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Sarah Skwire on Adam Smith and Grief

Adam Smith was a man who read the Stoics. He liked them, too, talking them up in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, particularly in the section on grief. Then he lost two of his closest relations (old timey, right?), David Hume and his mother. These world- …

Archive: Sarah Skwire on Pro-Market Literature and Feminism

August 28, 2022 Literature people and women hate liberty, right? Nope. Sarah Skwire and Juliette Sellgren are here to set the record straight. … being dangerous and destructive for women. You can see much more of Skwire's writing at the Online Library of Liberty's Reading Room. To learn more about the Great Antidote podcast, visit "Introducing The Great Antidote Podcast with Juliette Sellgren"

Adam Smith’s Slips and the End of Othello

December 13, 2021 Smith’s misrecollection of the end of Othello, then, is very much of a piece with this aesthetic preferences for the smooth, the regular, and the well ordered. … : The Avengers Christy Lynn's Folks is Folks (on Sarah Skwire & William Shakespeare) Lucia Alden’s Macbeth's Ambition and Smith's Words of Warning Richard Gunderman on Adam Smith and (Iago’s) Envy James Hartley’s Smith’s Man of System in Romeo and Juliet.

Adam Smith Goes to the Movies: The Avengers

April 24, 2019 If Adam Smith were alive today, he’d be just as excited as the rest of us about the release of Avengers: Endgame We may not instinctively think of the great 18th century philosopher and father of modern economics as a big fan of superhero movies, but that’s probably because we don’t read his essay “The History of Astronomy”[1] often enough. It is here that Smith’s …

On First Looking into The Wealth Of Nations

May 20, 2019 How does a student of poetry come to love Smithian political economy? Sarah Skwire counts the ways... Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was the first book of economics I ever read. Smith wasn’t the first economist I had read. I’d encountered F. A. Hayek’s essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative” a few years earlier, …

Happiness Makes us Human: Hutcheson and Carmichael

October 15, 2020 … read, less often considered, and relegated to the preludes or postludes of books on better-known writers from better-served moments in history. Related Links: Charlotte Thomas, Adam Smith and Aristotle Sarah Skwire, Money and Virtue in the Ancient World

Sir William Lucas Should Have Read Adam Smith

by Sarah Skwire July 29, 2019 One of the most delightfully tortuous social gaffes in the series of etiquette errors that is the 1995 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is Sir William Lucas’s encounter with the Bingley sisters. Austen provides readers with a thorough …

Adam Smith on the Country-City Debate

What is the "best place" to live- the city or the country? September 23, 2019 by Sarah Skwire for AdamSmithWorks One of the ways in which Smith is particularly interesting and useful for current readers of his work is the intelligence with which he comments upon the ever-reviving debate between the country and the city. Much of the current country-city debate …

In Praise of Luxury: Hume's “Of Refinement in the Arts”

Certainly, we know luxury can be taken to excess, and that it how we most often think of it. But Hume points out that its denial can also be excessive.

The Ongoing Search for Adam Smith (with Freakonomics)

January 26, 2023 The Freakonomics podcast wants to present Adam Smith as a person - not just two old books on a shelf. Did they succeed? Find out what Skwire says. Who was the real Adam Smith? Was Adam Smith really a right-winger? Can Adam Smith fix our economy? The Freakonomics podcast recently produced a three-part series on Adam Smith featuring a lot of names (Russ Roberts! Glory Liu! Dennis Rasmussen!) that will …

Was Adam Smith Really Like Freakonomics Suggests?

February 2, 2023 The Freakonomics podcast offers criticisms of too-left or too-right interpretations of Adam Smith but fails to present the connections between Smith's two major works. Skwire takes on episode 2 of "In Search of the Real Adam Smith." The second episode of the Freakonomics Radio series on Adam Smith, "Was Adam Smith Really a Right-Winger?" leaves the question of Smith as a person aside, and dives fairly heavily into some inside baseball about the Chicago School of economics and how it …

Smith on Rhetoric: Dangerous Clarity

Sarah Skwire for AdamSmithWorks March 2, 2020 ...Smith was--as have been so many writers--both impressed by and wary of the power of good writing and rhetoric I take a truly inordinate amount of pleasure in reminding economists that the father of modern economics began his professional career in 1748 as a lecturer on rhetoric. His lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres--delivered publicly in Edinburgh for at …

Free Trade in Language: Adam Smith on Words and Wine

June 6, 2021 Since Smith was clearly at peace with the idea of importing French wines, why does he object to importing French words? … this argument and explored the possibility that, like foreign wine, foreign words enrich a country more than they impoverish it. Related Links: Sarah Skwire, Smith on Rhetoric: Dangerous Clarity Graham McAleer, The Place of Language in Smith's Economics

An Error of Civility

August 17, 2020 A letter to the editors of The American Conservative … party or preference, we would decrease the number of people who visit and the number of people who know about Adam Smith and engage with his work and ideas. Amy Willis Director of AdamSmithWorks.org Sarah Skwire Senior Web Editor, AdamSmithWorks.org

Adam Smith and the Theater of the Marketplace

August 1, 2018 Adam Smith and the Theater of the Marketplace It is something of a critical commonplace to note that Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments [TMS] relies on similes between the theater and the world to make its argument that we can learn to sympathize …

Teaching through the Year: Seasonal Readings and Activities

We're making it easy for you to find seasonally relevant ways to bring Adam Smith and his ideas into your classroom.