The Wealth of Nations

by Adam Smith

Overview

When the Scottish moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) first published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, capitalism as we know it today barely existed. Most people in the West still worked for themselves in small shops or as subsistence farmers. But the worldwide spread of European empires, with their global, interconnected networks of shipping and trade, and the growth of trading markets, created a burgeoning new business class. Smith didn’t just study this development of a new commercial sphere, he constructed an entire philosophy around it that helped created the modern theory of capitalism.
 
Smith’s case for the simplification of government tariffs and the opening up of markets is used frequently in the modern world as an argument for completely unfettered capitalism. But as a moral philosopher, Smith was just as interested in building a more stable and just society as he was liberating capital from regulations. He maintained that the “invisible hand” of the market and the self-interest of individuals could ultimately be positive forces once unchained from Europe’s barely post-feudal government. In doing so he created, arguably, the entire discipline of modern economics.
 
In The Wealth of Nations you will find not just a vividly written and uncommonly passionate defense of the free market as a liberalizing force, but a fascinating look at both the financial and moral underpinnings of all Western society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781435172449
Publisher:	Fall River Press
Publication date:	04/25/2022
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	45,072
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and pioneering political economist and one of the key figures of the intellectual movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment.

He is now depicted on the back of the brand new £20 note.

Read an Excerpt

Adam Smith's ideas fit perfectly with this new democratic, individualistic idea. To him, the "wealth" of a nation wasn't determined by the size of its monarch's treasure or the amount of gold and silver in its vaults, nor by the spiritual worthiness of its people in the eyes of the Church. A nation's wealth was to be judged by the total value of all the goods its people produced for all its people to consume. To a reader at the start of the twenty-first century, this assertion may seem obvious. At the time he argued it, it was a revolutionary democratic vision.

Smith was born in 1723, in the small Scottish port of Kirkcaldy, which sits across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. His father was a collector of customs--a job that literally embodied the old mercantilist philosophy that Smith would later argue against. He was educated at the University of Glasgow, whose professors passionately debated the new concepts of individualism and ethics (one of his teachers, Francis Hutcheson, was prosecuted by the Scottish Presbyterian church for spreading the "false and dangerous" doctrines that moral goodness could be obtained by promoting happiness in others and that it was possible to know good and evil without knowing God), and then at Oxford, whose professors didn't debate or teach much of anything. In fact, the lassitude of Oxford's dons prompted Smith to suggest, in The Wealth of Nations, that professors be paid according to the number of students they attract, thereby motivating them to take a more lively interest in teaching--one of Smith's few suggestions with which today's tenured professors of economics generally disagree.

In 1748 Smith returned to the University ofGlasgow, first as a professor of logic and then of moral philosophy, filling Francis Hutcheson's chair. There he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, which brought him instant fame. In it, Smith asked how a normal self-interested person is capable of making moral judgments, when the essence of morality is selflessness. It was a question that troubled many of the new thinkers of the eighteenth century, who had liberated themselves from both theology and codes of aristocratic or chilvaric virtue. Smith's answer foreshadowed Sigmund Freud's superego: People possess within themselves an "impartial spectator" who advises them about moral behavior.

Smith resigned his professorship in 1764 to become tutor to the son of the late Duke of Buccleuch. The boy's mother, Countess of Dalkeith, had just remarried Charles Townshend, one of Smith's many admirers, who later became Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, and was responsible for imposing the taxes on the American colonies that prompted some Bostonians to throw large quantities of tea into Boston Harbor. For the next two years, Smith traveled throughout the Continent, beginning work on the book that was to become The Wealth of Nations. He visited Voltaire in Geneva, and in Paris met François Quesnay, a physician in the court of Louis XV who had devised a chart of the economy--a "tableau economique" he called it--showing the circulation of products and money in an economy analogous to the flow of blood through a body. Quesnay and his fellow Physiocrats believed that wealth came from a nation's production that enlarged the flow rather than from its accumulation of gold and silver, as the prevailing mercantilists believed, and that governments should therefore remove all impediments to the flow of money and goods in order to increase production.
Smith took these notions to heart, although he didn't agree with everything the Physiocrats propounded (such as their view that agricultural production was the only true source of wealth). Returning to Glasgow in 1766, he spent the better part of the following decade working out his theories. Occasionally he'd travel to London to discuss them with luminaries such as the philosopher Edmund Burke, historian Edward Gibbon, Benjamin Franklin (visiting from America), and the remarkable personalities Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. Smith's book finally appeared on March 9, 1776, in two volumes, and went through several subsequent editions. It was well received, although not an immediate sensation. Smith spent his remaining years back in Edinburgh as commissioner of customs, the same kind of mercantilist sinecure his father had held, and died in July 1790, at the age of sixty-seven.

