Riku Sayuj’s Reviews > The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith > Status Update

The Wealth of Nations is a great book – the greatest book ever written about economic life.
~ Amartya Sen

Even if someone finds poverty but not inequality offensive, he or she still may have to take an interest in economic inequality as a determinant of poverty.

A guy after my own heart. I hate roads (and cars) with a vengeance too :)

Smith was very attached to roads in a figurative sense, as we have seen; he was much less well disposed toward real, existing roads. He indeed imagines a violent reform to “save the ground taken up by highways,” without “interrupting the communication.”

While uniformly sceptical of the pretentions of individuals, in particular the powerful, he is convinced that their shortcomings often are a consequence of the circumstances in which they live.

Even the officers of the East India Company are not individually odious: “it is the system of government, the situation in which they are placed, that I mean to censure; not the character of those who have acted in it.”

“The liberal reward of labour” is for Smith the characteristic condition of commercial and civilized societies. “To complain of it is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest publick prosperity,” he says, and it is “abundantly plain” that an “improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people” is of advantage “to the society.” Such an improvement was a matter of justice.

“I have begun to write a book in order to pass away the time,” Smith wrote to David Hume from Toulouse, in 1764. He devoted some 12 years of his life to the composition of The Wealth of Nations, which was eventually published in 1776 (“finish your Work before Autumn; go to London; print it,” Hume had written sternly in 1772).

Police, the word, has been borrowed by the English immediately from the French, tho it is originally derived from the Greek politeia, signifying policy, politicks, or the regulation of a government in generall. It is now however generally confind to the regulation of the inferior parts of it. (LJ[A], vi.1)

Edward Gibbon, who knew Smith and his work well and looked on him with respect and affection, placed him in an exalted position: in the triumvirate of British historians: Hume, Robertson and Adam Smith.

(while excluding himself!)

In addition to the familiar argument that the pursuit of wealth has no intrinsic connection with happiness, Smith makes the stronger argument that we pursue riches in full knowledge that these external goods do not bring happiness. Smith emphasizes that we distinguish the condition of the rich, but not because we imagine that they are happier, but rather that they have more means to happiness.

Smith’s account of history and human action is contingent enough to match my sensibilities. I am a fan by now.