Today, March 9th, marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations (WN) in 1776. Adam Smith may also be one of the most misunderstood thinkers in the history of economics. Smith is not the father of modern economics, neither of capitalism, a term he never used.
In modern discussions Smith is often portrayed as a precursor of contemporary economics, something like an early version of the Arrow-Debreu model of competitive equilibrium. I remember Sam Bowles suggesting that (he actually said something to the effect that Smith, Marx and Arrow, all said the same thing) at a talk at the University of Utah. In that interpretation, Smith supposedly discovered that self-interested individuals interacting through markets generate optimal outcomes, the infamous “invisible hand.”
Many books, including most classics on the topic suggest that interpretation. For example, yesterday WAPO had an op-ed (actually two; the other was much less problematic) by Jesse Norman, who will be publishing a book titled, you guessed, Adam Smith: Father of Economics. He correctly notes that the: "250th anniversary is not a moment for hagiography. It is an opportunity to recover a way of thinking that is directly relevant, indeed urgent, to the economic, social and political challenges we face today." He goes on to analyze essentially the question of tariffs with modern economic notions. Note that back in the 1790s, just after Smith passed, Alexander Hamilton, using Smithian ideas and method achieved very different policy conclusions.*
These readings of Smith as a father of modern economics and a champion of free market capitalism tells us far more about modern neoclassical economics than about Smith himself. The conceptual universe of modern economics is fundamentally different from that of classical political economy, the tradition to which Smith belonged.
Smith should be understood as part of a broader intellectual tradition that begins not with him but with William Petty, and continues through Cantillon, the Physiocrats, Ricardo, and ultimately Marx, what later came to be called the surplus approach. This tradition was concerned with the material conditions for the reproduction of society, the generation of surplus, and the process of accumulation.
In that framework, economics was not primarily about individual choice or utility maximization. It was about the reproduction of society. Seen in this light, Smith’s analysis was fundamentally about social conflict and the distribution of income, not about harmonious equilibrium among optimizing individuals. The core problem of political economy was explaining how societies generated and distributed the surplus that allowed accumulation and growth.
Another common myth is that Adam Smith founded economics. In reality, Smith was the great systematizer of a body of ideas of the surplus approach. Political economy emerged gradually during the Scientific Revolution and the early modern period. Petty, Cantillon, and the Physiocrats had already developed crucial insights about value, production, and economic reproduction before Smith wrote the WN. Smith’s real contribution was to organize these insights into a coherent framework and to place them at the center of his critique of the mercantilist system he saw as dominant. His book certainly helped establish political economy as a distinct intellectual discipline.
Nor was Smith the theorist of capitalism in the modern sense. The term itself was not part of his vocabulary. Smith spoke instead of commercial society, a stage in historical development characterized by the expansion of markets, manufacturing, and exchange.** He was certainly against the mercantile system, and believed that Physiocracy had incorrectly limited the creation of wealth to agriculture. But his defense of the system of natural liberty was not a defense of free markets in the modern sense.
Modern defenders of free markets often claim Smith as their intellectual ancestor. But the relationship between the liberalism of classical authors (not classical liberalism, which brings another series of confusions) and neoliberalism is far more complicated. Smith’s defense of laissez-faire was largely a reaction against the mercantilist system and the remnants of feudal regulation that constrained economic activity in the eighteenth century. The liberalism of Smith and Ricardo was historically progressive; it aimed to dismantle the privileges of the Ancien Régime and promote economic development.
Neoliberalism, by contrast, emerged in the twentieth century as a reaction against the Keynesian and welfare-state reforms of the New Deal era. Its central objective has been to limit the ability of democratic governments to regulate markets or redistribute income. In that sense, neoliberalism is better understood as a revival of what Marx called “vulgar economics”, rather than a continuation of the classical tradition.
Perhaps no concept has been more abused than Smith’s invisible hand. In modern economics it is often interpreted as a general theorem about markets producing optimal outcomes. But in Smith’s text the metaphor appears in a very specific context: merchants preferring domestic investment for reasons of security, which incidentally supports domestic employment. That is a far cry from the sweeping claim that all self-interested behavior leads to socially optimal results.***
Smith was also deeply skeptical of concentrated economic power. His famous warning that “people of the same trade seldom meet together… but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public” reflects a profound concern with monopoly and collusion. Competition, not the invisible hand, was the mechanism that restrained self-interest. He was anti-monopoly, not anti-state. In fact, he was for taxes to fund public education, a radical proposition back then (and now if you believe libertarian views that education is not a public good).
If you want to understand more about Smith ideas I recommend Tony Aspromourgos' The Science of Wealth: Adam Smith and the framing of political economy. For a book that puts in perspective how the legacy of Smith evolved in the 19th century read After Adam Smith: A Century of Transformation in Politics and Political Economy by Murray Milgate and Shannon Stimson.
* On the distortions on Smith's views within the American context see my comments on Glory M. Liu's book Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became An Icon of American Capitalism.
** On Smith's views on history and the four stages of development see the classic paper by Ronald Meek.
*** On that see the revised entry on the Invisible Hand by Tony Aspromourgos for the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.
PS: He also did not build up on the ideas of Ibn Khaldun, who, in turn, cannot be seen as a precursor of classical political economy or of Smith. On that see this post.
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