Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 48 of Jerry Z. Muller’s 1993 book, Adam Smith In His Time and Ours [original emphasis):

As a moral philosopher, Smith was concerned about the nature of moral excellence. But like many other Enlightenment intellectuals, he tried to begin by describing man as he really is. His conception of man was not as an intrinsically good creature corrupted by society, nor as an irredeemably evil creature except for the grace of God. His project was to take man as he is and to make him more like what he is capable of becoming, not by exerting government power and not primarily by preaching, but by discovering the institutions that make men tolerably decent and may make them more so.