Chess before the Theory of Moral Sentiments

Black to play
C Lolli vs D Ercole Del Rio

18. …?
See game for solution.
Difficulty Scale

about our puzzles

OK, so it’s not hard to work out the answer, but it’s cute, and it happened in Modena in 1755. Before Adam Smith finished The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 there was, obviously enough, a fair bit of waiting around. So they played chess. Click through for the answer if you can’t work it out.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

7 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
trackback

[…] here: Club Troppo » Chess before the Theory of Moral Sentiments Filed Under: General, Politics Tagged With: australian, frijters, james, james-farrell, […]

TimT
14 years ago

You’ve probably already seen it but somewhere there on that chessgames site there should be record of a game between Jean Jacques Rousseau and David Hume. Good one too. (I first played it over years ago in an old Iving Chernev book that my uni library had.)

Oktay
Oktay
14 years ago

Kasparov-Palatnik 1978
Palatnik missed the opportunity at 11 and he ended up loosing the game.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1069723

Oktay
Oktay
14 years ago

11-… Qxd4 12-Qxd4 cxd4 13 Rxf7 Bxe5
In this situation black has better positions.

TimT
14 years ago

Oh you know, the pleasure of those classic games of chess usually arises because one side has the good grace to lose in an utterly extraordinary fashion. Didn’t the Immortal Game happen with Anderson beating Kieseritzky in a line of the Kings Gambit that Kieseritzky specialised in?