On Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations": A Philosophical Companion.

• Author: Otteson, James R.
• Position: Book Review

On Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations": A Philosophical Companion By Samuel Fleischacker Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii, 329. $39.50 cloth, $19.95 paperback.

Adam Smith's writings have recently undergone a revolution. For almost two centuries, Smith was hailed as the Founding Father of capitalism, with his 1776 Wealth of Nations (hereafter WN) a manifesto for private property, free trade, and free markets. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, however, several scholars claimed to discover that Smith was not really a classical liberal after all, but more like a progressive liberal: his concerns for the poor, his worries about the damage that excessive division of labor can do to workers, and his criticisms of merchants and monopoly corporations indicated, to some at least, that he was as concerned with "social justice" as with plain old regular justice. While men sported Adam Smith neckties in Washington during the Reagan years, scholars were busy claiming Smith for the progressives. Some went so far as to claim that Smith was a proto-Marxist. Indeed, Murray Rothbard suggested that Smith's apparent labor theory of value, his four-stages theory of human history, and his failure to understand marginal utility made him an economic dunce whose faulty analyses not only set the discipline of economics back a hundred years, but also paved the way and even perhaps bears some responsibility for the human tragedies wrought by Marxism and communism. Rothbard's somewhat overheated assertions aside, one might still reasonably ask: Will the real Adam Smith please stand up?

Enter Samuel Fleischacker's "philosophical companion" to WN. This book advertises itself as the first "philosophical" commentary on WN, and the back-jacket blurb from Charles Griswold, a noted Smith scholar and philosopher himself, states, "Until now, nobody has published a truly philosophical, let alone comprehensive and philosophical, commentary on Smith's great work of political economy." Given how much has been written about WNsince its first publication, claims to comprehensiveness and absolute novelty certainly raise expectations, but Fleischacker's book meets the expectations. It may not be entirely comprehensive--at least, not in the sense of commenting on everything in WN or commenting on it section by section--but it is an entire book written by a philosopher and dedicated to explicating and interpreting central themes in WN. Moreover, although...