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

“Oeconomy in general is the art of providing for all the wants of a family, with prudence and frugality,” Steuart asserted in the first chapter of the work. “What oeconomy is in a family, political economy is in a state … The great art therefore of political economy is, first to adapt the different operations of it to the spirit, manners, habits, a

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

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

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.”

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.

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

Smith provided a definition of national wealth and showed how the “whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country … naturally divides itself” among three parts: rent, wages, and profit. Those three divisions were the bases of the “three different orders of people:” those who lived by rent (landowners), those who lived by wages (labore

The method and substance that defined Chicago Price Theory evolved over many years, but its central tenet is that prices transmit information about what consumers want to buy and what producers want to sell; prices also reveal the incentives on which people act. Analysis of prices—what determines them, what causes them to change—informs the baselin