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Commerce and Corruption

Rousseau's Diagnosis and Adam Smith's Cure

Marquette University, Ryan.hanley{at}marquette.edu

Modern commercial society has been criticized for attenuating virtue and inhibiting the ethical self-realization of its participants. But Adam Smith, a founding father of liberal commercial modernity, anticipated precisely this critique and took specific measures to circumvent it. This article presents these measures via an analysis of his response to the critique of liberal commercial modernity set forth by Rousseau. It principally argues that Smith's distinctions of the love of praise from the love of praiseworthiness, and the love of glory from the love of virtue, were elements of a normative moral education that sought to elevate civilized man's corrupted self-love, and thereby recover within modern commercial society a respect for ethical nobility.

Key Words: capitalism • commerce • corruption • honor • liberalism • modernity • recognition • Rousseau • self-love • Smith • virtue

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