ABSTRACT
The Wealth of Nations is the first strategic effort not only to acknowledge the essence of the capitalist ethos but to propose a complex interdependence of workers, property owners, and the state to control and limit the destruction that was otherwise completely natural to what would come to be called capitalism. Adam Smith’s exposition begins as a critique of the reigning economic theory of the moment, “mercantilism.” Mercantilism, devised in the interest of the great seventeenth-century monarchies by bureaucrats like Jean-Baptiste Colbert in the court of Louis XIV, argued that the state should manage the economy by using licenses, setting prices, and establishing tariffs to protect domestic production. Adam Smith’s stroke of philosophic genius was to imagine a situation in which the barbaric could be made to conduct itself not in the interest of the most violent and shrewdest plunderer, but in the name of the eternally plundered: workers, those who had nothing to trade but their own bodies.
