Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Well, that is a really interesting question. Actually, I did some work on this exact topic. There were people who had been influenced by Adam Smith before the Revolution. The Abbé Sieyès is one of the most prominent. His archive is full of notes and annotations to The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The Abbé Sieyès has colleagues and friends who have been influenced by him, and they are interested in trying to understand how you think about the stability in a society that occurs naturally and spontaneously and what the gap is between that and political order: how you tailor your political institutions to effectively fit with your expectation of spontaneous sociability or social order. Definitely, they look to Adam Smith. Condorcet’s wife, Sophie, translates The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s not quite finished during the Terror, but when they survive — Condorcet does not survive the Terror. He dies in prison, either a suicide or an assassination. But afterwards, his widow continues with that translation, and the people who do survive and are interested in social theory build on what they think Adam Smith had already understood. If we think about 18th-century French thinkers, they seem obsessed with a particular theme: the notion of what kind of virtue is required for commercial states to persist. Why is that such an important question at that time? They’re trying to understand the forms of government that are going to fit with the emerging markets. They are very aware that international competition for trade is becoming hugely politically important, and they want to understand what needs to be true about a society and its political institutions in order to fit with those market forces.…

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