ABSTRACT
Samuel Fleischacker’s On Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ is a comprehensive, wide-ranging book. If it can be said to have a single underlying aim, perhaps it would be that of refuting for once and for all the commonly held view that Wealth of Nations is primarily a work in social science (the foundational text of the modern science of economics) and, so, independent of – maybe even inconsistent with – Smith’s thought as a whole, especially his moral theory, as articulated in his other classic philosophical text, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It becomes clear as one reads Fleischacker’s book that his strategy for refuting this longstanding myth involves – correctly, in my view – not denying Wealth of Nations’s status as science but rejecting and correcting the positivistic understanding of science that this myth presupposes, especially the dogma that what is scientific must be value free. I say that Fleischacker is correct not to underplay Smith’s scientific pretensions because Wealth of Nations is clearly not merely – not even primarily – a project in moral philosophy, nor a polemic against mercantilism and the Physiocrats, but an example of what even today we can recognize as social ‘science’. Wealth of Nations is a systematic, theoretical work that aims first and foremost to analyze and understand the complex workings of a specific social phenomenon (capitalism, or ‘commercial society’). In case there is any doubt about this, the full title of the work bears witness clearly enough to Smith’s scientific aims: ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’.
