ABSTRACT
First, a brief account of where things stand with Adam Smith, guided partly by this flawed but still useful new critical bibliography. The last thirty years have been a time of enormous vitality in the study of Adam Smith’s ideas and career. Confining attention to scholarly publications in the English language, we are offered an unprecedented abundance. Not only have historians of economic thought continued to study his texts with undiminished energy, their efforts have been widely supplemented by a fine amount of new work by cultural and intellectual historians, philosophers, and political theorists. Adam Smith has been blessed with fresh conceptual analysis, new methodological approaches, sustained consideration of the entire body of his writing, and careful reconstruction of his historical reception and influence.1 When we add to this outpouring of English-language scholarship a worldwide publishing boom set off in part by the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe – in addition to multiple new English-language editions of Smith’s writings, the 1980s and 1990s saw publication of an extraordinary number of new translations of Wealth of Nations, including editions in Chinese, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, and Serbo-Croat – the sense of Smith as a thinker of inexhaustible richness and importance dominates.
