As I said in my previous post, in a few days I will begin blogging my first-time reading of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
I am not trained in economics, but I really don't think of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments as an economics text, though his subsequent work is said to be grounded in this book. To me, this is a basic book. Of course I haven't read it yet, so I really don't know what is in it.
But going by the table of contents, it is quite clear to me that in here are developed nearly everything that form the basis for an economics concept.
In this sense, my instinct tells me this book lays the pre-conceptual, in other words a phenomenological, foundation to the field of free-market economy. I will know if my intuition was right only after I have read the book entirely.
Seriously, why this book?
Through many years of thinking things, I have come to appreciate the distinction between understanding through knowledge sharing and understanding through experience sharing. Whenever I see two groups differ, disagree and dig into their positions, I also see something else: that there is an inherent limitation to understanding through knowledge sharing because when we are in the realm of knowledge and expertise, we are dealing with concepts. Perhaps we need to dig deeper.
Great art (literature, music etc.,) communicates itself and unites us by letting us into an understanding through experience sharing. That is because all great art reaches what lies beneath a concept and evokes our pre-conceptual, our phenomenological being. I see something similar going on here in this book. It seems to me that this book is focused on talking about the notions that are pre-conceptual. About those building blocks that are not yet concepts, but that eventually lead up to an economic concept.
As I read the table of contents, I see terms such as, "propriety," "prudence," "benevolence," "self-love," "sense of merit and demerit," and so on, that are a far cry from "profit motive," "capital," "public good," etc., that we come to associate with free-market principles. I can't wait to get into it so please join me and as I post my thoughts on each section, please comment as you see fit.
I am hoping this reading, along with your interaction, will enrich my understanding. I will post the details of this "Blogging While Reading Adam Smith" experiment in a day or two.
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