A Victim of His Success
Economist Adam Smith so changed the conversation in Britain that most people take his groundbreaking insights for granted.
1790
King George III 1760-1820
Economist Adam Smith so changed the conversation in Britain that most people take his groundbreaking insights for granted.
1790
King George III 1760-1820
Adam Smith’s free market ‘Wealth of Nations’ had an immediate and highly beneficial impact on British economic policy, one whose ripples spread across the world. Yet as biographer Richard Haldane explains, so successful was Smith in changing the conversation that most people have now forgotten all about him.
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TO the practical politician and social reformer, Adam Smith ought to be a hero, no less than he is to the economist. To both he appears in the light of one of the greatest vanquishers of error on record, the literary Napoleon of his generation. No man in modern times has said more with so much effect within the compass of one book.
Yet it is not probable that any competent person could now be found to repeat without hesitation the assertion, made more than once by Buckle in his “History of Civilization” that “The Wealth of Nations” is the most important book ever written.* As we become removed by an ever-increasing distance from the prejudices and opinions which Adam Smith once for all shattered,* their magnitude and importance appear to grow smaller. Like every great thinker he is apt to lose something of the admiration he merits, because of the extent to which his conceptions have entered into and become part of our intellectual lives.
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Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862), an extremely good chess player who inherited enough money to allow him to devote himself to historical research. His magnum opus, ‘History of Civilization’, was published in 1857.
The prejudices of Smith’s day were, in essence, that for Britain to be strong other countries must be weakened by lop-sided trade deals enforced by a powerful military, deals designed to protect British corporations by burdening overseas competitors with regulation, tariffs and taxes. Members of her global customs union (the Empire) were comparatively favoured; but as policy was still designed to amass gold in her Treasury and not theirs, the American colonies rebelled in 1775.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Why did Haldane compare Smith to Napoleon?
In different ways, both made sweeping conquests.