ABSTRACT
Affirmative appropriations of Adam Smith presuppose a vision of the transparent desiring subject engaging in mutually beneficial harmonious exchanges of objectively valued objects. It is little surprise, then, that both the invisible hand of laissez-faire and the impartial spectator of a socially-embedded liberalism invoke a world in which relations between persons and the market economy are ultimately rendered harmonious and productive. The failure of so much of lived experience to reflect the expectations of a mutually-beneficial order derived from the sum of individual interests or a vision of markets contained and embedded in a society of other-regarding exchange suggests that we can find in Smith the limits of our own economic imagination. But to suggest that appropriation is both inevitable and limited is not to conclude that Smith and other thinkers that feature in the tradition of classical political economy have nothing to contribute to a critical understanding of our present.
