Let me offer just some brief remarks on what I learned this time around
rereading Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations".
I'm not saying these are the most important points,
they're probably not,
but they're the points that stuck out the most to me
looking at the book and studying it yet again.
The very first time I read "Wealth of Nations",
I was actually 15 years old
and it was one of the first books on economics I had ever read.
It was available in the public library and I wanted to read it,
and so there you go.
What struck me most on that first reading was Smith's idea of the invisible hand,
his explanation for the price system,
and, most of all, the section on digression on the grain trade.
I was learning those ideas pretty much for the first time,
but on this reread, some very different things struck me.
It really is striking in the "Wealth of Nations"
just how much Adam Smith stresses the importance of agriculture
and the importance of agriculture for economic growth,
and, of course, this is during a time
when industrialization is just starting to get underway.
What I think now, more than before,
is that the very first time Smith traveled to England
when he went to study at Oxford and he crossed the border,
it really struck him just what a huge difference there was
between English farms and Scottish farms,
and this was a very important experience in shaping the later "Wealth of Nations".
It also struck me just how much Smith thinks of growth
as something really fairly gradual and also fairly slow.
We moderns like to stress the dynamic elements in "Wealth of Nations",
and, yes, they are there,
but still, there's a very different way of looking at the book.
Smith wrote it in a time where rates of growth still were
probably quite slow in terms of improvements in living standards,
and that's reflected in the text.
Overall this is a story of gradual changes,
not sudden radical upheavals that would come later in the 19th century.
Smith really was greatly interested in the colonies,
North America but also Ireland.
This takes up significant chunks of the "Wealth of Nations"
but in terms of what Smith hoped to persuade the reader of,
other than dismissing mercantilism, this was perhaps his primary interest.
Smith very strongly promoted the idea
that Great Britain should have an act of union
with its English-speaking based colonies.
Of course, that isn't exactly the way it worked out and in this regard,
we can think of "Wealth of Nations" as actually quite a significant failure
even though, on issues like free trade, Adam Smith won many of those debates.
On this reread, it also struck me just how important Adam Smith was
as a source for Karl Marx.
The continual distinction between stages of history, for instance,
that one reads in Marx;
you can see the roots clearly in Adam Smith.
Smith really was promoting the idea that the laws of politics
and, indeed, deeper laws of society really did change during the transition
to a commercial Republic.
Finally, what also struck me on this reread,
especially in the latter parts of "Wealth of Nations",
is how much Smith self-consciously thought of himself as writing
in a kind of great books tradition, drawing upon the classics of antiquity,
ancient Greece and ancient Rome, but providing different answers
and realizing that, finally, the world had achieved a certain amount of opulence,
was becoming fully commercial,
and that this changed fundamental questions of politics,
such as how religion worked or whether or not to have a standing army.
And Smith saw himself, in a way, as the first truly modern writer
understanding the importance of modern economics
for society and politics more generally.
Anyway, that's really quite a subjective account,
but those are just a few of the things from the "Wealth of Nations"
which struck me on a reread this time around.