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This is an interesting collection by scholars who defended their theses between 2002 and 2004. It is focused on Adam Smith and treats Smith in a number of interesting though, perforce, loosely organized contexts. Part one gathers together three essays, by Hanley, on “Smith and Aristotle,” Kuiper, on Smith's “feminist contemporaries,” and Mitchell, on eighteenth century notions of “systems,” under the heading “Adam Smith, his sources and influence.” Part two contains five essays: Forman-Barzilai, on “connexion”; Von Villiez on a comparison of Smith and Rawls; Frierson on “Smithian environmental virtue ethics”; Brubaker on the “wisdom of nature”; and, lastly, Flanders, on “moral luck,” all under the heading “Adam Smith and Moral Theory.” Part three organized under “Adam Smith and economics” contains three essays, one each by Hurtado-Prieto, on Smith and Mandeville, Montes (one of the joint editors) on “Smith and Newtonianism,” and Paganelli, on “vanity” and “paper money.” The last section, part four, contains three essays one each by Smith, on “progress,” Trincado, on “Smith's criticism of the doctrine of utility,” and Schliesser (the other joint editor), on Smith's “conception of philosophy.” The range of the contributions illustrates both the revival of serious intellectual interest in Smith as a philosophe and in the context of eighteenth century studies or of the enlightenment more generally. The Routledge series “Studies in the History of Economics” has always been prepared to be innovative and the re-contextualization of Smith's work in the variety of contexts presented here maintains the series’ reputation for changing frameworks within which to view the intellectual history of economics.

Entangled Political Economy, the idea that the economy and the polity are a nexus of interrelations often with unplanned outcomes, is close to the concept of economics that Adam Smith presents, a concept which was not shaped by strict discipline barriers. I show that Adam Smith analyzes the nature and causes of the wealth of nations by analyzing the interaction of the economy with politics, ethics, and the law. In particular, Smith presents each of these systems as a network of relations with all the other systems: the economy is entangled not just with the polity, but also with other systems of behavior such as the law and morality. Adam Smith may help expand the horizons of the entangled political economy analysis and the explanatory powers of economics.

Adam Smith sees religion both as having a useful and a dangerous role. People create gods to explain what they do not understand and appease their desire of justice when human justice is perceived to fail. These are socially useful functions of religion. But when religion is used as a political tool and is used for state capture purposes, then it becomes a dangerous and destructive force in society.

For approximately a century and a half after their dramatic deflation, the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles of 1710–1720 had discredited finance. With the exception of government bond markets and a few chartered companies, the rapid rise and fall of fortunes associated with the South Sea Company, in Britain, and the Mississippi Company in France, had made the joint stock system of corporate finance almost synonymous with fraud and financial debauchery. (The most authoritative account of these schemes is given in Murphy, 1997.) The joint stock system of finance was seen as seriously flawed, and an indictment of the theories on credit money of the schemes’ instigator, John Law. During those one hundred and fifty years, classical political economy rose and flowered. Not surprisingly finance then came to be considered for its fiscal and monetary consequences. This pre-occupation left its mark on twentieth-century economics in an attitude that the fiscal and monetary implications of finance, eventually its influence on consumption, are more important than its balance sheet effects in the corporate sector. This attitude is apparent even in the work of perhaps the pre-eminent twentieth century critical finance theorist, John Maynard Keynes.

Can we model politics as exclusively based on self-interest, leaving virtue aside? How much romance is there in the study of politics? We show that James Buchanan, a founder of public choice and constitutional political economy, reintroduces a modicum of romance into politics, despite claiming that his work is the study of “politics without romance”: Buchanan’s model needs an ethical attitude to defend rules against rent-seeking.

We claim that Adam Smith, more than David Hume, should be considered one of the primary intellectual influences on Buchanan’s public choice and constitutional political economy. It is commonly believed that Hume assumes in politics every man ought to be considered a knave, making him an influence on Buchanan’s idea of politics without romance. Yet, it is Smith who, like Buchanan, describes rent-seeking and suggests that public virtues may be the remedy through which good rules maintaining liberty and prosperity can be generated and enforced. Smith, like Buchanan, rejects sole reliance on economic incentives: the study of politics needs some romance.

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.

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.

Is liberalism premised on an unrealistically individualist anthropology? In one regularly told story about modernity, the earliest liberals grounded their arguments for political liberty in a picture of human nature that centered on our moral autonomy, perhaps epitomized best in Kantian thought. However, a range of critics have now compellingly argued that such accounts of our agency are descriptively inaccurate, and that normative social projects beginning from such flawed foundations are thus unstable. While this paper accepts this criticism of individualist anthropologies, it proposes that this need not identify a problem with liberalism overall. To make this case, this paper turns to Adam Smith, who grounded his early advocacy of liberalism in an anthropology grounded in natural theology that depicts us as morally interconnected, rather than as autonomous, and as always morally impressionable. As it will explain, Smith presumed an account of character as integrally related to and influenced by the agent’s social context, for both better and worse. Furthermore, he wove his attentiveness to this complex interaction between the agent and their context into both his economic analyses and political proposals. Smith’s social vision thus illustrates how a strong regard for individual liberty is fully compatible with a sophisticated anthropology that recognizes our malleability as moral agents – and even with political proposals that capitalize upon this malleability. Smith’s thought thus offers useful resources for contemporary proponents of liberalism who wish to value the dignity of individuals without basing that valuation in unrealistic abstractions, or ignoring the responsibilities engendered by the fact of our ongoing moral formation by our social contexts.