Adam Smith's rhetorical sympathy: a return of moral sentiments to public policy

Abstract

Since Adam Smith's highly successful Wealth of Nations, most scholarship built on his work has been economic in scope and has ignored the greater implications of his contribution to policy-making. This thesis examines the role moral sentiment played in Smith's conception of society and how this contributed to the rhetorical theory of his day and ours. Specifically I argue that Smith's concept of sympathy was a means of ensuring that public policy would not lose touch with its rhetorical roots. As part of this larger argument I review the concepts of sympathy and self-interest as they developed from Smith's work and show how they work together to induce cooperation among citizens. Finally, I illustrate how sympathy and self-interest work together to support a new method of human cooperation called Collaborative Learning, which will prepare the possibility for further work on the sympathy/self-interest dichotomy in twenty-first century policy-making.