Revindicating Adam Smith’s critique of ambition and consumption

Adam Smith worries that the commercial life is self-defeating: a treadmill of nonbeneficial ambition and consumption where actors systematically misidentify their own good. Numerous scholars – including Hanley, Hill, Rasmussen, Fleischacker and Sagar – have recently attempted to vindicate commercial society against Smith’s powerful objection. The current article clarifies this objection and refutes these attempts to overcome it. The article diagnoses a deeper illiberalism in these efforts – some moralistic, others consequentialist – to vindicate commercial society, and concludes by showing that consequentialist vindications mistake prudential judgements for moral ones. The discussion has implications for Smith scholarship and contemporary efforts to morally assess capitalism.