On the correlation of ideas between Smith and Hegel: moral feelings, ethical life, and civil society

Abstract

In this paper we propose to examine a possible correlation between the ideas of Adam Smith and Georg W. F. Hegel, based on a review of the drifts of the vast Enlightenment movement. We suggest thinking of this correlation as a "family resemblance" between the proposals of one author and another, particularly with regard to practical philosophy. After noting that it is not feasible to establish the direct influence of the Theory of Moral Sentiments of the Scottish thinker on the Swabian, we intend to follow some interpretive hypotheses to try to reconstruct, indirectly, a possible confluence of their positions around certain relevant topics on morality, ethical life and the conflictive social life that emerges with modernity. In the confrontation of both ideas, we believe, a certain convergence between such ideas is revealed, at the same time as a certain divergence of their horizons of meaning.