Adam Smith is famous as a champion of commercial growth. But he is arguably even more insightful -- and more relevant to our contemporary moment -- as a theorist of national decline. This lecture will survey his diagnosis of the chief existential threats to national stability, both internal and external.

Ryan Patrick Hanley is J. Joseph Moakley Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Boston College. Prior to joining the faculty at Boston College, he was the Mellon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, and held visiting appointments or fellowships at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. A specialist on the political philosophy of the Enlightenment period, he is the author of over seventy articles and chapters, editor or translator of five books, and author of four books: Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge, 2009), Love's Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity (Cambridge, 2017), Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life (Princeton, 2019), and The Political Philosophy of Fénelon (Oxford, 2020).  His most recent published project is Love: A History (Oxford, 2024), which he edited for the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series.