Political Economy

October 15, 2024

Silvestri & Walraevens offer commentary on Adam Smith's "Great Dream of Good Government" using both Lectures on Jurisprudence, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and The Wealth of Nations.

After a year-long celebration of Adam Smith's birth in 2023, Peter Boettke addresses those still not well-versed with Smith's magisterial work of political economy.

Unlike many other species who confront nature red in tooth and claw, we are not physically equipped to survive the cold or combat nature naked and unarmed. We do not possess by nature a fur coat, let alone sharp teeth and claws.  We stand naked before nature vulnerable to the vagaries of nature and the kindness of predators.  However, what we lack in natural protections we more than make up for in our ability to cooperate with one another.

August 21, 2024



Writing in 1776, Smith focused on the need for military preparedness in an advanced societies with a large population and division of labor.

March 13, 2024


"I'm going to argue against the ‘ad hoc, therefore no political theory’ position by looking at what I regard as significant restrictions on liberty in what I will call Article III of Book V of Wealth of Nations. I’ll have to show, first that he permits severe restrictions on liberty, but that they are grounded in his political theory."

January 10, 2024


[S]ociety cannot subsist unless the laws of justice are (mostly) observed as a matter of convention, so that everyone knows that everyone knows how to act, and will act justly, without being forced to do so. An orderly and flourishing society is “agreeable,” just for its own sake, and because of our self-interest in being a member of such a society. We take pleasure at observing this order, and this flourishing.

November 15, 2023


"The distribution of national income between wages and profit varies between time and place. However, variations in the return to labor across industries persist in nations both rich and poor and in economies that are advancing, stationary, or declining. Smith maintains, the proportion between wages in different industries remains the same, and cannot be altered, at least for any considerable time."

August 2, 2023


"What Foucault helps us see is that within the liberal tradition as originally articulated by Smith and, later developed by French liberals, including Tocqueville, there is a self-awareness that one-sided and imprudent reliance on claims to exactitude and precision, including in the human sciences, as potentially dangerous to liberty."

July 19, 2023


"Smith writes that high-interest rates crowd out productive investments. Does this justify his willingness to damper excessive exuberance coercively?"

March 29, 2023


What can a Scottish Enlightenment-style "science of man" teach us about how to deal with our international neighbors? Van de Haar finds a close connection between Smith's moral philosophy and international politics and economics.

March 1, 2023

January 19, 2023

January 11, 2023


Soll's Smith is scrutinized and Muller demonstrates a minor replication crisis in the Humanities.

December 7, 2022



Over two centuries, the arguments of corporations for monopoly “remained remarkably static,” but the experience of the corporations brought to bear in the debate “certain moments of conceptual innovation that trading corporations spurred and shaped.”

November 9, 2022


While other countries improved in trade and wealth during the Enlightenment, Ireland remained relatively poorer longer. Adam Smith, James Stafford, and Max Skjönsberg weigh in on the case of Ireland.

October 12, 2022


 If you look at the wider context, Smith is (a) either describing/stipulating a particular measure or (b) using a thought experiment to introduce a much more complex claim than the LTV. And (c) Smith has a number of measures of value. This last point (c) suggests that (d) strictly speaking Smith does not have a single theory of value at all in the sense that is at stake when people attribute a LTV to him.

September 14, 2022


Adam Smith demonstrates the primacy of emotion and feeling for creating morality and society. For Smith, we experience these emotions through spectatorship, culminating in the creation of the impartial spectator.

August 31, 2022


Remember that Smith was open to government financing deficit spending in emergencies. His concern was rather with continually increasing the public debt and its long-term burden. 

June 29, 2022


Conjectural Historian? Moral Philosopher? Political Economist?

What is and should be Adam Smith's place in the history of ideas? 

July 13, 2022


In Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations he shows how monopolies hinder prosperity and contain the seeds of their own destructions. The merchants and other laborers who work within market systems will always be chipping away at their power.  

March 2 2022


The rudimentary conventions of property emerge in Hutcheson’s account, as they do for Adam Smith, as a consequence of our native moral sentiments.

February 16, 2022


Smith did not intend for us to view the system of natural liberty as an ideal system; he himself advocated some interventions...Some government actions sacrifice the ordinary laws of justice to an idea of public utility, and some of those actions ought to be taken.

February 2, 2022

January 19, 2022

December 15, 2021

December 1, 2021

November 18, 2021


Honest commerce serves our own interests. But how does it relate to the duties of beneficence or serving the good of others?

November 3, 2021

September 8, 2021

October 6, 2021

May 19, 2021

April 7, 2021

March 24, 2021

March 24, 2021



How much can we extract modern meanings from ancient texts, and why should we beware reading too much into the past?

April 13, 2022

March 10, 2021


Hispanic culture did not seem very compatible with this praise of self-interest, which at first glance sounded excessively selfish and contrary to the religious moral maxim to love thy neighbor.

January 27, 2021

February 24, 2021

January 13, 2020

December 4, 2020

If we confine ourselves to the editions of TMS we see Smith, in the first edition, set out largely on a project of moral anatomy. He lays out a novel account of moral judgment through sympathy. But he came gradually to blend his anatomy with painting, to fuse science with art.

November 25, 2020


Smith’s evolution across the six editions of TMS showcases his desire to refine his moral philosophy in an effort to extend what David Hume called “the science of man.”

October 28, 2020

July 22, 2020

22 de Julio 2020

July 8, 2020


Adam Smith's Three Invisible Hands

May 13, 2020

April 15, 2020

April 29, 2020

February 19, 2020

January 8, 2020

February 5, 2020

September 18, 2019

August 7, 2019

August 14, 2019

August 21, 2019

June 26, 2019

26 de Junio, 2019

January 9, 2019

October 1, 2018

July 25, 2018

November 30, 2018

November 1, 2018

July 25, 2018

October 15, 2018