ABSTRACT
Lisa Herzog has given a wonderfully balanced study comparing the views of Adam Smith and G. W. F. Hegel on the role of the market in modern society. These are two of the greatest, most ambitious, and most successful systematizers the modern world has to offer. Herzog sees the need for more political philosophers and other non-economists to study markets and economic phenomena in a normative way. The author discusses some issues where she disagrees with Professor Herzog's interpretation of Smith's economic system. A perhaps more serious disagreement occurs, when Herzog writes that Smith anticipated a long-run tendency in commercial society towards more material equality. Herzog's reading of Smith's entire system is an interesting one, because she goes part way in the Hegelian interpretation of Smith. The natural effects of the Smithian natural movements in the 21st century will be to lower pay for workers in advanced capitalist countries, and tend to financially bankrupt and destroy the liberal welfare state.
