Smith's Theory Research Articles

‘Universal opulence’: Adam Smith on technical progress and real wages

This paper first considers the character of Smith's account of division of labour as a theory of technical progress. In so far as Smith's account does entail a vision of liberal or competitive commercial society as exhibiting ongoing technical progress, this must have implications for income distribution through time. The paper therefore also considers, in particular, Smith's conception of the course of real wages in competitive commercial society, and how this connects with his view of technical progress. A reconciliation of Smith's theory of real wages and his prediction of high and rising real wages over time is suggested.

The meaning of property: freedom, community, and the legal imagination

In his latest book, Jedediah Purdy takes up a question of deep and lasting importance: why is property ownership a value to society? His answer returns us to the foundations of American society and enables us to interpret the writings of the patron saint of liberal economics, Adam Smith, in a wholly new light. Unlike Milton Friedman and other free-market scholars, who consider property a key to efficient markets, Purdy draws upon Smith's theories to argue that the virtues of wealth are social rather than economic. In Purdy's view, ownership does much more than shield one from government interference. Property shapes social life in ways that bring us closer to, or take us farther from, the ideal of a community of free and equal members. This view of property is neither libertarian nor communitarian but treats the community as the precondition of individual freedom. This view informed U.S. law in the early days of the republic, Purdy writes, and it is one that we need to restore today. Touching upon some of the most charged issues in American politics and law, including slavery, inheritance, international development, and climate change, The Meaning of Property offers a compelling new view of property and freedom and enriches our understanding of democratic society.

Moral markets

Is market exchange solely dependent on selfishness or does other-regarding behavior play any substantial role? This article reviews the philosophical, psychological and neurological basis for moral values, showing that they are consistent and measurable. I demonstrate that values play a role in social interactions, including market exchange. Indeed, market exchange in moderately regulated economies is predicated on the notion that most people, most of the time, behave morally – albeit in the shadow of enforcement. This idea is of ancient origin, but is most clearly articulated in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. The moral nature of social decisions is used to identify modifications of the standard expected utility model, and implications for a value-based approach to human decisions are elucidated for law, regulation, business organization, economic growth, and happiness. The conditions that lead to moral market failures like the Enron debacle are also described. Not only do morals underpin markets, but intriguing new evidence suggests that markets may strengthen moral values.

Adam Smith and the Grotian Theory of Property

In the theory of property, which he presented in his lectures in Glasgow in 1762–63, Adam Smith moved decisively against the ideas of his Scottish contemporaries and near contemporaries, particularly with respect to the elements of their theories they had inherited from Locke. This article explores the reasons behind this change in direction and discusses the use Smith made of Grotius' theory of property in reformulating his own ideas. I argue that Grotius' influence is evident in three features of Smith's theory: the account of property in the first age of society; the role of agreements in the subsequent development of property; and the nature and scope of natural rights.

A Free-market Model for Media Ethics: Adam Smith's Looking Glass

This article points out the challenges to current models for media ethics that arise from the private ownership of public media, and it proposes a new model that integrates Adam Smith's free-market theory and his system of moral reasoning. The model creates moral obligations to maintain the integrity of a system for anyone who profits from it. This model renews an appeal for the contemporary notion of transparency and is built on an analogy between the system of the free market for creating wealth and the system of the free press for producing reliable market information.

How “scientific” is science education research?

AbstractThe research articles published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching in 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995, and in 2005 were surveyed to discover the extent to which they were theory driven. Carey and Smith's theory of the development of science epistemologies was used to frame the study. Specifically their theory posits that science epistemologies develop through three developmental levels. Persons at Level 1 view science as an inductive and descriptive enterprise. Persons at Level 2 view science in terms of hypothesis generation and test. Persons at Level 3 see science as theory driven. That is, theories are generated and their postulates are tested via planned tests with predicted consequences and theories are used to generate specific hypotheses, which in turn are tested in a similar manner. Three computer‐generated surveys were conducted on each article identifying articles that contained the words theory, hypothesis, and prediction. The surveys assumed that if the reported research was guided by Level 3 epistemology, then these key terms would be likely to appear somewhere in the article. The term theory was found in only 18.0% of the 1965 articles. Percentages increased in subsequent decades, that is, to 36.5% in 1975, to 44.3% in 1985, to 58.3% in 1995, and then to 86.7% in 2005. Similar, though less dramatic, increases were also found for the terms hypothesis and prediction. Relatively few articles contained two or all three of the terms. Nevertheless, analysis of all 45 research articles appearing in 2005 revealed that most authors were generating and testing hypotheses and/or theories (presumably guided by Levels 2 or 3 epistemology) albeit in a largely implicit and sometimes inconsistent way. Suggestions for improving the quality of research and its reporting are made. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:257–275, 2010

