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Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics

Online ISBN:
9780691234939
Print ISBN:
9780691210834
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Book

Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics

Paul Sagar
Paul Sagar
King's College London
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Published online:
18 May 2023
Published in print:
19 April 2022
Online ISBN:
9780691234939
Print ISBN:
9780691210834
Publisher:
Princeton University Press

Abstract

Adam Smith has long been recognized as the father of modern economics. More recently, scholars have emphasized his standing as a moral philosopher—one who was prepared to critique markets as well as to praise them. But Smith's contributions to political theory are still underappreciated and relatively neglected. This book argues that not only have the fundamentals of Smith's political thought been widely misunderstood, but that once we understand them correctly, our estimations of Smith as economist and as moral philosopher must radically change. Rather than seeing Smith either as the prophet of the free market, or as a moralist who thought the dangers of commerce lay primarily in the corrupting effects of trade, the book shows why Smith is more thoroughly a political thinker who made major contributions to the history of political thought. Smith, the book argues, saw war, not commerce, as the engine of political change and he was centrally concerned with the political, not moral, dimensions of—and threats to—commercial societies. In this light, the true contours and power of Smith's foundational contributions to western political thought emerge as never before. Offering major reinterpretations of Smith's political, moral, and economic ideas, the book seeks to revolutionize how he is understood. In doing so, it recovers Smith's original way of doing political theory, one rooted in the importance of history and the necessity of maintaining a realist sensibility, and from which we still have much to learn.

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