ABSTRACT
The recent explosion of literature on Smith has included several books that attempt to give an overview of Smith’s entire corpus, presumably for use in the classroom. Evensky’s is the best of these. His book encompasses a short but quite detailed summary of the ‘History of Astronomy’, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Lectures on Jurisprudence, followed by a comprehensive account of the Wealth of Nations, with a chapter for each of its five Books. As he goes along, Evensky explicates the ideas he describes – finding helpful modern equivalents for Smith’s economic terms, in particular (see the discussion of ‘circuits’ and ‘screens’ on pp. 142 and 228) – comments briefly on them, or addresses issues in the secondary literature, and he concludes by staging an interesting encounter between Smith and some contemporary schools of economics. But the bulk of the book is expository, introducing Smith’s contributions to moral, political and economic thought, and the way they are supposed to work together, to readers who may be unacquainted with them.
