The Hidden Algorithm of Sympathy: How Adam Smith, David Hume, and Benjamin Franklin Invented the Moral Engine of Capitalism

The Hidden Algorithm of Sympathy: How Adam Smith, David Hume, and Benjamin Franklin Invented the Moral Engine of Capitalism
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In 1752, a Scottish philosopher and an American printer found themselves debating a paradox that still defines the modern world: can reason alone sustain a society, or must emotion guide the invisible hand?

Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin never formally co-authored a treatise, yet their correspondence and overlapping circles in the 1750s-1770s formed the emotional substrate of capitalism. Between Edinburgh’s coffeehouses and Philadelphia’s salons, they and their mentor-friend David Hume mapped the transition from moral sentiment to market law. What they created — half psychology, half economics — was the first algorithm for organizing human behavior without divine command.


The Science of Feeling (1739 – 1759)

David Hume published A Treatise of Human Nature in 1739, when the word data still meant “things given by God.” His argument detonated scholastic moral philosophy: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.” With that line, ethics became empirical. Hume proposed that sympathy — the ability to feel another’s pleasure or pain — was the real architecture of order. Society worked because emotions were contagious.

Adam Smith absorbed that hypothesis into The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). He transformed Hume’s empathy-as-physics into a behavioral system: each person carries an “impartial spectator,” an inner mirror that evaluates one’s actions as others would. Two centuries before behavioral economics, Smith implied that the market’s true equilibrium was psychological — a collective calibration of pride, guilt, and approval.


The Electrical Republic (1740 – 1776)

Across the Atlantic, Franklin was experimenting with a different kind of sympathy: electricity. His 1751 Experiments and Observations on Electricity described invisible forces binding particles and people alike. “All things are full of electricity,” he wrote, and he meant it socially. Franklin’s civic inventions — subscription libraries (1731), the first volunteer fire company (1736), the American Philosophical Society (1743) — were infrastructures of mutual aid, translating moral sentiment into institutions.

When Franklin met Smith in London around 1776, both men were witnessing revolutions: one political, one industrial, both spiritual. That same year, Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; Franklin helped draft the Declaration of Independence. The coincidence was not accidental. Both documents assumed that self-interest, when bounded by sympathy, could generate freedom rather than chaos.


From Moral Thermodynamics to Market Mechanics (1800 – 1900)

By the 19th century, the emotional variable was stripped from the equation. Political economy hardened into what the historian Mary Poovey calls “the numeric self”: value quantified, virtue outsourced to ledgers. The industrial revolution recoded Smith’s moral equilibrium into mechanical efficiency. Marginal utility replaced moral judgment; sympathy disappeared into statistics.

And yet the numbers still whispered. Early insurance tables in the 1830s and 1840s — ancestors of modern risk analytics — depended on collective empathy disguised as probability: societies sharing losses through pooled premiums. Even Marx’s critique in Das Kapital (1867) retained Smith’s ghost; surplus value was a moral wound measured in labor hours.


Behavioral Revival (1947 – 2025)

The mid-20th century tried to resurrect feeling with data. Herbert Simon’s concept of bounded rationality (1947) and Daniel Kahneman’s Prospect Theory (1979) re-admitted emotion into economics. In 2002, when Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, the committee cited his work on “judgment under uncertainty” — an echo of Hume’s passions and Smith’s impartial spectator, now graphed in regressions rather than sermons.

Today’s algorithmic markets, optimized by trillions of data points per second, are paradoxically closer to Hume than to Walras: systems of automated sympathy, adjusting continuously to the aggregate feeling of billions of users. What remains missing is moral awareness — the why behind the metrics.


The Artometric Perspective

Within Artometrics, these three Enlightenment figures form the prototype of cultural science. Hume supplied the psychological law, Smith formalized it into social equilibrium, and Franklin built its civic hardware. Their correspondence was the eighteenth-century version of open-source design: distributed, empirical, idealistic.

Understanding them numerically means returning to their data. Between 1739 and 1776, the trio collectively produced over 2.1 million words of published text; Smith’s Wealth of Nations alone contains more than 900 references to “sympathy,” “virtue,” or “justice.” The empirical ratios are revealing: roughly one moral term for every five economic ones — a balance modern textbooks rarely match.

What they invented was not capitalism as we know it but a moral algorithm — a system where self-interest functions only under the constraint of mutual perception. The machine ran on feeling.


Conclusion

Economics began as a branch of moral psychology. Its founders believed the invisible hand would fail without an invisible heart. The 21st-century task is not to replace sympathy with AI, but to measure empathy as accurately as we measure efficiency.

The true wealth of nations was never money.
It was trust.


Citation Note: Primary sources include David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40); Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Wealth of Nations (1776); Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751) and collected letters (Yale Edition). Secondary metrics drawn from JSTOR corpus frequency analyses and 2024 Oxford Economic History Review datasets.


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

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