Adam Smith's 1776 book *An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations* is easily the single most influential treatise on economics ever published; its themes are known to almost everyone through the work of the 'neoclassical' economists
and popular expositions of 'free-trade' themes, but it is a lucid and compelling work to read itself, including because of the Glasgow professor Smith's role in the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th Century. A personal friend of David Hume (Smith got in
quite a bit of trouble for recommending Hume for a professorship Hume was denied on account of his atheism) and a student of the moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson, Smith's intellectual and personal life in a Scotland which was both backwards and '
modernist' at the same time left an impress on this book which enthusiasts may not quickly ken.

The systematic modern study of manufacture and trade had begun quite a bit earlier than Smith, with the French "Physiocrats", but the rise of modern industrial production was only in its very infancy at the time of *The Wealth of Nations*; Smith's famous
discussion of how the division of labor reduced the amount of time necessary to make pins by an 'order of magnitude' would not have been possible for Quesnay. It is important to remember, however, that in an era preceding the French Revolution (and
Napoleon) the European legislative and bureaucratic administration of the economy and taxation was in a parlous state indeed; one of the most famous features of the British 18th century, beyond endless hangings for crimes as minimal as shoplifting, was
the "window tax" on homes: the more windows a home had, the more the homeowner would have to pay. (Smith is appropriately droll about this, as with many other peculiarities of early-modern commerce.)

As is well understood, Smith's major target in writing the book was the ever-incoherent "mercantilist" system practiced by all European powers, which through irrational price supports and tariffs increased the cost of "necessaries" tremendously and
limited the scope of commercial innovation. However, beyond the simple statement of the case for freer trade—one which is, in its way, undeniable, as witnessed by the contortions of those sojourners in Britain, Marx and Engels, when they were
confronted with the question of how "socialists" should feel about the matter—there is 'much wisdom' in the book about the modern economy and the rational path of an individual through it. (Though the recent enthusiasm for Smith's earlier book *The
Theory of Moral Sentiments* is a bit vapid, it is difficult to detect a hostility to the honest 'workingman' in Smith's economic pages here.)

An additional factor in the book's reception which is rarely, if ever, mentioned is its contemporaneity with the American Revolutionary War, an historical occurrence received in the "metropole" with a great deal more ambiguity than American "patriots"
may expect; the Revolution saw British literary and political figures divided up into enemies of it, like the famous Samuel Johnson (author of a pamphlet about the colonies called *Taxation no Tyranny*), and no less august *supporters* like the Whig
politician Edmund Burke. That series of events in America, the conclusion of which was far from evident at the time of the book's writing, manifestly does *not* go unmentioned in *The Wealth of Nations*; Smith's own views as a metropolitan Briton
confronted by an expensive disorder overseas not easily justified by reference to British traditions of liberty are *systematically* ambiguous, and the lesson within for "political economy" concerning what happens *inter nationes* is rarely unpacked
except in a spirit of 'tame cosmopolitanism'.

Finally, although the modern refraction of Smithian themes through the prism of "game theory" (ultimately equivalent to "Bayesian" theories of probability, which base our judgment of "subjective probability" not only on observed instances of a phenomenon'
s occurrence but on what we believe about the world more generally) has made it seem that the early-modern theme present in Smith (and Marx) known as the "labor theory of value" is definitely 'kaput', I think today we must start asking rather Smithian
questions about how 'sensible' certain types of economic speculation really are; if certain sectors of finance have come unmoored from even the labors of the "captain of industry", what they have to do with the business of living *does* become rather
unclear.

(At any rate, anybody would be well served by reading the book, and Modern Library has made a hardback copy of the standard Cannan edition available agreeably inexpensively.)

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