Spectacular Judgments

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith characterizes the remorseful criminal as someone who “dares no longer look society in the face” and would “be glad to fly to some inhospitable desert, where he might never behold the face of a human creature, nor read in the countenance of mankind the condemnation of his crime.” Only the “horror of solitude drives him back into society, and he comes again into the presence of mankind, astonished to appear before them, loaded with shame and distracted with fear, in order to supplicate some little protection from the countenance of those very judges, who he knows have already all unanimously condemned him.” ¹ Aligning the moral sense with the sense of sight, this passage is typical of the emphasis on looking that pervades Smith’s moral philosophy. In this case, it is not punishment itself that Smith’s hypothetical criminal dreads but “look[ing] society in the face” and seeing on its countenance “the condemnation of his crime.” Indeed, Smith describes here what we might call the ideal relationship between spectacle and justice in the legal imagination. The public, represented by Smith’s “impartial spectator,” looks on criminals in judgment, and criminals internalize that disapproving gaze, coming to see themselves as they are seen by others, “unanimously condemned.”