ABSTRACT
The 9th of March 1976 saw the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the first edition of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and the development of a new, separate science which is now generally described as economics.2 That this anniversary needs celebration among economists, who can all be described as the heirs of Adam Smith, does not have to be stressed. Many of these celebrations have been organised across the world,3 including, on a more limited scale, in Australia. In writing a paper to celebrate this anniversary, an author is faced with a difficult problem of choice. Should he concentrate on a formal analysis of Smith’s doctrines, as was so brilliantly done in the 150th anniversary festschrift,4 or should he analyse the research of Smith scholars in the last fifty years, to use the model adopted by W. R. Scott in 1940?5 Perhaps a solution to this problem is obtained by combining aspects of these two approaches with that adopted by Professor Recktenwald in a recent paper6 which emphasises the relevance of the Wealth of Nations for ‘today and tomorrow’.
