Adam Smith’s ambiguous theodicy and the ethics of international political economy

When feeling in need of ethics, international relations (IR) largely resorts to Enlightenment figures, especially Kant and his intellectual descendants. Scholars tend to see the ethical legacy of the Enlightenment as secular, despite Kant’s own writings on rational religion and theodicy. My interests and expertise run along the different pathways laid down by political economy; for me, the key Enlightenment figure is Adam Smith. Carl Becker places Smith in that Enlightenment movement that “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” Human life still appears as a “significant drama”—as a theory of orderly progress that replaces classical cyclical theories or Christian eschatology. ¹ More precisely, Cassirer argues that the key intellectual problems engaging Enlightenment thinkers are “fused with religious problems,” none more troubling than how to reconcile a vision of creation as simple and harmonious with the disorderly “facts of human experience,” a problem of theodicy to which “they recur untiringly.” ²