Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2012
There is enormous and unabated interest in Smith's thought partly because he remains—rightly or wrongly—the most important touchstone for the liberal, free-market project. But it is also because his work is so rich and therefore capable of bearing multiple interpretations. In fact, Smith studies is a surprisingly large and competitive field, with its own journal: in 2003 the quantity of secondary literature on Smith could be realistically described as “enough to sink a small boat” (Margaret Schabas, “Adam Smith's Debts to Nature,” in Oeconomies in the Age of Newton, ed. De Marchi and Schabas [Duke University Press, 2003], 1) and today it is even larger. Here are three new books to add to that growing literature; all are important additions.