Fonna Forman-Barzilai on "Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy"
Time and place: Oct 26, 2010 10:15 AM, Undervisningsrom 2, Georg Sverdrups hus, Blindern, Oslo
Fonna Forman-Barzilai, (Associate Professor
Department of Political Science, University of California, San
Diego, USA)Editor, The Adam Smith Review,
will give a talk "Adam Smith and the Circles of
Sympathy"
Abstract:
In this talk I will piece together Adam Smith's view of the
international realm as remarkably unsympathetic (very literally,
without sympathy), deeply pluralistic morally (without universal
truths), and susceptible to conflict (without law or oversight).
Three questions will be addressed: Why did Smith believe the world
was like this? Why did he maintain that cosmopolitanism was
implausible in such a world? And how did he ultimately talk about
larger and broader spaces in face of his anti-cosmopolitanism?
Fonna Forman-Barzilai is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. She is a political theorist, whose research interests are situated broadly in modern European thought -- political, moral and economic -- with an emphasis on the development of cosmopolitan ideas from antiquity to the present.
