The Scottish Contribution to Modern Economic Thought.

• Author: Morris, Claire E.

While on sabbatical during the fall of 1980, as the train passed slowly through the small Scottish town of Kirkcaldy, I rushed forward to alert a group of chattering American college students studying abroad that they must take note of the important place through which they were passing.[1] Had this book been available at the time, I would have thrust it into their hands with the admonition to . . . "Read it; it will explain why this ground is so significant." All except three of the fifteen essays which appear here have been previously published over the last two decades, several in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy, one in the Journal of Economic Literature, and the others in various monographs by the authors. Despite their random availability, this is a collection that most economists interested in the history of thought will want on their shelves if only for the convenience of having them all together in one place.

The editor, Douglas Mair, does a fine job in the introductory essay of providing the common thread hat holds all the pieces together. Yet, like almost all edited books with multiple authors, the contributions are not of equal merit. The best of the pieces are three by Terence Hutchison and one by Horst Claus Recktenwald. Hutchison's are from his recently published Before Adam Smith: the Emergence of Political Economy 1662-1776, and are excellent on the precursors of Smith and the state of economics before The Wealth of Nations. His treatment of David Hume and Sir James Steuart adds much to our understanding of those scholars, but even better is the way he handles Smith. Like other writers here, he emphasizes the importance of seeing Smith as a philosopher interested in the entire spectrum of human experience and not just in the economic aspects. He correctly establishes that Smith's main focus was on individual freedom and not economic growth, that Smith accepted and wrote about "what is" the nature of economic relationships and not the relationships of a "perfect market system," and that Smith had important things to say about macroeconomics and money as well as about how markets function. Recktenwald's piece is the article that he published in the Journal of Economic Literature in March 1978. Besides doing a wonderful job of reviewing the best literature on Adam Smith, he includes five pages of richly elaborated notes and eight pages of an extensive bibliography that anybody doing research on Smith must have in his...