The Wealth of Nations is resolutely about human beings--their capacities and incentives to be productive, their overall well-being, and the connection between productivity and well-being. In the very first sentence of his Introduction, Smith takes aim at the mercantilists and declares, "The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life. . . ." And two paragraphs later he states that a nation's wealth grows because of "the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied. . . ." Smith's concern about all of a nation's working people is evident. In a wealthy nation "a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire." In the rest of the book he explains why this is so.
While The Theory of Moral Sentiments showed how normal, self-interested people could make moral judgments by consulting an internal "impartial spectator," in The Wealth of Nations Smith explains how such people will automatically contribute to the well-being of others even absent such consultations, simply by pursuing their own ends. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner," writes Smith, in one of the most frequently cited passages in the history of economic thought, "but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love. . . ." With several strokes of his pen, Smith thereby provided a moral justification for motives that had been morally suspect in Western thought for thousands of years.

How can self-interested behavior--the "private interests and passions" of men Smith calls them--lead to the good of the whole? By means, he says, of an "invisible hand"--perhaps the most famous, or infamous, bodily metaphor in all of social science. By an "invisible hand" Smith does not mean a mystical force; he is referring to an unfettered market propelled both by competition among self-interested sellers and by buyers seeking the best possible deals for themselves. If sellers produce too little of something to meet buyers' demands, for example, the price of the product will rise until other sellers step in to fill the gap. If some sellers charge too high a price to begin with, others will step in and charge a lower one.

Unimpeded, the invisible hand will allocate goods efficiently. But the key to wealth creation, for Smith, comes in the division of labor--by which individuals specialize in doing or producing a particular thing. Smith famously illustrates this principle by reference to the making of pins within the kind of small factory that characterized the early years of the Industrial Revolution. "One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations . . . ," he explains. "I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed . . . [who] could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins a day." He contrasts this with the likely output of individuals who tried to make the entire pins themselves. "[I]f they had all wrought separately and independently . . . they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a
day. . . ."

Specialization improves productivity because it allows workers to become more skilled in their specific tasks, motivates them to discover more efficient means of doing them, and saves them the time of changing over to different tasks. Here, Smith noticed something that modern managers often overlook: Innovation often begins with the workers closest to the things being worked upon. "A great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures in which labour is most subdivided, were originally the inventions of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it."

In order to reap the full benefits of specialization, the market must be sufficiently large. After all, there's little point in creating forty-eight thousand pins if there aren't enough people to buy them. The larger the market, the greater the opportunities for specialization. It follows that barriers to trade, within a nation or between nations--regulations, licenses, tariffs, quotas, and other market protections--reduce potential wealth. At the extreme, the necessity of self-sufficiency causes hardship, as in "the lone houses and very small villages which are scattered about in so desert a country as the Highlands of Scotland, [where] every farmer must be butcher, baker, and brewer for his own family."

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface
Editor's Introduction
Introduction and Plan of the Work

Book I Of the Causes and Improvement in the productive Powers of Labour, and of the Order according to which its Produce is naturally distributed among the different Ranks of the People
Chapter I Of the Division of Labour
Chapter II Of the Principle which gives Occasion to the Division of Labour
Chapter III That the Division of Labour is limited by the Extent of the Market
Chapter IV Of the Origin and Use of Money
Chapter V Of the real and nominal Price of Commodities, or of their Price in Labour, and their Price in Money
Chapter VI Of the component Parts of the Price of Commodities
Chapter VII Of the natural and market Price of Commodities
Chapter VIII Of the Wages of Labour
Chapter IX Of the Profits of Stock
Chapter X Of Wages and Profits in the different Employments of Labour and Stock
Chapter XI Of the Rent of Land

Book II Of the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock
Introduction
Chapter I Of the Division of Stock
Chapter II Of Money considered as a particular Branch of the general Stock of the Society, or of the Expence of maintaining the National Capital
Chapter III Of the Accumulation of Capital, or of productive and unproductive Labour
Chapter IV Of Stock lent at Interest
Chapter V Of the different Employment of Capitals

