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Moral Philosophy or Economic Analysis? The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith

The Wealth of Nations (WN), like Malthus’s Essay on Population, Marx’s Capital and Darwin’s Origin of Species is one of those few books which have changed the way we think about the world. Edmund Burke believed it was ‘probably the most important book ever written’ (O’Brien 1993, 144, n. 1). But this could never be said of Smith’s other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Smith’s reputation today as a seminal thinker of the 18th century would be almost as high had TMS never been written. Yet as The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith (Berry, Paganelli, and Smith 2013) clearly shows, the attention of Smith scholars at the present time is more engaged by moral philosophy—not to mention astronomy, rhetoric, belles lettres and jurisprudence—than by economics. This is partly a consequence of the definitive Glasgow edition of the works and correspondence of Adam Smith, inaugurated by the bicentenary of WN in 1976 and originally published by Oxford University Press, which was soon made widely available in paperback by the Liberty Fund. In the academic industry at any rate, supply creates its own demand. But there may be other reasons, intellectual and perhaps ideological, that I shall consider later in this article. In what follows I will first report the content of the Handbook, next examine its treatment of economic themes, and then explore some questions of intellectual history that it raises. Finally I shall ask why so much academic (and commercial) attention is now being paid to Adam Smith.