Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints – The Pleasure of Exchange: Adam Smith's Third Kind of Self-Love

Michele Bee

No wc948, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: This article argues that the self-love that motivates exchange in The Wealth of Nations (WN) can be seen as the desire for deserved approval discussed by Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). This often overlooked desire appears in TMS as the most representative kind of self-love. Exchange motivated by this desire emerges as the way to find confirmation through others’ appraisal of one’s own self-assessment, and thus to find an agreed measure for respective deserved praise. The target in this economic relationship is the equivalence which signals mutual recognition of deserved esteem. Equivalence here is the aim and not the result of exchange, unlike a tug-of-war, where both parties try to give as little and gain as much as possible regardless of the recognition each deserves.

Date: 2020-01-29
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:wc948

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/wc948

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