Time for Sympathy: Some Thoughts on the 250th Anniversary of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments

Students of political economy are of course very familiar with Adam Smith, but often in the same way that students of sociology are familiar with the works of Max Weber. He is canonical, a founding...

Vanity and the love of system in Theory of Moral Sentiments

Some recent writing on Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments has emphasised the importance of vanity as one of the most important human motivations. This reading leads to a new version of Das Adam Smith Problem, but this is unwarranted. Such a reading tends to conceal the significance that Smith gave to the love of system, which motivates the actions of the philosopher, the man of state, and above all the entrepreneur. This paper shows, by contrast, that by using this conception we can relate Theory of Moral Sentiments to Wealth of Nations, and reject the idea that these works are based upon contradictory assumptions.

Topologie

This conference was the last of six in the series of topology conferences in Oberwolfach organized by Cameron Gordon and Bob Oliver, joined for the first time by Thomas Schick as successor of Wolfgang Lück, who was organizer for an even longer time. Unfortunately, Lück could not attend the conference for medical reasons. There were about 45 participants in the meeting, working in many different areas of algebraic and geometric topology. The 19 talks of the conference covered a wide range of areas such as 3-manifolds and knot theory, geometric group theory, algebraic K - and L -theory, and homotopy theory. One of the goals of the conference is to foster interaction between such different areas and the passage of methods from one to the other. The following is a summary of some of the highlights. Karen Vogtmann reported on joint work with Martin Bridson, showing that the automorphism group of a free group on n letters cannot act non-trivially on a Euclidean space of dimension n-1 , or on any acyclic homology manifold of dimension n-1 . This uses some delicate refinements of classical Smith theory. In a related direction, Tadeusz Januszkiewicz presented the construction of finitely generated groups with the property that the action on an arbitrary finite dimensional acyclic space always has a fixed point. This construction involves simplices of groups used together with Smith theory and a limit theorem from hyperbolic group theory. In other talks on geometric group theory, Roman Sauer described new results in Mostow rigidity, stating roughly that hyperbolic lattices can only be lattices in the corresponding \mathrm{SO}(n,1) ; and Clara Löh proved non-vanishing for simplicial volume of certain non-compact locally symmetric spaces. Simon's conjecture in knot theory asserts that a knot group (i.e., the fundamental group of the complement of a knotted S^1 in S^3 ) admits surjective homomorphisms onto only finitely many other knot groups. Alan Reid talked about joint work with Michel Boileau, Steve Boyer, and Shicheng Wang, showing that this is true for all 2-bridge knots. The proof involves a skillful use of newly discovered properties of the \mathrm{SL}(2,ℂ) character variety of knot groups due to Kronheimer and Mrowka. In another talk on 3-dimensional topology, Jessica Purcell addressed hyperbolic structures, more precisely the conjecture that if C is a compression body with a single 1-handle attached to a torus cross an interval, then the core of the 1-handle is isotopic to a geodesic in any geometrically finite hyperbolic structure on C . Insight into this problem was also gained via computer aided simulation and visualization. As one application of homotopy theory, Ib Madsen presented an integral refinement of the Riemann-Roch theorem for curves (with suitable twist bundles). This work was based on precise calculations of the homotopy effect of associated maps on the classifying space level. Another application of homotopy theory was described by Carles Broto. He presented a purely algebraic result about the p -subgroup structure in finite groups of Lie type, one which was reduced to a statement about their classifying spaces and then proved using the homotopy theory of p -local finite groups. No algebraic proof of this result is available up to now. Kuhn's realization problem in unstable homotopy theory asks which abstract graded rings over the field \mathbb F_p , with a compatible action of the Steenrod algebra, are isomorphic to \mathrm{mod} p cohomology rings of spaces. Kuhn gives precise conditions which he conjectures to be necessary and sufficient, and his conjecture had already been proven when p=2 . In Gerald Gaudens' talk, an important special case of the conjecture was proved for odd primes. Other talks addressed a new homological approach (via so-called blob homology) to topological quantum field theory, the failure of a possible generalization of the Madsen–Weiss theorem to higher dimensions (shown using calculations of family indices), the rigidity of the curve complex of a surface and the construction of exotic smooth structures on 4-manifolds via suitable surgery methods. The famous Oberwolfach atmosphere made this meeting another wonderful success, and all thanks go to the institute for creating this atmosphere and making the conference possible.

