Sympathy, Justice, and the Impartial Spectator with Kristen Collins

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Peter Boettke sits down with Kristen Collins for a wide-ranging conversation on Adam Smith's moral philosophy and its intersection with theories of justice, sympathy, and political power. The conversation moves through the relationship between sympathy, moral imagination, and the origins of our sense of justice, drawing on Michelle Schwarze's work on sympathetic resentment, before turning to why economists have historically misread Smith as indifferent to the poor and powerless — despite Smith's own repeated siding with the weak against the powerful. Boettke and Collins also explore Smith's "man of system" passages as a caution against imposing utopian visions by force, discuss Judith Shklar's "liberalism of fear" in relation to Hayek, and close with an extended look at Collins's research on Jeremy Bentham's little-known Sotomion — a proposed institution designed to protect unmarried pregnant women from social shame while preserving their social connections, offering a striking counterpoint to Bentham's more famous Panopticon.

Dr. Kristen Collins is a Senior Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She hosts the Virtual Sentiments podcast, which features conversations with scholars and practitioners reflecting on the ethics and politics of technology. She is currently working on a book, Seeing and Being Seen: Spectatorship and Surveillance in Liberal Democracies, under contract with Oxford University Press.

**This episode was recorded on June 2, 2026**

Show Notes:

• Kristen Collins, “Observed without Sympathy: Adam Smith on Inequality and Spectatorship” (American Journal of Political Science, 2020)

• Virtual Sentiments | Maria Pia Paganelli on 250 Years of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations

• Virtual Sentiments | Eileen Hunt on Mary Shelley and the Ethics of AI

• Martha C. Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal (Harvard University Press, 2021)

• F.A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False”

• Michelle Schwarze, Recognizing Resentment: Sympathy, Injustice, and Liberal Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

• Carl Menger, “The Social Theories of Classical Political Economy and Modern Economic Policy”

• James R. Otteson, Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

• Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton University Press, 2013)

• William Easterly, Violent Saviors: The West's Conquest of the Rest (Basic Books, 2025)

• Joshua L. Cherniss, Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2021)

• Jeremy Waldron, Political Political Theory: Essays on Institutions (Harvard University Press, 2016)

• Jeremy Waldron, One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality (Harvard University Press, 2017)

• Judith N. Shklar, The Liberalism of Fear (Harvard University Press, 2026)

• Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (Grove Press, 2021)

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