1 - Smith Scholarship

Summary

This chapter situates Smith scholarship in a long historical view. It highlights the kaleidoscopic nature of reading and writing about Smith from the eighteenth century to the present. A brief survey of the early reception of Smith’s works in the anglophone world demonstrates how and why Smith was initially read as a practical resource before being transformed into an intellectual and political authority. Interpretive problems like “Das Adam Smith Problem” and the Chicago School Smith, introduced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then became starting points for critical and revisionist historiography. Contemporary scholarship has been marked by several distinctive features: an increasing interest in Smith as a philosophical thinker, the centrality of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, engagements with Smith to proliferate new defenses and critiques of liberalism, and the reformulation of older categories of analysis. I suggest that the ambiguity and contestability of Smith’s intentions as well as the slipperiness of the conceptual categories that he inspired have engendered shifting meanings, emergent problematics, and the enduring political relevance of his works and ideas.