Moral Philosophy and the Modern World

Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation
by Alan Wolfe
University of California Press, 1989, 371 pp., $25.00

Adam Smith became professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1752. To hold such a professorship in that time and place was to be recognized as a chief spokesperson for enlightened Scottish culture as a whole. His responsibility, along with that of his counterpart at Edinburgh, was to articulate his society’s self-understanding, in lectures and published writings, thereby shaping the ou13tlook of the entire student body as well as tutoring the educated public at large. As Alan Wolfe points out, Smith was no mere ...