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Though contemporaries, Adam Smith and Sir James Steuart are commonly portrayed as if they belonged to different eras. Whereas Smith went down in history as both founder of the science of political economy and patron saint of economic liberalism, Steuart became known as the last, outdated advocate for mercantilist policies in Britain. Smith himself was responsible for popularizing the notion of the “system of commerce” as an approach to political economy that dominated the early modern period. As a historiographical concept, the mercantile system became a misguided international trade theory grounded upon the Midas fallacy and the favorable balance of trade doctrine. Smith’s treatment of international trade in the Wealth of Nations, however, was criticized for its inconsistencies and lack of analytical clarity even by some among his own followers. Given Smith’s doubtful credentials as an international trade theorist, the chapter investigates the reasons that led him and Steuart to be placed on opposite sides of the mercantilist divide. The authors analyze the works of both authors in depth, showing that their disagreements had chiefly to do with different views on money and monetary policy. Additionally, the authors explore how early nineteenth-century writers such as Jean-Baptiste Say and J. R. McCulloch helped forge the intellectual profiles of both Steuart and Smith.

In 1976, amid the vastly greater celebrations of the bicentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, there was the greatest orgy of historical nostalgia in the history of economics, occasioned by the bi‐centenary of the Wealth of Nations. In addition to a veritable deluge of scholarly books, articles, pamphlets, conferences, and symposia, and also innumerable popular and ephemeral effusions, all the mass media were enlisted. There were countless magazine and newspaper articles, some radio and T.V. programs, at least one especially commissioned technicolor film and, for all I know, there may also have been bicentennial poems, paintings, sculptures, and choral symphones!

Religion and philosophy satisfy the basic human needs of understanding, belonging, and finding meaning. They provide tranquility of mind and satisfy the desire to be loved and lovable. However, they present their own failings and can counter each other in positive and negative ways, that threaten the communities of beliefs they form and their interactions. An appropriate institutional framework can control the fanaticism and sectarianism that can come with established religion and philosophy.

Edward J. Harpham (2001, p. 139) once began an article by writing that “many Adam Smiths are presented to us in the secondary literature.” The new wave of Smith scholarship is so varied that one's reading of the 18th-century Scot is bound to change significantly as one switches secondary sources. While recent scholarship on Smith is, in fact, diverse in both its methodology and its overall picture of Smith's system, Harpham is wrong. There aren’t many Smiths. Essentially, there are just two: one that adopts a certain caricature bending A Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereafter TMS) into irrelevance, and one that regards him as a moral philosopher with a theory of political economy fully integrated into his ethics.

This paper aims to present the salient features of Smith's argument of the falling rate of profit. This theory has usually been interpreted as a result of the intensification of competition in the markets of goods and services of the factors of production. This aspect of Adam Smith had been initially posed by Ricardo and subsequently was widely adopted by the major economists of the past as well as from the majority of the modern historians of economic thought.

This paper reviews the major interpretation of the argument from Ricardo and Marx as well as from major historians of economic thought, and then attempts to reconstruct Smith's argument, which is scattered throughout the Wealth of Nations. The authors present some indirect empirical evidence based on the evolution of interest rates on annuities lending support to Smith's insights of the falling rate of profit.

In the author's view, Smith's analysis of the falling tendency in the rate of profit is by far more complex than usually presented and that the intensification of competition is the result of the falling rate of profit rather than its cause which is the capitalization of the production process.

This paper presents a review of existing literature and an interpretation of Adam Smith's original model of the falling rate of profit.

The memorial is an account of Smith's personality and work by a former and favored student. It is a sustained personal reminiscence backed by the reminiscences of others who admired Smith together with an account of Smith's working practices and of his main texts. It is in this sense subjective as well as objective. It is not a full-scale biography, rather a biographical sketch and it is necessarily limited by its very proximity to the subject. The principal and other informants knew Smith and liked him. However, given Stewart's own profession, the work is more than this. It was written in the context of the consequences for Smith's reputation in the light of the French Revolution. Stewart is anxious, given the sensitivities concerning the destructive radicalism in France and in the context of the conservative reaction in Britain, to distance Smith's ideas on liberty and on policy from those ideas as they were being expressed in revolutionary France. In this way, Stewart's biographical work is both an account of Smith's life and works and a politicized interpretation of his principle economic ideas.

At the 2009 Devos economic forum on the global financial crisis, David Cameron, then leader of the British Conservative Party and now Britain's Prime Minister, called for embracing a “moral capitalism.” The purpose of this paper is to consider the insights into a moral framework for the modern economic order that might be drawn from natural religions perceived by Adam Smith and Thorstein Veblen.

A review of the two perceptions of natural religions provide the basis for assessing their compatibilities with the type of competitive market economy that Smith observed in the eighteenth century, and with a modern market economy of large corporate enterprises and global financial markets. Particular attention is given to reforms that curb the practices that led to the global financial crisis.

Smith's “pure and rational” natural religion has been interpreted as being compatible with the type of competitive market economy that he analyzed in Wealth of Nations. Veblen's natural religion of “Christian morals” had a natural rights analogue in the ethics of a competitive market economy in which market relationships were heavily influenced by production resting heavily on personal skills of craftsmen and trade relying on the honesty of small merchants.

The primary focus is on reforms in those aspects of the financial sector of the modern market system that have been associated with the current global financial crisis. What the two natural religions might suggest in the nature of broader socio‐economic reforms, e.g. corporate governance issues, would require a much larger study.

While debates over a “moral capitalism” will be influenced doctrinal stances of institutional religions, sectarian differences may be bridged by considering natural religions that are rational and rest on the principle of fair play and mutual service.

Because of the attention that has been given to Smith's and Veblen's critical commentaries on institutional religions, the paper shows that their perceptions of natural religions and how those religions might relate to the economic order are easily overlooked.

The purpose of this paper is to present the methods of teaching about the global financial crisis (GFC) from a social economic perspective. Using primary texts from the history of economic thought, the moral underpinnings for collective social action are examined in times of economic depression. The deregulation of financial markets raises two questions: to what extent is deregulation the result of a misunderstanding about human nature and the behavioral lessons of social economics; and to what extend does deregulation ignore the moral lessons of Adam Smith’s invisible hand?

By reading sources including Mandeville, Smith, Keynes, Hayek and others, students form conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of government interventions, both to fix, and to prevent, major recessions and depressions.

Two fallacies relating to financial market deregulation are that “greed is good” and that rational actors in the market will self-regulate leading to widespread prosperity. These moral beliefs supported financial liberalization, and ultimately contributed to financial institutions taking on enormous risks and losses that are ultimately socialized.

This paper innovatively uses readings from the history of economic thought to spark pedagogical discussions and debates about human nature and policymaking relevant to the GFC.