Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-jr42d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-17T06:15:09.751Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Signifying Voices: Reading the “Adam Smith Problem”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Vivienne Brown
Vivienne Brown
Affiliation:
The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The “Adam Smith problem” has traditionally been concerned with the issue of authorial integrity: the issue of how a single author, Adam Smith, could have written two such apparently dissimilar, even contradictory, works as The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) and The Wealth of Nations (WN). As the problem to be resolved was the single authorial origin of two such works, the perceived incompatibilities between them were explained in terms of Smith's intellectual biography – for example, Smith's travels to France, Smith's meetings with the physiocrats, or the mental incapacities of an aging man. The current consensus is that the Adam Smith problem is a “pseudo problem” and that Smith's works represent a unified project, but the same reference to authorial origins now provides thr opposite claim that “the same man” wrote both books (Raphael and Macfie, 1976, p. 20). Here the postulate of authorial integrity, “of stable integrated character, not subject to deep intellectual doubts or fissures” provides an assurance that such a man is unlikely to have written two entirely different books (Macfie, 1967, p. 76), an assurance underwritten by a coherent authorial intentionality that guarantees the consistency of the two works.

Type
Essays
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , October 1991 , pp. 187 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anspach, Ralph. 1972. “The Implications of the Theory of Moral Sentiments for Adam Smith's Economic Thought.” History of Political Economy 9:176–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M. M. 1984a. Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics. Manchester: Manchester University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, M. M. 1984b. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M. M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Death of the Author.” In Image Music Text, pp. 142–48. London: Fontana; Flamingo edition, 1984.Google Scholar
Brissenden, R. F. 1969. “Authority, Guilt, and Anxiety in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Texas Studies in Literature and Languages 11:945–62.Google Scholar
Brown, Vivienne. 1987. “Value and Property in the History of Economic Thought: An Analysis of the Emergence of Scarcity.” Œconomia, no. 7, série P.E. de la revue, Économies et Sociétés:85–112.Google Scholar
Brown, Vivienne. 1989. The System of Natural Liberty and The Wealth of Nations. Paper presented to the History of Economic Thought Conference, Groningen, The Netherlands, September 1989.Google Scholar
Brown, Vivienne. 1991. The Dialogic Experience of Conscience: Adam Smith and the Voices of Stoicism. Mimeo.Google Scholar
Campbell, T. D. 1971. Adam Smith's Science of Morals. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Clark, Katerina, and Holquist, Michael. 1984. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Evensky, Jerry. 1987. “The Two Voices of Adam Smith: Moral Philosopher and Social Critic.” History of Political Economy 19:447–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fish, Stanley. 1988. “Comments from Outside Economics.” In The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric, edited by Klamer, Arjo, McCloskey, Donald N., and Solow, Robert M., pp. 21–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1986. “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Rabinow, P., pp. 101–20. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Heilbronner, Robert L. 1982. “The Socialization of the Individual in Adam Smith.” History of Political Economy 14:421–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hont, Istvan, and Ignatieff, Michael (editors). 1983. Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klamer, Arjo, McCloskey, Donald N., and Solow, Robert M. (editors). 1988. The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lamb, Robert Boyden. 1974. “Adam Smith's System: Sympathy not Self-interest.” Journal of the History of Ideas 35:671–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindgren, Ralph. 1973. The Social Philosophy of Adam Smith. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lodge, David. 1987. “After Bakhtin.” In The Linguistics of Writing, edited by Fabb, N., Attridge, D., Durant, A., and MacCabe, C., pp. 89–102. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
McCloskey, Donald N. 1986. The Rhetoric of Economics. Brighton: Wheatsheaf.Google Scholar
McCloskey, Donald N. 1988. “Thick and Thin Methodologies in the History of Economic Thought.” In The Popperian Legacy in Economics, edited by de Marchi, Neil, pp. 245–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macfie, A. L. 1967. The Individual in Society. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Marshall, David. 1982. “Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments.” Critical Inquiry 10:592–613.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, David. 1986. The Figure of Theater. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Harvey. 1987. “The Mysterious Veil of Self-Delusion' in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 20:405–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morrow, Glenn R. 1923. The Ethical and Economic Theories of Adam Smith. New York: Longmans; reprinted, 1973, by Augustus M. Kelley, New York.Google Scholar
Morrow, Glenn R. 1928. “Adam Smith: Moralist and Philosopher.” In Adam Smith, 1776–1926, pp. 156–79; reprinted, 1966, by Augustus M. Kelley, New York.Google Scholar
Morson, Gary Saul (editor). 1986. Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Oncken, August. 1897. “The Consistency of Adam Smith.” The Economic Journal 7:443–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pocock, J. G. A. 1983. “Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relations between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of Eighteenth-Century Social Thought.” In Wealth and Virtue, edited by Hont, Istvan and Ignatieff, Michael, pp. 235–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raphael, D. D. 1975. “The Impartial Spectator.” In Essays on Adam Smith, edited by Skinner, A. S. and Wilson, T., pp. 83–99. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Raphael, D. D., and Macfie, A. L.. 1976. Introduction to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by Raphael, D. D. and Macfie, A. L.. Vol. 1 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Liberty Classics imprint, 1982.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. 1976a. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by Campbell, R. H. and Skinner, A. S.. Vol. 2 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press; reprinted by Liberty Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. 1976b. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by Raphael, D. D. and Macfie, A. L.. Vol. 1 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press; reprinted by Liberty Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. 1978. Lectures on Jurisprudence, edited by Meek, R. L., Raphael, D. D., and Stein, P. G.. Vol. 5 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press; reprinted by Liberty Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. 1983. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, edited by Bryce, J. C.. Vol. 4 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press; reprinted by Liberty Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Teichgraeber, Richard III., 1981. “Rethinking Das Adam Smith Problem.” The Journal of British Studies 20:106–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. (Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 13.) Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Viner, Jacob. 1928. “Adam Smith and Laissez Faire.” In Adam Smith, 1776–1926, pp. 116–55; reprinted, 1966, by Augustus M. Kelley, New York.Google Scholar
Viner, Jacob. 1960. “The Intellectual History of Laissez Faire.” The Journal of Law and Economics 3:45–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Thomas. 1976. “Sympathy and Self-interest.” In The Market and the State, edited by Wilson, T. and Skinner, A. S., pp. 73–99. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Winch, Donald. 1978. Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winch, Donald. 1983. “Adam Smith's ‘Enduring Particular Result’: A Political and Cosmopolitan Perspective.” In Wealth and Virtue, edited by Hont, Istvan and Ignatieff, Michael, pp. 253–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Jeffrey T. 1986. “The Impartial Spectator and Natural Jurisprudence: An Interpretation of Adam Smith's Theory of the Natural Price.” History of Political Economy 18:365–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar