ABSTRACT

Gavin Kennedy’s Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy is the latest in a series of books written over the past few years that has tried to reassess our understanding of the teachings and significance of Adam Smith’s work (see Fleischacker 1999, 2004; Force 2003; Griswold 1999; Montes 2004; Otteson 2002; Rothschild 2001; Vivenza 2001). These books have largely skirted controversy by developing complex and, often, esoteric interpretations of one dimension or another of Smith’s thought. Fleischacker, for example, situates Smith’s moral theory in the context of Kantian ethics and the Wealth of Nations in its larger philosophical milieu. Griswold and Rothschild rethink Smith’s project in terms of the larger enlightenment context of the eighteenth century. Otteson discovers a hitherto missed ‘moral marketplace’ upon which he believes Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments rests. Montes and Vivenza, in turn, locate Smithian themes in a variety of intellectual traditions found in western thought since the ancients. Underlying each of these interpretations is a general willingness to engage in alternative ways of interpreting the larger meaning of Smith’s various writings.