In defence of Adam Smith's theory of value

This paper defends Adam Smith against his critics on his ‘additive’ theory of value as well as his theory of ‘falling rate of profits’. It argues that Adam Smith did not forget the raw materials, and so forth, in his resolution of the price into wages, profits, and rent, and that the constraint binding on the total income was also taken into account by treating rent as the residual. It further argues that there is no fallacy of composition in Smith's explanation for the ‘falling rate of profits’. It was explained on the basis of rising real wages and the farmers’ inability to shift the burden of the rise in wages from profit to rent in the context of a growing economy.

Translating Sympathy by the Letter: Henry Mackenzie, Sophie de Condorcet, and Adam Smith

Henry Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigné and Sophie de Condorcet's French translation and informal critique of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments revise Smith's sympathy through formal manipulations of epistolary address and perspective. In the preface to Mackenzie's novel, translation serves as a figure for disavowing authorship and collides with an instance of dialogue transformed into soliloquy. I identify this transformation as the novel's defining practice of epistolarity and argue that Julia de Roubigné specifies the impact that Smith's theory of sympathy has on the history of the novel. A similar epistolary practice shapes Condorcet's Lettres sur la sympathie, and her translation challenges both the figurative nature and familial basis of Smith's version of sympathy. Mackenzie's novel and Condorcet's works of translation and philosophy signal the specifically formal aspects of the broad cultural revision, in Britain and France, of Smith's theory of sympathy.

Sympathy, Beauty, and Sentiment: Adam Smith's Aesthetic Morality

One of the more striking aspects of Adam Smith's moral theory is the degree to which it depends on and appeals to aesthetic norms. By considering what Smith says about judgments of propriety – the foundational type of judgment in his system – and by tying what he says in The Theory of Moral Sentiments to certain of his other writings, I argue that Smith ultimately defends an aesthetic morality. Among the challenges that any aesthetic morality faces is that it seems to entail moral relativism. This problem is magnified by Smith's reliance on the judgments of the impartial spectator, which also seems to make his theory more vulnerable to a Euthyphro-type objection. I suggest that Smith can potentially get around these problems, given his presumption of aesthetic naturalism. While there is certainly some variation in our aesthetic judgments, Smith claims that we naturally find certain actions and sentiments odious, while others we find agreeable. The reason, he argues, is that any society that judged otherwise would not survive.

Inequality and political stability from Ancien Régime to revolution: The reception of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments in France

This article examines the excitement that Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments generated in France during the French Revolution, focusing particularly on the writings of political theorists, participants and commentators such as the abbé Sieyès, Pierre-Louis Rœderer, the Marquis de Condorcet and Sophie de Grouchy Condorcet, who were dismayed at their political opponents’ use of Rousseau, and looked to Smith for an understanding of the passions that was compatible with democratic sovereignty and representative government. In the political context of the early 1790s, clarifying the concept of natural sociability, which Rousseau had rejected, but Smith and Helvétius, in different ways, each regarded as indispensible to a society dependent on advanced division of labour, became a central concern in the public lectures delivered by Pierre-Louis Rœderer as the Terror took hold.

Sentimentality, communicative action and the social self: Adam Smith meets Jürgen Habermas

There is a long and tortuous history of misinterpreting Smithian social theory. After rehearsing that history we offer here a way of understanding Smith that, unlike much of recent revisionist Smith scholarship, does not further add to this confusion. Our proposal is to understand the relation between moral and economic behaviour in Smith as analogous to the way in which Habermas makes strategic (and normatively oriented) behaviour parasitic on a more basic communicative competence. Given this analogy, it is ironic that Habermas's own understanding of Smith's theory also leaves much to be desired.

