ABSTRACT
A self-described ‘introductory book’ of only ninety-seven pages, Weinstein’s On Adam Smith claims to present, if not wholly defend, a potentially controversial interpretation of Smith. The three claims constituting his approach are laid out in the Introduction: Smith is treated ‘not as an economist who happened to write philosophy, but, rather, as a philosopher who wrote some economics’, he is not merely a ‘historical curiosity’ but rather has a ‘contemporary message’, and finally, while ‘most contemporary Smith scholarship’ rejects the ‘Adam Smith problem’, ‘suspicions’ remain about the unity of his corpus, suspicions that Weinstein intends to combat by showing his work as a unified whole. He concludes the Introduction by asking his audience to put aside their preconceptions and prejudices in order to see that Smith ‘has much to offer, and it is rarely what one expects’. With the partial exception of the claim about current relevance I find these claims unexceptional, even admirable. I suspect most readers of this Review would agree.
