Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision

Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics

by Donald Winch

For most of the two hundred years or so that have passed since the publication of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith's writings on political and economic questions have been viewed within a liberal capitalist perspective of nineteenth- and twentieth- century provenance. This essay in interpretation seeks to provide a more historical reading of certain political themes which recur in Smith's writings by bringing eighteenth-century perspectives to bear on the problem. Contrary to the view that sees Smith's work as marking the point at which 'politics' was being eclipsed by 'economics', it claims that Smith has a 'politics' which goes beyond certain political attitudes connected with the role of the state in economic affairs. It argues that he employs a consistent mode of political analysis which cannot be encompassed within the standard liberal capitalist categories, but can be understood by reference to the language and qualities of contemporary political debate, and of the eighteenth-century science of politics cultivated by Montesquieu and, above all, Hume, particularly as revealed by recent scholarship. A concluding chapter draws the various strands of the interpretation together to form a portrait of what Smith might legitimately be said to have been doing when he wrote on these matters.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy

220 pages, Paperback

First published May 18, 1978

About the author

Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Intellectual History at the University of Sussex.

Born 1935 in London. A beneficiary of the 1944 Education Act, he attended a local grammar school and was awarded a state scholarship to study at the London School of Economics, where he obtained a degree in economics in 1956. His initial specialisation was in the economics of international trade, and a scholarship enabled him to study at Princeton, where Jacob Viner was the leading expert. Viner was also a notable historian of economics, and Winch chose to write a doctoral dissertation on the economics of empire and colonization, later published as Classical Political Economy and Colonies (1965).

Winch.s first academic appointment was at the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to this country when offered a lectureship in the department of political economy in Edinburgh. Three years later, in 1963, he was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Sussex, where he has remained for nearly half a century, broken by visiting appointments in Cambridge, Oxford, North America and Japan. For most of that time Winch was attached to the School of Social Sciences, becoming its Dean for 6 years in 1968. His main undergraduate teaching centred on one of the School.s compulsory contextual courses, Concepts, Methods, and Values (CMV). This enabled him to extend his interest in the methodology and history of economics into a broader concern with the history of the social sciences from the Enlightenment onwards. He continued to teach economics well into the 1980s, though by then most of his teaching, and all of his research, was in intellectual history.

Reviews

[Craig Bolton]

Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics) by Donald Winch (1978)