ABSTRACT
James Otteson’s second book onAdam Smith, titled simply Adam Smith, has most of the advantages, and a few of the drawbacks, of his first book, Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life (Marketplace), which I discussed as part of a roundtable for the second issue of ASR (Brubaker 2006a). Otteson reports that ‘(o)nly a short time ago I would not have imagined that I would write another book about Adam Smith’ (p. xv). The change of mind is due to the need for a volume on Smith in the series ‘Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers’ edited by John Meadowcroft and published by Continuum. The series is designed to ‘introduce these thinkers to a wider audience, providing an overview of their lives and works, as well as expert commentary on their enduring significance’ (p. xii). Otteson’s Smith accomplishes this goal and more. There is some irony here, however, since my review of the first book was titled
‘Why Adam Smith is neither a conservative nor a libertarian’. I argued there that Smith is best understood as a moderate liberal in the eighteenth century sense. Otteson now seems to agree: ‘I would instead call Smith a classical liberal.’ His justification of that label gives a good sense of the book’s presentation of Smith:
He was…an old-fashioned liberal: favoring individual liberty, endorsing state institutions to protect this liberty, and, where they conflicted, favoring the individual over the state as a default. But he was also a skeptical empiricist. He favored free trade, free markets, and a government robust but limited to the enforcement of a few central tasks not because they comported with a priori principles but because they seemed to work. He tended toward optimism about the future, and about what lay ahead for humanity if much of the apparatus of government meddling was dismantled; yet by the same token he was not optimistic that truly free trade – or, probably, truly free markets – would ever be fully realized, because doing so would make it too difficult for grasping politicians to extend their power and for corrupt businessmen to profit at others expense. Smith was also a champion of the poor. He was interested, as an empirical scientist should be, to discover how economies work and the way human psychology works; yet he was also interested, as a moral philosopher should be, to recommend political and economic strategies to minimize suffering and to maximize flourishing… He recognized that businessmen would often seek special privileges to increase their profits or decrease
competition, despite the fact that these privileges would invariably make the common man worse off. He thus strongly opposed partnerships between business and government. And he worried about the effects on workers of extreme division of labor.
