Adam Smith's Lost Legacy

In this accessible book, Gavin Kennedy takes a fresh look at Adam Smith's moral philosophy and its links to his political economy and his lectures on jurisprudence. The book provides a new analysis of Wealth of Nations, and argues that Adam Smith's intellectual legacy was coopted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by economists pursuing agendas that Smith did not advocate. It also provides a new explanation for the main mysteries about Smith's later life.

Kennedy (Edinburgh Business School, Herio-Watt U.) re-examines such works as Smith's Wealth of Nations, finding that Smith's ideas were more or less appropriated by later theorists and stripped of their moral philosophy. In some case, he notes, nineteenth- and twentieth-century economists and philosophers simply invented what they needed and called the result Smith's. In fact, Smith wrote for his own times, when he and others who wished not to be condemned had to be very careful about what they said and wrote. Kennedy traces Smith's development of his ideas from his youth onward, and the pains he took to make his ideas palatable to his audience, which, we must remind ourselves, consisted mainly of schoolboys aged 14 to 17 for some time, and how Smith's published work was used for quite another purpose than he intended. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Gavin Kennedy is Professor and Director of Contracts at Edinburgh Business School, Herio-Watt University.