Republicanism Modernized

Republicanism Modernized Paul A. Rahe (bio) Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson. Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. viii + 191 pp. Index. 65.00 (cloth); 19.99 (paper). This slim volume consists of seven chapters: an introductory chapter aimed at situating its argument with regard to the secondary literature on republicanism and liberalism; substantive chapters on Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Paine and James Madison, Germaine de Staël, and Benjamin Constant; and a five-page concluding chapter suggesting what these figures have in common. The substantive chapters have all been published elsewhere and appear here in revised form. It is in these chapters, taken individually, that the value of the book lies. In the introductory chapter, Kalyvas and Katznelson attempt to lay the foundation for stitching together the substantive chapters. This they fail to accomplish. To their great credit, they recognize that the republicanism embraced by Smith, Ferguson, Paine, Madison, de Staël, and Constant was commercial in character and had, as its end, prosperity as well as public and private liberty; and they are aware that these thinkers relegated virtue and public-spiritedness to a secondary, instrumental role without jettisoning them altogether. But they are not fully in command of the secondary literature on republicanism, and they appear not to have read the republican tracts of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Had they read more widely in the secondary literature, had they taken the trouble to study with care the writings of Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Henry Neville, John Wildman, Algernon Sidney, Walter Moyle, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and James Burgh (among others), Kalyvas and Katznelson would have seen that the analytical accounts of the history of republicanism provided by J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner are fundamentally at odds;1 they would have been forced to consider whether there was not a profound difference between the early modern republicanism inspired by Machiavelli and that of the Greeks and Romans; and they would have been driven to ponder whether the liberal beginnings to which the title of this book refers do not, in fact, go back to the 1650s. Moreover, had they [End Page 205] done so, they would have been in a better position to define with precision what they mean by republicanism and liberalism.2 After reading their book, I was left wondering whether, by their definition, Aristotle, Machiavelli, James Harrington, and Rousseau all count as republicans and, if so, why; whether constitutional monarchies should be regarded as republics and, if so, why; and whether there were any liberals in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth century who were not also republicans and what would define them as such. Alternatively, Kalyvas and Katznelson could have dismissed the republicanism-liberalism debate as beside the point, and instead they could have framed their discussion with an eye to the distinction drawn by Montesquieu (whom they mention only in passing) between the democratic republics of classical antiquity and the strange, new commercial republic disguised as a monarchy that he discovered during the months he spent in England.3 It was, after all, The Spirit of Laws that inspired the ruminations of Smith, Ferguson, Paine, Madison, de Staël, and Constant; and it was in response to his political typology that they framed their arguments. Montesquieu was the superintending spirit of the age.4 The first of the substantive chapters presented by Kalyvas and Katznelson is intriguing and attractive but not in the end fully persuasive (pp. 18–50). In it, they tackle what German scholars long ago termed das Adam Smith Problem. They begin by contrasting the secondary literature, based mainly on Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, that treats the Scot as a civic republican, with the secondary literature, based mainly on his Wealth of Nations, that depicts him as a liberal (pp. 18–22). They correctly conclude that Smith's thinking has both a republican and a liberal dimension, and they attempt to square the circle by suggesting there is a single psychological principle underpinning both of his books—the "drive to acquire social approval, moral approbation, and civic...

FROM DIVISION TO INTEGRATION OF NATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES BY “THE UNIVERSAL DIALECTICAL SYSTEMS THEORY”

The authors see interesting parallels between the development phases of physics (as a basic natural science), management/organization (as a science on orchestrating organizational parts for goal-focused leading and working in line with the law of requisite holism and resulting success), and systems theory (as a science on holism as a world view and methods to attain it) from determinism and division to realistic indeterminism by integration using information. Similar phases can be seen in Adam Smith's theory of economics. The authors suggest the introduction of the “Universal Dialectical Systems Theory” (UDST) as a common denominator of the values and methods of the requisitely holistic observation, perception, thinking, emotional and spiritual life, decision-making, and action by interdisciplinary creative co-operation and information, as a means to link natural and social sciences.

