ABSTRACT

In the standard literature in international political economy (IPE), Adam Smith serves as the marker for a “classical liberal school of economics.” Built on a “shared and coherent set of assumptions” about the human drive to truck and barter, leading to inevitable material improvement, this “economics” claims to derive from Smith a set of “inviolable laws” of economic life that mandate free markets internally and free trade internationally.2 Others within IPE and international relations have complicated this view,3 even if their efforts have failed to dislodge the standard reading. Nonetheless, additional readings may be useful for those who are sensitive to the historicity of economics and its richly debated propositions.