Adam Smith S Discourse

Adam Smith's name has become synonymous with free market economics; The Wealth of Nations is taken as the definitive account of the benefits of free competitive markets. Yet recent scholarship has challenged this view and given us a richer, more nuanced figure, steeped in the intricacies of enlightenment social and political philosophy. Adam Smith's Discourse both develops this literature and gives it a radical new extension by taking into account recent debates in literary theory.

From the author's introduction: "As Smith's Wealth of Nations stands as the classic exposition of the case for free trade, so the Theory of Moral Sentiments investigates the moral bonds holding together the commercial way of life." This study employs both gender and political theory to investigate the nature of those bonds as portrayed by Smith. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In a Foucauldian analysis of the power of the discourse of Adam Smith to shape the way modernity defines the self and subjectivity, Shapiro (political science, U. of Hawaii) examines how Adam Smith's moral philosophy and political economy are now textualized and institutionalized. He argues that Smith's writings legitimize contentious realities by seeming purely descriptive, monumentalizing arbitrary victories of power in persons such as "the individual" and collectivities such as "the nation." Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Adam Smith‘s contribution to economics is well-recognised but in recent years scholars have been exploring anew the multidisciplinary nature of his works. The Adam Smith Adam Smith‘s contribution to economics is well-recognized but in recent years scholars have been exploring anew the multidisciplinary nature of his works. The Adam Smith Review pro

Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and was strongly influenced by his critique. In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith’s sympathy with Rousseau’s concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend commercial society against these charges. These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmatic in nature, not ideological: it was Smith’s view that, all things considered, commercial society offered more benefits than the alternatives. Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith’s approach can be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons of commercial society today and thus contributes to a debate that is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.