ABSTRACT
This short book is partly about identity. Leonidas Montes is an economist at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, in Santiago, Chile, and this identity is a crucial part of his authorial persona, even while he constructs a work characterized by its multidisciplinary approach. Throughout he is concerned to rewrite Adam Smith’s identity as the ‘father of the science’ of economics, or as the founder of ‘our discipline’. Montes has some sympathy with the idea of Smith as the ‘most eminent forebear’ of the study of economics; however, he is more exercised by the misconceptions that this solemn anointment by the clerisy has fostered. Like Smith, Montes is not trapped in the identity of economist; far from it, he is clearly at home with Smith the philosopher, and swims in that medium very effectively. That indeed is his crucial point: to reassert the philosophical nature of Smith’s project, against those ‘mainstream’ or ‘neoclassical’ economists who have so egregiously misinterpreted Smith’s intellectual legacy. It is these economists who seem to be the target of the book, in the sense of both culprits and (perhaps) intended readers. Montes makes his analysis of Smith a springboard for a larger project of redefining the nature of economics as a discipline, freeing it from what he repeatedly terms the ‘axiomatic-deductive’ tradition, and seeking to replace it with a more humane, ethically alert and ‘realistic’ approach to economics. Montes, like the neoclassical economists, but with far greater attention to Smith’s actual words and ‘context’, looks back to Smith as a model and ancestor of this new economics.