Book III Of the different Progress of Opulence in different Nations
Chapter I Of the Natural Progress of Opulence
Chapter II Of the Discouragement of Agriculture in the ancient State of Europe after the Fall of the Roman Empire
Chapter III Of the Rise and Progress of Cities and Towns, after the Fall of the Roman Empire
Chapter IV How the Commerce of the Towns contributed to the Improvement of the Country

Book IV Of Systems of political Economy
Introduction
Chapter I Of the Principle of the commercial, or mercantile System
Chapter II Of Restraints upon the Importation from foreign Countries of such Goods as can be produced at Home
Chapter III Of the extraordinary Restraints upon the Importation of Goods almost all Kinds, from those countries with which the Balance is supposed to be disadvantageous
Chapter IV Of Drawbacks
Chapter V Of Bounties
Chapter VI Of Treaties of Commerce
Chapter VII Of Colonies
Chapter VIII Conclusion of the Mercantile System
Chapter IX Of the Agricultural Systems, or of those Systems of Political Economy, which represent the Produce of Land, as either the sole or the principal Source of the Revenue and Wealth of every Country

Book V Of the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth
Chapter I Of the Expences of the Sovereign or Commonwealth
Chapter II Of the Sources of the general or public Revenue of the Society
Chapter III Of public Debts

Appendix on the Herring Bounty
Index I. Subjects
Index II. Authorities

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Adam Smith's enormous authority resides, in the end, in the same property that we discover in Marx: not in any ideology, but in an effort to see to the bottom of things." —-Robert L. Heilbroner

Reading Group Guide

The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith

It is symbolic that Adam Smith’s masterpiece of economic analysis, The Wealth of Nations, was first published in 1776, the same year as the Declaration of Independence.

In his book, Smith fervently extolled the simple yet enlightened notion that individuals are fully capable of setting and regulating prices for their own goods and services. He argued passionately in favor of free trade, yet stood up for the little guy. The Wealth of Nations provided the first--and still the most eloquent--integrated description of the workings of a market economy.

The result of Smith’s efforts is a witty, highly readable work of genius filled with prescient theories that form the basis of a thriving capitalist system. This unabridged edition offers the modern reader a fresh look at a timeless and seminal work that revolutionized the way governments and individuals view the creation and dispersion of wealth--and that continues to influence our economy right up to the present day.|

1. Many of the concepts developed by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations-the nature of free trade, laissez-faire, the division of labor-were revolutionary notions in 1776, and remain central to contemporary liberal economic thought. Discuss contemporary economics in light of some of the key notions elaborated by Smith.

2. Smith famously writes: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love. . . .” What does Smith mean by “self-love” or “self-interest”?

3. As R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner write, The Wealth of Nations “was not only an intellectual achievement . . . embracing as it does the explanation of complex social relations on the basis of a few principles, but also a work which provided practical prescriptions for the problems of the day.” Discuss these aspects of Smith’s work-analytical and prescriptive or historical; what is their relation? Is the one necessary for an appreciation of the other?

4. In his Introduction to this volume, Robert Reich notes that “The Wealth of Nations is resolutely about human beings-their capacities and incentives to be productive, their overall well-being, and the connection between productivity and well-being.” How does this statement, taken as a point of departure, shed light on Smith’s book and its significance?

5. Although he is considered the founder of political economy (or modern economic thought more generally), Adam Smith considered himself a moral philosopher. How does looking at him in this way-as someone fundamentally concerned with questions of ethics-change your understanding or appreciation of his work?

Editorial Reviews

For years I have looked around for a really nice hardback edition of The Wealth of Nations without finding one. But this new edition is splendid, the sort of thing I am pleased to have on my shelf, and which would make a fine gift too.

Adam Smith was the first to see that the measure of a nation's wealth was not money, but the industry and enterprise of its people. That a thriving and growing economy could lift whole nations out of poverty. And that the keys to economic growth were incentives, free enterprise, and productivity. That makes The Wealth of Nations just as relevant today as when it was written. So I am delighted to see this handsome new edition.

An enormously useful feature of this edition is the selection of famous quotes at the beginning. Smith's insightful epigrams such as "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest" and his famous remarks on the "invisible hand" can be hard to find in the original, but here they all are, laid out easily and accessibly. There is also a brief guide which explains to the reader what Smith was trying to do in each section of the work, which makes reading it much easier.

- Dr Eamonn Butler, Director, Adam Smith Institute

From the Publisher