- Liberty, Commerce, and the Moral Life

Catalog description

Examines the distinctive understandings of liberty in the midst of the emergence of a new world of commerce in the eighteenth century. Students will focus on the writings of David Hume and Adam Smith, comparing their ideas against the backdrop of other thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Locke, Hobbes, Mandeville, and Rousseau. Students will also judge the debates and disagreements among key figures in modern political philosophy. What are the origins of political liberty? Is vice or virtue the animating force of what Smith called the "system of natural liberty"?