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Economists usually try to avoid making moral judgements, at least in their professional capacity. Positive economics is seen as a way of analysing economic problems, in as scientific a manner as is possible in human sciences. Economists are often reluctant to be prescriptive, most seeing their task as presenting information on the various options, but leaving the final choice, to the political decision taker. The view of many economists is that politicians can be held responsible for the morality of their actions when making decisions on economic matters, unlike unelected economic advisors, and therefore the latter should limit their role.

This section will explore the macro-organization of the lectures and the way or ways in which Smith actively signals how the lecture series fits together. The starting point is the lecture, and series of lectures, as genre.

A Review essay on Tatsuya Sakamoto and Hideo Tanaka (Eds), The Rise of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, London: Routledge, 2003 pp. xii+215. ISBN 041529648X £60.00. This volume is composed of thirteen short but concentrated essays and an introduction on the rise of political economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, each written by a distinguished Japanese scholar. Although the contributors are engaged in international scholarly activities, the volume devotes one chapter to “Adam Smith in Japan” and elsewhere draws attention to scholarly interpretations of Smith in the “West.” Both suggest that the perspective, whilst linked directly to international scholarly discussion through modern works consulted and themes identified in earlier literature (the edited volume by Hont and Ignatieff (1983) being cited, amongst others, as historically significant for the development of the approach set out in the collection), carries insights that arise out of earlier but sustained Japanese interest in the notion of social and cultural modernization and reform. It is perhaps also in this context that they hit on the centrality of the issue of “manners,” shorthand for morals, values, political behaviour, economic motivation and so on. Tatsuya Sakamoto makes this notion of “manners” explicit in his interesting chapter on Hume (p. 92) and Shoji Tanaka makes central the formation of free individuals liberated from feudalism and “religious delusions” (p. 134).

David Hume's image, as produced by his fellow Scot, Allan Ramsey, is printed large on the hardback cover of David Hume's political economy. This handsome portrait captures Hume's confidence and intelligence and displays, in its scarlet cloth, fine lace and elaborately worked, golden trim, Hume as a successful philosophe, a man of knowledge and also of commercial success (a success of considerable psychological importance for Hume, and a source of pride) founded upon the literary works on which his left arm rests. Indeed, without the significant reference to the books, this could as well be the portrait of a Scottish merchant or affluent banker, both types ranked among his Edinburgh friends. Hume with no University post and no inherited income worth speaking of made the most of the commercial possibilities open to authorship. This is a refined, even luxurious painting, and brings together in one enduring image, at least for those in the know, Hume's notion of “luxury” or of “Refinement in the Arts” and the idea of virtue in commercial society. This is a fitting cover for a work that places Hume's political economy firmly in the contexts of his notion of a science of human nature and of the role of virtue in commercial society.

It was with a certain amount of surprise mixed in roughly equal proportions with curiosity that I recently accepted the task of writing a review of a work, published in 2001, on the encounter between the Enlightenment (meaning the French Enlightenment) and postmodernism. Reading in the Scottish Enlightenment suggests a need to know something about the wider European context though the exclusivity of France as the Enlightenment or as the home of Enlightenment is no longer a sustainable proposition. The Scots, in their energetic Universities, were as much involved with applying Newton and developing Locke or extending Shaftesbury or countermanding Mandeville as they were with the continental philosophies. The proposition put to me, to persuade me to the task, was the work was likely to contain ideas that intellectual historians of economics might profit from. A reflection on the significance of two potentially conflicting sets of ideas ought to have significance for the study of 18th-century economics developed within the cultural context of wider Enlightenment thought.

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.

A review essay on Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. pp. xii+274. £45.00. ISBN 0521452600 and £14.99. 0521458935. The economic thinking of the Medieval period is not always treated in histories of economic thought. Its inclusion or omission depends on the decisions of authors with respect to the purposes and audiences that their histories intend to serve. Where the focus is the evolution of modern-day economics in terms of the development of economic analysis, it may be reasonable to predict that early economics or as some would have it “proto-economics” or Schumpeter’s “rudimentary economic analysis” (Schumpeter, 1986, p. 53) would have no place in history texts. In as much as there is no identification of “the economy” separate from households, it is possible to hold that there is no genuine economic theory. Such a tidy solution is not found, however, in the development of actual histories of economic thought. John Kells Ingram started with “Ancient Times” and then moved to “The Middle Ages” (Ingram, 1910). Erich Roll also starts early and works forward from there (Roll, 1939). Gide and Rist started with “The Physiocrats” (Gide & Rist, 1909), and Mercantilism in the early modern period is another possible starting point. Some fairly robust and well-established texts, concerned with substantive issues in the development of thought and analysis, include ancient and Medieval economic thinking. Gordon’s work on Economic Analysis before Adam Smith (1975) includes very early sources. Long-established texts such as those of Schumpeter (which views Aristotle as having enough systematic knowledge to qualify as economically interesting) and of Ekelund and Hébert, for example, include “Scholastic Economic Analysis” (Ekelund & Hébert, 1997, p. 25). But there are caveats: Writers like Plato, Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas lived in nonmarket societies in which individual economic decisions were taken by tradition and command rather than by individual, unconstrained economic agents. Consequently the lasting influence on western social thought of these early writers lies not so much in their insights into the operation of market forces, but rather in their preconceptions regarding the nature of social laws (Ekelund & Hébert, 1997, p. 9).Such generalisations, useful as starting points, are likely to need both hedging and nuancing since Medieval economic life did change. Wood insists on the changing nature of economic life and the intellectual adjustments that change requires. Wood, for example, places her discussion of “property” in a “growing sense of individual rights and possession” and on “conflicting legal ideas on property” (p. 19). The transition from poverty as something to be chosen as recommended by St. Francis to the notion that “a copious body of misers is the essential foundation of the State,” held by a fifteenth-century merchant Prince, also nicely highlights the transitions (p. 207).