Practical Morality of Life

Caroline Breashears is Professor of English at St. Lawrence University, New York, USA. She has been a visiting Scholar at the American Institute for Economic Research and an Adam Smith Scholar at Liberty Fund. Her previous scholarly publications include Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the “Scandalous Memoir,” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and articles in venues such as Economic Affairs, Aphra Behn Online, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Script & Print, Modern Philology, Philological Quarterly, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

• AcknowledgmentsTimeline: Adam Smith and George Anne Bellamy in the Eighteenth CenturyIntroduction: Practical Morality in the Theatre of Life1. Dramatic Acts: The Alston Street Playhouse and The Wealth of Nations2. 'I must surely stand acquitted': The Impartial Spectator in Bellamy's Apology3. Seeing What Smith Saw: Moral Judgment in The Theory of Moral Sentiments4. 'Two different roads': Ambition in a World of Temptation5. Smith's 'practical system of Morality': The Character of Virtue in ContextWorks Cited

Some have noted Smith’s oddly pervasive metaphor of the stage, and all the men and women merely players, and spectators, too. Caroline Breashears’s brilliant book turns a spotlight upon why. Smith founded a “humanomics,” an economics with human life and literature left in. Breashears has found his muse.