as humans live the better life or be the best that we can be, even though we know we’re never going to get to the perfection that he–that we have out there as the ideal.” On a closing note, maybe you could address why you believe Smith is still relevant today.

Ryan Hanley 35:50
On this particular front, in terms of living life well, I think Smith really has a little value added, and what I think of an economist might say–a comparative advantage over other thinkers. We have all kinds of texts available to us in our tradition in terms of living the good life. We’ve already mentioned Aristotle among others; the Bible; lots of religious philosophical literature from antiquity all the way up through the Renaissance and such as say, people like Montaigne. One has to ask the obvious question: Why not read them? They’re classics of this genre themselves. What does Smith add? And I think Smith adds something really specific that makes him really wonderful. And it comes from his insights, frankly, as an economist. Smith understood as well as any the unique constraints, limitations and freedoms possible in a modern commercial order. He understood the ways in which those incentives; the ways in which in trying to better our condition were often led to pursue wealth, fame, recognition. He understand both why those were good. He understood why they were challenging. And he also understood why they were beneficial for the modern economy. After all, it’s this desire to pursue our self-interest; to better our conditions that’s the engine of economic growth. So, as an economist, Smith understands this very well. As a philosopher of living, one of the things that makes him so unique is that he writes a philosophy of living well that is very much suited for that world with all its opportunities and all its challenges. So where Aristotle wrote for the ancient polis, a very different world; not a market society–one in which most people were slaves and very few people were free. Fifth century Athens is just vastly different from 21st century America. However, 21st century America is in many ways defined by precisely the features that Smith was describing in The Theory of Moral Sentiments–these incentives for wealth, power, greatness, recognition. And so I think what Smith adds to the conversation, and to answer the question: Why Smith now? Because he gives us a guide in an age in which I think some of us are perplexed about how to live in amidst these particular pressures and unique challenges. I teach college students. I have a soon-to-be college student. Young people today are growing up in a remarkable world. I’m sure it’s never been easy to grow up. But boy, there are challenges out there today that are in many ways exactly what Smith predicted and are now ramped up to a high degree. I don’t have to tell any of my college students all the challenges that come and the anxiety that comes from a world that incentivizes power, fame, recognition, etc. The question of how you live well within that world, it’s not going to speak to our world if you just hand people Aristotle. But for those of us trying to navigate practically what it means to live today, we’ve got to live well within these challenges. And I think Smith was trying to write for those challenges and makes him not a replacement for Aristotle; not a substitute for Aristotle, but a very useful supplement, too. I hesitate to say it, but perhaps something like an updating of Aristotle’s core concerns about flourishing and virtue.

Sean Murray 39:06
And a little more accessible in my opinion than Aristotle.

Ryan Hanley 39:10
There’s going to be an Aristotle scholar out there that tells me that I’m wrong.

Sean Murray 39:15
Glad to have him on or her on the show, so we can–they can make their case then. This has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for coming on The Good Life.

Ryan Hanley 39:24
Hey, you’re very welcome. And I really appreciate your time and a chance to share a little bit about this thinker that I’ve lived with for so long, and I’ve benefited from. And I hope might inspire others to take up and read in their own right, so I really appreciate the opportunity.

Outro 39:39
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