Adam Smith S America

The unlikely story of how Americans canonized Adam Smith as the patron saint of free markets Originally published in 1776, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was lauded by America’s founders as a landmark work of Enlightenment thinking about national wealth, statecraft, and moral virtue. Today, Smith is one of the most influential icons of economic thought in America. Glory Liu traces how generations of Americans have read, reinterpreted, and weaponized Smith’s ideas, revealing how his popular image as a champion of American-style capitalism and free markets is a historical invention. Drawing on a trove of illuminating archival materials, Liu tells the story of how an unassuming Scottish philosopher captured the American imagination and played a leading role in shaping American economic and political ideas. She shows how Smith became known as the father of political economy in the nineteenth century and was firmly associated with free trade, and how, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the Chicago School of Economics transformed him into the preeminent theorist of self-interest and the miracle of free markets. Liu explores how a new generation of political theorists and public intellectuals has sought to recover Smith’s original intentions and restore his reputation as a moral philosopher. Charting the enduring fascination that this humble philosopher from Scotland has held for American readers over more than two centuries, Adam Smith’s America shows how Smith continues to be a vehicle for articulating perennial moral and political anxieties about modern capitalism.

Brings together Smith's most incisive and enduring observations on subjects ranging from political and economic history to morals, taxation, art, education, war and the American colonies.

Counter to the popular impression that Adam Smith was a champion of selfishness and greed, Jerry Muller shows that the Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations maintained that markets served to promote the well-being of the populace and that government must intervene to counteract the negative effects of the pursuit of self-interest. Smith's analysis went beyond economics to embrace a larger "civilizing project" designed to create a more decent society.

Adam Smith was a Scottish professor of moral philosophy. He published his classic The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the year the American Revolution began. Smith became widely known for his ideas of free markets, laissez-faire commerce, and the "invisible hand." Yet English politicians, landed gentry, and the nobility paid little attention and enacted none of Smith's suggested reforms. The American colonies, however, began their existence as an independent nation in 1781 with no money, no industry, no banks, and deep in debt. The Founding Fathers-particularly Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin-turned to the ideas of Adam Smith to create and jump-start an economic system for America with both immediate and long-sustained results. This little-known but vital part of U.S. history is now revealed in Roy C. Smith's highly readable new book.

Smith's THE WEALTH OF NATIONS was the first comprehensive treatment of political economy. Originally delivered in the form of lectures at Glasgow, the book's publication in 1776 co-incided with America's Declaration of Independence. These volumes include Smith's assessment of the mercantile system, his advocacy of the freedom of commerce and industry, and his famous prophecy that "America will be one of the foremost nations of the world".

Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, was no dry pedant. His lectures and writings are alive with examples taken from the busy eighteenth-century world around him, and Edmund Burke praised his literary style as "rather painting than writing." It was Adam Smith who taught moral philosophy and literary criticism to Boswell at the University of Glasgow, and in Smith's works we follow his interests from political history to law, sociology, economic and social history, philosophy, and English literature. E. G. West brings to life Adam Smith's first years in the bustling Scottish seaport of Kirkcaldy (and recounts Smith's brief kidnapping, as a baby, by gypsies). We follow young Smith as a student, watch his thought develop as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, and enjoy with him the hospitality of David Hume, the Parisian literary salons, Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, and other giants of the era. West gives us a masterful summary of The Wealth of Nations. Even more significant, West restores to eminence an earlier work of Smith's, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. "If The Wealth of Nations had never been written," he asserts, "this previous work would have earned for him a prominent place in intellectual history." West takes particular delight in using The Theory of Moral Sentiments to rebut Marx's assumptions about laissez-faire capitalism. E. G. West was educated at the University College of Exeter, graduating in economics in 1948. He has taught at several British colleges and at Carleton University in Ottawa, and has been a visiting research scholar at the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley and a visiting professor at the Center for Study of Public Choice, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Dr. West authored several books including Education and the State and Education and the Industrial Revolution. His articles have appeared in numerous periodicals and scholarly journals.

This book demonstrates that because the United States is enmeshed in a complexity of regulations, government debt, bureaucracy, and taxes does not mean that these policies cannot be reversed. They have been before. Rabushka describes an earlier reversal of mercantilist claims by a growing group of influential politicians influenced by Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. It is Rabushka's contention that Adam Smith's principles of sound money, taxes, minimal governmental regulation, and free trade have led to prosperity.