Adam Smith's Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce, and Conscience.

• Author: Hueckel, Glenn

This book is filled with surprising messages, the most surprising of which is that we apparently cannot know the meaning the author intends to convey in those messages. Because "language has a kind of fecundity with a potential proliferation of different readings, it is no longer axiomatic that the 'meaning' of a text is given by authorial intent" [p. 3]. On the contrary, "meanings are not so much present in the text but are constructed by the process of reading" [p. 13]. Even in Smith's own Lectures on Rhetoric, "the power of language is shown not to be entirely under the author's control" [p. 18]. Consequently, Brown "does not lay claim to uncovering . . . Smith's own intentions" since such a claim cannot be "justified" [p. 19]. This obviously is a troubling principle for a reviewer: apparently the reader cannot hope to "uncover" Brown's intended meaning in the book before us; and, if "the power of language" was beyond Smith's "control" then it is certainly beyond that of this humble reviewer, eliminating any hope of unambiguously conveying the meanings I have "constructed" from this work. Nevertheless, in the conviction that it is a long way from the salutary reminder that every reader brings to a text his own "interpretive apparatus" to Brown's troubling claim that we cannot hope to know an author's intended meaning, I shall press on.

Brown's claim that we cannot justly employ "the principle of authorial intention" undercuts the efforts of Smith scholars "to provide an account of the totality of Smith's intellectual output." To do so is to presume "that Smith's diverse writings constitute an oeuvre in the sense of a unified intellectual programme" [p. 207], but since we cannot know any author's intent, we cannot be certain that such a coherent system was in fact Smith's intent. We cannot even accept as evidence of that intent Smith's own statement in the "Advertisement" to the sixth eclition of his Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) to the effect that he conceived his Wealth of Nations (WN) as a part of a larger system begun in that earlier work. To do so "assumes that Smith's personality and his own understanding of his writings are definitive in interpreting the meanings of the texts and in assessing the overall structural thematicity of his works" [p. 20].

But there is much more to Brown's argument than simple agnosticism regarding the coherence of Smith's "oeuvre." We have here a resurrection of "the 'old Adam Smith problem'" in a new...