On Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations"
A Philosophical Companion
Chapter One
LITERARY METHOD
I begin with Smith's writing style, since I will contend throughout this book that scholars have persistently misread the Wealth of Nations (WN), and I'd like to show right off why it is easy to do that. WN tends to appear, in both scholarly and popular literature, by way of striking snippets. One can properly grasp its teachings, however, only by engaging in the painstaking exercise of reading the long, elaborate arguments from which the snippets get snipped. So I begin with some warnings about how not to read Smith and some suggestions about what can be gained by submitting to the discipline of reading Smith slowly, of treating him as the refined eighteenth-century belles-lettrist that he set out to be.
By comparison with most philosophers, Adam Smith is easy to read. There is no abstract jargon, as in Kant or Hegel, no stilted syntax, as in Locke, and there are few passages with the subtle argumentation to be found in Descartes or Hume. Smith the economist is also easier to read t ... read full excerpt from On Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations": A Philosophical Companion ebook
