Smith's Writings Research Articles

Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision

For most of the two hundred years or so that have passed since the publication of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith's writings on political and economic questions have been viewed within a liberal capitalist perspective of nineteenth- and twentieth- century provenance. This essay in interpretation seeks to provide a more historical reading of certain political themes which recur in Smith's writings by bringing eighteenth-century perspectives to bear on the problem. Contrary to the view that sees Smith's work as marking the point at which 'politics' was being eclipsed by 'economics', it claims that Smith has a 'politics' which goes beyond certain political attitudes connected with the role of the state in economic affairs. It argues that he employs a consistent mode of political analysis which cannot be encompassed within the standard liberal capitalist categories, but can be understood by reference to the language and qualities of contemporary political debate, and of the eighteenth-century science of politics cultivated by Montesquieu and, above all, Hume, particularly as revealed by recent scholarship. A concluding chapter draws the various strands of the interpretation together to form a portrait of what Smith might legitimately be said to have been doing when he wrote on these matters.

Captain John Smith's Route through Turkey and Russia

Ch_ APTAIN JOHN SMITH, sometimes Governour of Virginia, and Admirall of Nevv-England, has been a remarkably controversial figure for more than a century. His deeds have been praised and blamed with equal vehemence, and his writings subjected alternately to sublimely uninformed carping and to thoughtlessly enthusiastic adulation. Only now and again has his work been analyzed with at least a moderate amount of dispassion. It has usually been a matter of invective contra or apologia pro Smith. One of periods of John Smith's life which has escaped careful investigation, so far as present writer is aware, is that between his capture by Turks after bloudy encounter in the valley of Veristhorne (VWr6storony, or Rothenthurm) and his return to Transylvania about a year later'-that is to say, from November i602 to November i603. Edward Arber, first modern editor of John Smith's writings, was at a loss to understand, let alone explain, details supplied by John Smith's own writings, and other editors and biographers have fared little better. It is difficult to decide which to marvel at more-John Smith's

The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo

David Ricardo was born in London in 1772. His father, a successful stockbroker, introduced him to the Stock Exchange at the formative age of fourteen. During his career in finance, he amassed a personal fortune, which allowed him to retire at the age of forty-two. Thereafter, he pursued a political career and further developed his economic ideas and policy proposals. A man of very little formal education, Ricardo arguably became, with the exception of Adam Smith, the most influential political economist of all time. Ricardo was the first economist to make extensive use of deductive reasoning and arithmetical models to illustrate the anticipated reactions to juxtaposed market forces and responsive human action. His modes of analysis have become identified with economics as an academic discipline. Like Smith, Ricardo believed that minimal government intervention best served an economy. His contributions to economics are numerous and include the theory of 'hard money' to hedge inflation, the law of diminishing returns, developed along with his close friend the classical economist T R Malthus, and the labour theory of value. One of Ricardo's most significant contributions to economics is the law of comparative advantage as applied to international commerce, which grew out of Adam Smith's division of labour and has become the central argument for free trade and open markets. It implies that countries best serve themselves when they trade with other countries abiding by their respective scales of efficiency. Besides being the most efficient method of international commerce, the comparative-advantage mode of trade also encourages international stability through multilateral business interests and global interdependencies. As Frederic Bastiat, the French journalist and politician, wrote, If goods do not cross borders, armies will.. Throughout the years, several economists have elaborated on fundamental Ricardo themes and developed compelling theorems. Using Ricardo's assertions about the interrelationships among capital, labor, output, and investment, the Nobel laureate F A Hayek posed the Ricardo effect, a retort to John Maynard Keynes's accelerator principle. Robert Barro of Harvard University used Ricardo's equivalence theorem to argue that the distinction between government taxing its citizens or deficit spending on credit is inconsequential to the long-term aggregate economy. Gordon Tullock, one of the founders of the public choice school, built upon Ricardo's rent theory to explain his rent-seeking phenomenon, which illuminates the inequitable and monopolistic distribution of excessive gains derived through discriminate government subsidies. This 11-volume set contains all of Ricardo's published and unpublished writings, and provides great insight into the early era of political economics by chronicling Ricardo's significant contributions to modern economics. The edition has been widely acclaimed as the best example, prior to the Glasgow edition of Adam Smith's writings, of scholarly editing applied to the work of an economist. It contains a general index and includes four volumes dedicated to his personal correspondence with such economic luminaries as Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say, and James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill. Complete sets of the edition have not been available for many years. This publication is an affordable paperback version of the hardcover edition prepared under the auspices of the Royal Economic Society by Piero Sraffa and printed by Cambridge University Press in 1951-1973.