Sympathy Before Empathy: The Forgotten Emotion That Built Capitalism

In 1759, when Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the English language lacked a word for empathy.
The closest term was sympathy — from the Greek sym-pathos, meaning “to suffer with.”
The modern word empathy would not appear until the German philosopher Theodor Lipps coined Einfühlung (“feeling into”) in 1903 and it was translated into English in 1909 by Edward Titchener, a Cornell psychologist.
This linguistic gap—one hundred and fifty years wide—shaped how the Western world conceived of markets, morality, and the self.

The Moral Engine of the 18th Century

Smith’s Scotland was an Enlightenment laboratory where moral philosophy blurred into economics.
When he spoke of sympathy, he meant the ability to imaginatively feel another’s situation through shared sentiment, not to inhabit it psychologically as empathy implies.
In Smith’s invisible hand, each person’s pursuit of advantage was checked by this sympathetic mirroring—how would others see me?

It was an elegant equilibrium model long before calculus formalized economics.
In the 1759 first edition of Moral Sentiments, the term sympathy appears 238 times, compared to zero occurrences of empathy in any English text of the century.
Language itself encoded the limits of introspection: you could feel with others, but not into them.

When Words Become Systems

Between 1750 and 1850, industrialization transformed sentiment into system.
As production scaled, sympathy—an interpersonal virtue—was replaced by efficiency, an impersonal metric.
Without the vocabulary for empathy, policy treated suffering statistically.
Poor laws, workhouses, and utilitarian ethics all reflected a linguistic blind spot: reformers measured pain but could not describe identification.

The numbers illustrate the moral shift.
Britain’s real GDP per capita roughly tripled between 1760 and 1860, while average life expectancy for laborers rose by only five years.
Progress was measurable; compassion was not.
Economics had outpaced emotion.

The German Correction

At the turn of the twentieth century, Lipps introduced Einfühlung in aesthetics, describing how an observer “projects themselves into” a work of art.
Titchener’s 1909 translation, empathy, extended the idea to psychology.
This semantic innovation coincided with a scientific one: Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis (1899) and Max Weber’s verstehende Soziologie (1904) reframed understanding as internal participation.
Feeling became cognition.

By 1930, empathy appeared in English journals at roughly 10 occurrences per million words—still rare, but growing.
Post-war social sciences, especially Carl Rogers’ humanistic psychology (1951), elevated empathy to a civic virtue.
Yet economics, obsessed with equilibrium and rational choice, ignored it.

Data Without Understanding

The 20th century’s neoclassical model defined humans as homo economicus: rational agents maximizing utility.
This abstraction coincided with the rise of national accounts and GDP (Kuznets, 1934).
Empathy—unmeasurable, qualitative, relational—fell outside the model.
As of 2025, no major economic indicator includes any metric for emotional welfare beyond consumption proxies.
Meanwhile, behavioral economics confirms what Hume and Smith already knew: emotion drives choice.

A meta-analysis of over 450 behavioral studies (Journal of Economic Psychology, 2022) found that “affective framing” increases risk-taking by an average of 27 percent, regardless of expected value.
In other words, the market still runs on sentiment; our models just call it “confidence.”

The Artometric Interpretation

From an Artometrics standpoint, this linguistic evolution—sympathy → empathy → analytics—maps the moral compression of modernity.
When the lexicon expanded, the models contracted.
What Smith called sympathy became the seed of economic behavior; what Lipps called Einfühlung became the seed of modern psychology; and what data scientists now call signal is the digital residue of both.

If we plot cultural frequency data (Google N-gram 2024), sympathy peaks around 1840 and declines steadily thereafter, while empathy rises exponentially after 1950.
The curves intersect around 1971—the same decade global GDP growth decoupled from wage growth.
As empathy entered language, sympathy left policy.

Re-Humanizing the Model

Economics is now re-discovering what philosophy once assumed: that welfare cannot be detached from identification.
The World Bank’s 2023 report on “Subjective Well-Being Metrics” proposes empathy-based indicators for governance—a belated return to Smith’s 18th-century premise.
The challenge is methodological: to quantify empathy without turning it into sentiment analysis.

The Artometric project argues that this is possible through cultural metrics—datasets that trace moral attention: how often societies represent suffering, cooperation, or generosity in their art, media, and code.
The future GDP may include not just goods and services, but goodness and service.

Closing Reflection

If sympathy built capitalism, empathy may yet civilize it.
The word we lacked in 1759 might be the one we need in 2025: a variable that converts awareness into policy.
Smith imagined that feeling would guide the hand; perhaps feeling, properly measured, can steady it again.

Citation Note:
Primary sources: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759); Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik (1903); Edward Titchener, “Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes” (1909).
Quantitative references: Google Books N-gram Corpus (2024 release); UK GDP estimates (Broadberry et al., 2023); Journal of Economic Psychology (Vol. 94, 2022).
Secondary sources: Mary Poovey, The History of the Modern Fact (1998); Carl Rogers, Client-Centered Therapy (1951).

This article was written with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2025).