ABSTRACT
This is a collection of seven essays by French Adam Smith scholars with three papers by Anglo-American scholars. At least two among the latter, originally invited lectures at an Adam Smith workshop in Paris, are strictly related to each other, since they deal with the relationship of state and civil society. Donald Winch in ‘Civil Society and the State in Adam Smith’ adds some useful comments to what he has been writing on Smithian politics since the 1970s. He shows how the dichotomy state–civil society is absent from Smith and how the ideas of the homo oeconomicus and the autonomy of the economy are still to come. Winch then examines Smith's peculiar idea of politics as a special kind of prudence, the virtue of a legislator who has to be able to cope with the ebbs and flows of society while keeping in view the common good with a kind of reasonableness that is almost the opposite of the attitude of the man of system. Knud Haakonssen's ‘Adam Smith and Civil Society’ sets out to prove how Smith's discussion of morality, justice, and government does not ‘forerun’ eighteenth-century discussion of the opposition between the state and civil society, but also that his own occasional use of the term civil society shares very little with the meaning current in his century and that even his discussion of government has little to do with any notion of the state qua juridical subject. I would say that neither Winch nor Haakonnsen would understand their own contributions in terms of a discussion of Adam Smith's ‘liberalism’, one key-word casting in the book's title and discussed at length in Biziou's paper. The third invited lecture is ‘Justice and Market according to Adam Smith’ by Charles Griswold, who summarizes what he had said on justice in his book.
