Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life
James R. Otteson, Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 338 pp. $26 (paperback),
ISBN: 0-521-01656-8. Reviewed for EH.NET by Jeffrey T. Young, Department of Economics, St. Lawrence University.
For too long Adam Smith has been viewed almost exclusively as the intellectual property of economists. Economists, I would guess, have written most of the secondary literature. His work has, of course, always been available to the philosophers, but since the publication of the Wealth of Nations there has been a feeling about that Smith was a first rate economist, but a second rate philosopher. [MORE]
Comments (1)
"...there has been a feeling about that Smith was a first rate economist, but a second rate philosopher." As readers of Austrian revisionist work on Smith know, he was a second rate economist. (e.g. See Rothbard's History of Economic Thought) Perhaps he was a first rate philosopher (I was much more impressed with Theory of Moral Sentiments, a careful scholarly work, than Wealth of Nations, a sloppy hodgepodge of unoriginal or just wrong economics). It would be just about right for the popular conception of Smith to be just reverse of the truth.
Published: April 28, 2004 4:38 PM