ADAM SMITH’S DISCOURSE, Canonicity, commerce and conscience
For reading a book, Please sign in to your account.
loginAdam Smith’s name has become a byword for free market economics. The account of the benefits of free competitive markets found in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (WN) is regarded as the classic statement of the virtues of a laissez-faire capitalism in which economic agents contribute most effectively to the public good by selfishly pursuing their own interests guided only by the profit motive. Within recent Adam Smith scholarship, however, the political, jurisprudential and moral dimensions of his thought have been explored rather than the economic analysis, and these aspects have been located in terms of the intellectual interests and aspirations of the eighteenth century. Within this larger social matrix, the celebrated view of Smith as primarily an economist—and a dogmatic free market economist at that—appears as a gross caricature; the picture that emerges of Smith is more sceptical, philosophical, and politically focused, and the enthusiasm with which he welcomes the transition to a society based on trade and manufactures is tinged with a more dispassionate recognition of the losses as well as the benefits deriving from commercial society.
