Adam Smith on Social Progress and the Evolution of Love

Abstract

Adam Smith is not generally considered a pioneering theorist of love. To the degree that scholars have attended to his treatment of love, they have tended to focus on his critical comments on love and sex in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This article, in contrast, focuses on Smith’s comparatively understudied treatment of love in the Lectures on Jurisprudence to argue that the lectures set forth a sophisticated theory of the ways in which the progressive development of social institutions contributed to the emergence of modern conceptions of love. Specifically, in focusing on three core elements of Smith’s treatment of domestic law—the evolution of the relations of husbands and wives, the evolution of the relations of parents and children, and the evolution of the relations of masters and slaves—it seeks to bring to light Smith’s understanding of how, through a better understanding of the processes driving the emergence and evolution of our social institutions, we can better understand how and why we today experience love in the way we do, as well as how and why our understanding of love differs from earlier understandings of love.