ABSTRACT
“An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (henceforth WON 1 ) represents, for Schumpeter (1966, p. 181), “the most successful not only of all books on economics but, with the possible exception of Darwin's Origin of Species, of all scientific books that have appeared to this day,” written by “the most famous of all economists.” For Schumpeter, this success is deserved although WON does not contain “a single analytic idea, principle, or method that was entirely new in 1776 […] and thought it cannot rank with Newton's Principia or Darwin's Origin as an intellectual achievement” (ibid., pp. 184–185). So where does the importance come from and how is the posterity of WON explained?
