ABSTRACT
Lisa Herzog has written an admirable book that presents a bold and much overdue comparison between Adam Smith and G. W. F. Hegel, two thinkers typically taken as paradigmatic of diametrically opposed political sensibilities. Herzog uses the naturalism of supply and demand and of the natural price to shape her analysis of Smith's theory of wages. Her long consideration of supply and demand thus tilts the analysis, in this and in other aspects, in favor of the naturalist interpretation, despite the powerful claims she makes elsewhere of qualifying it. Her contrast between Smith's "impartial legal system" securing rewards to "industry and parsimony", and Hegel's system, where the value of labor sinks the more workers work is a powerful one, but seems valid mostly as it refers to workers. She insightfully cautions that Smith's concept of desert should be sharply contrasted to the libertarian one that rejects desert as irrelevant to market workings.
