A Study On Smith 's Path To Private Interest

Path research is to research problems from the perspective of realization path, and the starting point and ending point have been relatively identified. The starting point of this article refers to the individual pursuit of self-interest while ending point refers to the growth and achievement of the social overall public benefit. Specifically, this problem has two aspects. First, if individual pursuit of self-interests is consist with social public benefit, how to achieve this kind of consistency; while when individual pursuit of private interests deviates from social public benefit, what kind of mechanism reconciles this divergence and how does it work. Adam Smith is the terminator and synthesizer of the English Emotionalism in18th Century, and also known as the "father of modern economics" by descendants. The early capitalism is the historical background of his theory when there were great changes in the social production mode and social lifestyle, which is similar to the current situation of our country on a certain degree.In this paper, the generation of the conflict between self-interest and public benefit is analyzed from two angles of realistic contradiction and theoretical background, and the solutions proposed by early capitalist thinkers are first outlined. To solve this problem, Smith in The Wealth of Nations proposed the market path:market provides an implementation path for individual to pursue self-interest in commodity society; market division and general competition greatly improves the efficiency of social production; the magic "invisible hand" guides people to pursue their self-interest. All of this allows the whole society to share the fruits from the pursuit of self-interest, which further contributes to the growth of overall social public benefit. According to the sympathy theory in his ethics ideology, humanity, sympathy and its mechanism can lay the foundation for moral evaluation and moral judgment. Through their own emotions, people evaluate or judge whether other’s emotions and behaviors are proper, and further maintain social order and reconcile the conflict between self-interest and public benefit through moral evaluation and ethics. Meanwhile sympathy and its mechanism also provide a path for human to make self-evaluation, which can to some extent restrict unreasonable pursuit of self-interest and inspire people to pursue social interest on the basis of self-love. However, taking emotions as the moral criteria will inevitably lead to the defects of subjectivity and arbitrariness. It is Smith’s impartial spectator ideology that remedies this system and also acts as the starting point for his rational route. On the one hand, he believes impartial spectator provides impartial perspective for human moral evaluation and self-evaluation when analyzing from the rational point of view; on the other hand, by using rational deductive method, Smith built a basic framework for social order and law by examining the connotation of realistic and impartial spectator, thus the social order and human general emotion basis are allowed to achieve a harmonized status. Finally, by sorting out the evaluations of later generations on the three paths proposed by Smith, this paper discusses the limitations of Smith’s solutions in today’s problems and aims to judge the historical status and realistic value of Smith’s ideas from an impartial perspective.