page_title: Augustan prose
section_title: After 1750
hierarchical_section_title: Augustan prose / Philosophy and religious writing / After 1750
caption_attribution_description: Profile of Adam Smith. The original depiction of Smith was created in 1787 by James Tassie in the form of an enamel paste medallion. Smith did not usually sit for his portrait, so a considerable number of engravings and busts of Smith were made not from observation but from the same enamel medallion produced by Tassie, an artist who could convince Smith to sit.
context_page_description: Augustan prose is somewhat ill-defined, as the definition of "Augustan" relies primarily upon changes in taste in poetry. However, the general time represented by Augustan literature saw a rise in prose writing as high literature. The essay, satire, and dialogue thrived in the age, and the English novel was truly begun as a serious art form. At the outset of the Augustan age, essays were still primarily imitative, novels were few and still dominated by the Romance, and prose was a rarely used format for satire, but, by the end of the period, the English essay was a fully formed periodical feature, novels surpassed drama as entertainment and as an outlet for serious authors, and prose was serving every conceivable function in public discourse. It is the age that most provides the transition from a court-centered and poetic literature to a more democratic, decentralized literary world of prose.
context_section_description: Adam Smith is remembered by lay persons as the father of capitalism, but his Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759 attempted to strike out a new ground for moral action.  His emphasis on "sentiment" was in keeping with the era, as he emphasized the need for "sympathy" between individuals as the basis of fit action.  The idea, first rudimentally presented in Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, of a natural coherence between sensible beings being necessary for communication not only of words, but of emotions and states of being, was here brought out more fully.  While Francis Hutcheson had presupposed a separate sense in humans for morality (akin to conscience but more primitive and more native), Smith argued that moral sentiment is communicated, that it is spread by what might be better called empathy.  These ideas had been satirized already by wits like Jonathan Swift (who insisted that readers of his A Tale of a Tub would be incapable of understanding it unless, like him, they were poor, hungry, had just had wine, and were located in a specific garret), but they were, through Smith and David Hartley, influential on the sentimental novel and even the nascent Methodist movement. If sympathetic sentiment communicated morality, would it not be possible to induce morality by providing sympathetic circumstances?
  Smith's greatest work was An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. What it held in common with de Mandeville, Hume, and Locke was that it began by analytically examining the history of material exchange, without reflection on morality.  Instead of deducing from the ideal to the real, it examined the real and tried to formulate inductive rules.  However, unlike Charles Davenant and the other radical Whig authors (including Daniel Defoe), it also did not begin with a desired outcome and work backward to deduce policy.  Smith instead worked from a strictly empiricist basis to create the conceptual framework for an analytical economics.
caption: Charcoal sketch of Adam Smith.
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