Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism

“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

Perhaps the greatest consequence of the Chicago Smith was the way it served to reframe the problems of modern American capitalism and modern society as problems that stemmed from government, rather than the market itself.

Adams feared that the goods of fortune would determine who had power—not just in terms of the formal structures of law and government, but in terms of people’s ability to “stand out, to be recognized, and to evoke favorable public sentiments.”161 In such a society, wondered Adams, “what chance has humble, modest, obscure, and poor merit in such a s

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.

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,

Government operated through coercion, clumsiness, and deceptive intention; the invisible hand of the market, however, was the realm of freedom, choice, and possibility.

Following Smith, Adams was convinced that men valued wealth not for its intrinsic value, but rather for its instrumental value in earning social recognition and distinction. “The answer to all these questions is,” Adams asserted, “because riches attract the attention, consideration, and congratulations of mankind.”

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—

Though Hayek’s readings of Smith may have been opportunistic, they were not inaccurate.24 He was careful to distance his interpretation of Smith from those he found to be reductive or dogmatic. His interest in Smith’s works and their prominence stemmed, above all, from his impulse to lay the epistemic foundations for a social theory of markets and