Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism

Adams feared that the goods of fortune would determine who had power—not just in terms of the formal structures of law and government, but in terms of people’s ability to “stand out, to be recognized, and to evoke favorable public sentiments.”161 In such a society, wondered Adams, “what chance has humble, modest, obscure, and poor merit in such a s

Stigler’s mark in economics centered on the economic competency—or rather incompetency—of state power. Once man’s behavior was reduced to utility-maximizing self-interest, economists were able to tear down the edifices of government intervention in the economy; they sought “a large role for explicit or implicit prices in the solution of many social

Following Smith, Adams was convinced that men valued wealth not for its intrinsic value, but rather for its instrumental value in earning social recognition and distinction. “The answer to all these questions is,” Adams asserted, “because riches attract the attention, consideration, and congratulations of mankind.”

Ultimately, Smith’s importance in the antebellum tariff debates had very little to do with substantive interest in what he had to say about trade, and more to do with what his thought had come to represent: an ideological and seemingly irresolvable conflict over the politics of free trade.

Government operated through coercion, clumsiness, and deceptive intention; the invisible hand of the market, however, was the realm of freedom, choice, and possibility.

For Friedman, Smith’s invisible hand was an “instrumental device” whose direct opposite was government.

By reworking Smithian concepts like “individualism,” “self-interest,” and “the invisible hand,” thinkers like Hayek, Stigler, and Friedman transformed Smith into an original way of thinking about an individualistic, market-oriented society that was justifiable on social-scientific grounds.

Knight wanted to question not just the ethical bases of a competitive economic order, but also the ethical norms that a market society fostered. “An examination of the ethics of the economic system must consider the question of the kind of wants which it tends to generate or nourish as well as its treatment of wants as they exist at any given time,

Scholars have long noticed Smith’s worries about the debilitating effects of the division of labor and anxieties attached to the insatiable desire “better one’s condition.”