I began this book with a general discussion of the Enlightenment and of the widespread unease about its prospects and about its virtues. I suggested that Adam Smith is both a partisan and critic of the Enlightenment; he purposes to preserve what is best about the movement by drawing upon resources ancient and modern, while also analyzing its unintended shortcomings. I have argued throughout that the old problem of the relationship between philosophy and ordinary experience is itself fruitfully seen as a principal theme in his reflections on what it would mean for human life to be enlightened. At several junctures I queried the persuasiveness of the manner in which particular themes and arguments are treated in Smith's work – for example, the priority of the spectator over the actor in matters of ethical evaluation, the safeguards against the possible degeneration of the pleasure of sympathy into selfishness and vanity, the circularity of ethical reasoning, and the prescriptions for liberty of religious belief and their implications for the survival of energetic religion. On each occasion I sought to articulate Smith's likely reply to questions that might legitimately be put to him.