What is the current value of the work of Adam Smith?
Very relevant, but not for the reasons most people think. Most people think that Adam Smith is relevant because we have such a market-oriented system, so we should know how markets work, how to get benefits, and Smith tells us about this. While this is quite right, it’s only part of his work. I am a reluctant admirer of is work, because I am more sceptical about the benefits markets can offer than he was – which is not surprising if you look at our respective contexts: in his time, markets were severely constrained by the King and his cronies and other powerful mercantilists, and he wanted to get rid of those constraints on entry and competition to unleash the talents of ordinary people. In the early 21st century, I see a society that is very market-oriented and I have my doubts about some of the results, especially in the financial sector. Yet Smith understood the world in state-market-condominium terms, the state and the market as emerging from the same self-interested forms of human
