General Introduction: Why Adam Smith?

Abstract

Graduate economists, thoroughly conversant within the neoclassical paradigm and therefore numerate, who read the first few pages of Wealth of Nations confront an entirely different method of political economy to that which their academic training prepares them. If they persist, they find a literary style (no mathematics) that can be irritatingly obscure, seemingly long-winded and occasionally ambiguous, and given to ‘diversions’ of apparently questionable relevance, certainly when compared to the kinds of problems with which they are familiar. It is unlikely that they have an immediate resonance with Adam Smith’s style of discourse. Yet within his books there is much that may enlighten some of their deeper questions, and some they might find disturbing to their mastery of general equilibrium theory. For today’s economists, Smith’s corpus is the veritable and venerable ‘elephant in the room’: how did modern economics develop from such an unpromising source and why is he credited as the ‘Father of Economics’?