Craig Smith, Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy: The Invisible Hand and Spontaneous Order

Craig Smith has several goals in this book (I shall use both his first and last names to distinguish him from Adam Smith; I apologize in advance for the redundancy). One goal is to investigate the general nature of spontaneousorder (SO) explanations of social phenomena, with a special emphasis on Adam Smith’s use of them. A second is to isolate the part of such explanations that invisible-hand (IH) arguments play, again with a special emphasis on Adam Smith’s contribution. A third is to argue that Adam Smith’s use of such arguments – and their use by others in the Scottish Enlightenment period – led them to adopt ‘classical liberal’ political positions, what Craig Smith proposes to call ‘British Whig Evolutionary Liberalism’ (3).