Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism
Glory M. Liuamazon.com
Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism
Scholars have long noticed Smith’s worries about the debilitating effects of the division of labor and anxieties attached to the insatiable desire “better one’s condition.”
Glory M. Liu • Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism
Smith provided a definition of national wealth and showed how the “whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country … naturally divides itself” among three parts: rent, wages, and profit. Those three divisions were the bases of the “three different orders of people:” those who lived by rent (landowners), those who lived by wages (labore
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For Friedman, Smith’s invisible hand was an “instrumental device” whose direct opposite was government.
Glory M. Liu • Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism
From the standpoint of Ely and the new generation economists, economic analysis and its application made up an inherently ethical task whose basic unit of analysis was the social whole. In this sense, their pronouncements were not socialist in a Marxist sense—that is, implying public ownership of capital and the ultimate displacement of capitalism—
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“Oeconomy in general is the art of providing for all the wants of a family, with prudence and frugality,” Steuart asserted in the first chapter of the work. “What oeconomy is in a family, political economy is in a state … The great art therefore of political economy is, first to adapt the different operations of it to the spirit, manners, habits, a
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Knight wanted to question not just the ethical bases of a competitive economic order, but also the ethical norms that a market society fostered. “An examination of the ethics of the economic system must consider the question of the kind of wants which it tends to generate or nourish as well as its treatment of wants as they exist at any given time,
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Ultimately, Smith’s importance in the antebellum tariff debates had very little to do with substantive interest in what he had to say about trade, and more to do with what his thought had come to represent: an ideological and seemingly irresolvable conflict over the politics of free trade.
Glory M. Liu • Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism
Especially in the northeastern clerical schools, then, the science of political economy qua moral philosophy was a handmaiden of religion; the study of the systematic arrangement of the laws of nature—even the laws that governed economic activity—revealed the divine will of God and instructed one’s highest moral faculty to follow its dictates.
Glory M. Liu • Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism
What appears to be one of the central, orienting questions for reading Smith in the twenty-first century is a new version of the old Adam Smith Problem: how do we reconcile Smith’s advocacy of the material benefits of the market society he envisioned with his worries about its heavy moral costs?