Betti number bounds for fewnomial hypersurfaces via stratified Morse theory

We use stratified Morse theory for a manifold with corners to give a new bound for the sum of the Betti numbers of a fewnomial hypersurface in R N. In the book Fewnomials (6), A. Khovanskii gives bounds on the Betti numbers of varieties X in R n or in the positive orthant R n . These varieties include algebraic varieties, varieties defined by polynomial functions in the variables and exponentials of the variables, and also by even more general functions. Here, we consider only algebraic varieties. For these, Khovanskii bounds the sum b∗(X) of Betti numbers of X by a function that depends on n, the codimension of X, and the total number of monomials appearing (with non zero coefficients) in polynomial equations definingX. For real algebraic varieties X, the problem of bounding b∗(X) has a long history. O. A. Oleinik (8) and J. Milnor (7) used Morse theory to estimate the number of critical points of a suitable Morse function to obtain a bound. R. Thom (12) used Smith Theory to bound the mod-2 Betti numbers. This Smith-Thom bound has the form b∗(X) ≤ b∗(XC), where XC is the complex variety defined by the same polynomials as X. For instance, if X ⊂ R n is defined by polynomials of degree at most d, then Milnor's bound is b∗(X) ≤ d(2d − 1) n . If X ⊂ (R {0}) n is a smooth hypersurface defined by a polynomial with Newton polytope P , then the Smith-Thom bound is b∗(X) ≤ b∗(XC) = n! ¢ Vol(P ), where Vol(P ) is the usual volume of P. We refer to (10) for an informative history of the subject, and to the book (1) for more details. These bounds are given in term of degree or volume of a Newton polytope which are numerical deformation invariants of the complex variety XC. In contrast, the topology of a real algebraic variety depends on the coefficients of its defini ng equations, and in partic- ular, on the number of monomials involved in these equations. For instance, Descartes's rule of signs implies that the number of positive roots of a real univariate polynomial is less than its number of monomials, but the number of complex roots is equal to its degree. Khovanskii's bound can be seen as a generalization of this Descartes bound. It is smaller than the previous bounds when the defining equations have few monomials compared to their degrees. While it has always been clear that Khovanskii's bounds are unrealistically large, it appears very challenging to sharpen them. Some progress has been made recently for the number of non degenerate positive solutions to a system of n polynomials in n variables (3). Here, we bound b∗(X), when X is a fewnomial hypersurface. Suppose that X ⊂ R n is a smooth hypersurface defined by a Laurent polynomial with

Adam Smith's theory of economic history and economic development

The aim of the paper is to show that Smith has a theory of economic history grounded in a politico-economic modeling (as well as a sort of economic theoretical modeling). In terms of the politico-economic approach, in the Wealth of Nations (Book III.ii–iv) Smith tried to offer a systematic account of economic development from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. These lead to suggest that the seeming internal inconsistency between the natural and the actual courses of progress in Book III may be resolved, and that Smith may be treated as a precursor of Douglass North, who stressed an inextricable link between the polity and the economy in economic history.

Translating Sympathy by the Letter: Henry Mackenzie, Sophie de Condorcet, and Adam Smith

Henry Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigne and Sophie de Condorcet's French translation and informal critique of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments revise Smith's sympathy through formal manipulations of epistolary address and perspective. In the preface to Mackenzie's novel, translation serves as a figure for disavowing authorship and collides with an instance of dialogue transformed into soliloquy. I identify this transformation as the novel's defining practice of epistolarity and argue that Julia de Roubigne specifies the impact that Smith's theory of sympathy has on the history of the novel. A similar epistolary practice shapes Condorcet's Lettres sur la sympathie, and her translation challenges both the figurative nature and familial basis of Smith's version of sympathy. Mackenzie's novel and Condorcet's works of translation and philosophy signal the specifically formal aspects of the broad cultural revision, in Britain and France, of Smith's theory of sympathy.

Involutions on tori with codimension-one fixed point set

The standard P. A. Smith theory of $p$-group actions on spheres, disks, and euclidean spaces is extended to the case of $p$-group actions on tori (i.e., products of circles) and coupled with topological surgery theory to give a complete topological classi