Recent years have witnessed a renewed debate over the costs at which the  benefits of free markets have been bought. This book revisits the moral and  political philosophy of Adam Smith, capitalism's founding father, to recover  his understanding of the morals of the market age. In so doing it illuminates  a crucial albeit overlooked side of Smith's project: his diagnosis of the ethical  ills of commercial societies and the remedy he advanced to cure them.  Focusing on Smith's analysis of the psychological and social ills endemic to  commercial society - anxiety and restlessness, inauthenticity and mediocrity,  alienation and individualism - it argues that Smith sought to combat corruption  by cultivating the virtues of prudence, magnanimity, and beneficence.  The result constitutes a new morality for modernity, at once a synthesis of  commercial, classical, and Christian virtues and a normative response to one  of the most pressing political problems of Smith's day and ours.    Ryan Patrick Hanley is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Marquette  University. His research in the history of political philosophy has appeared in  the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the  Review of Politics, History of Political Thought, the European Journal of Political  Theory, and other academic journals and edited volumes. He is also the editor  of the forthcoming Penguin Classics edition of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral  Sentiments, featuring an introduction by Amartya Sen, and a co-editor, with  Darrin McMahon, of The Enlightenment: Critical Concepts in History.

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