La metodología dramática en la obra de Adam Smith

Abstract

This article provides a framework for a unified reading of Adam Smith’s thought. It is based on the synthesis of two lines of research that have been previously tried without, however, reaching a common result to date: the one that has clarified the Newtonian methodology of the economic part of his production and the one that has resorted to the dramatic model to interpret his ethical thought. As an expository strategy, the Newtonian model is subsumed under the dramatic model and the analysis of the tragic fable developed by Aristotle in his Poetics is identified as a reference for Smith. This emphasizes the centrality of the productive imagination in his own work, both in the construction of his objects and in the didactic organization of his texts, concluding that aesthetic creativity was for him the basic methodology that underlay scientific rigor.