Social media have made it possible for us to display our vanity and court the attention of others at an unprecedented scale. This article engages Adam Smith's account of vanity to offer a fresh perspective on the online attention economy, focusing primarily on users' desire for attention and...

Technological change, an overwhelming fact in recent socioeconomic history, involves, as Joseph A. Schumpeter famously put it, "creative destruction" on a large scale: it gives rise to new goods, production methods, firms, organisations, and jobs, while rendering some received ones obsolete. Its...

This work offers the first comprehensive comparison between the philosophy of Adam Smith and that of his successor, Thomas Reid. It looks at Reid's and Smith's remarkably similar accounts of human perception and judgement, and at their different moral and economic theories. In this way, this...

As with many philosophers of the modern period, Smith's thought was highly influenced by the advent of modern, Newtonian physics as well as by the so-called mechanistic worldview. However, the adoption of this theoretical paradigm leads to an aporia, i. e., to a fundamental problem, within...

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued against the account of human nature which views moral sentiments as deriving from self-love. This paper emphasises that Smith's understanding of human nature was not that it was either selfish or benevolent. Human nature consists of the ability to...

Commentators often follow David Ricardo in looking, especially, at chapters Vand VI of Book I of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations as the place to find his theory of value. And most commentators attribute to Adam Smith some versions of a labor theory of value. But in those chapters, Smith is...

Based on some of Carl Menger's publications, his estate and archives, this article examines how the Austrian School relates to the thought of Adam Smith. Was Menger an heir of Smith, as Gustav Schmoller, leader of the German Historical School and Menger's arch-enemy, insinuated? Was there indeed...

On the 300th anniversary of his birth, one thing can be said about Adam Smith: entire libraries (real and digital) have been filled with analyses of his thought. This trend does not seem to be on the verge of ending soon. Everybody hopes to uncover the "real Smith." This article has a more...

"Adam Smith's science of the legislator and the "virtues of the statesman" are understood as a kind of higher order-liberalism, coming close to what Colander and Freedman call "the liberal methodology" pertinent to the role of economics in policy-making. Evolving socio-economic heterogeneities,...

This article treats Smith's writings on patriotism and universal benevolence in the final edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments by placing them in some broader contexts. Smith affirmed proper patriotism as virtuous and consistent with the Christian ethic of universal benevolence. Proper...

This article examines the interpretation of Adam Smith's writings in The Birth of Biopolitics, where Foucault delves into market processes, the government's role, the nature of economic knowledge, the dynamics of the "invisible hand," and the complex relationship between society and the state....

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith lays out an account of ethics based on reflected passions towards our neighbours. I argue that this account can inform theories of intergenerational justice. Existing approaches implicitly focus on claims of justice between generations, not...

Purpose Is there a secret recipe for economic growth? Design/methodology/approach No, there is no recipe, but we can extrapolate some pieces of advice from Adam Smith. Findings An economy can leave behind its "dull" stagnant state and grow when its markets expand, when the productivity of its...

The received view does not associate David Hume with the genesis of the labor theory of value, but as is argued here, Hume issued a number of key propositions that belong to the labor theory of value such that he rightly belongs to the classical school of political economy. Hume articulated both...

Der 300. Geburtstag von Adam Smith bot 2023 die Gelegenheit, sich ausführlich mit Leben, Werk und Nachwirkung des Gründers der modernen Ökonomik zu beschäftigen. Die acht Beiträge dieses Bandes bieten nicht nur einen ausführlichen Überblick über den aktuellen Stand der ökonomischen und...

Der 300. Geburtstag von Adam Smith bot 2023 die Gelegenheit, sich ausführlich mit Leben, Werk und Nachwirkung des Gründers der modernen Ökonomik zu beschäftigen. Die acht Beiträge dieses Bandes bieten nicht nur einen ausführlichen Überblick über den aktuellen Stand der ökonomischen und...

Adam Smith's inquiry into the emergence and stability of the self-organization of the division of labor in commodity exchange is considered using statistical equilibrium methods from statistical physics. We develop a statistical equilibrium model of the distribution of independent direct...

This paper introduces "data elements" into a neoclassical general equilibrium model and the new structural general equilibrium model to study the choice of economic growth paths for developing countries. It derives and compares a general expression for the economic growth rate in equilibrium...

The great German mathematician David Hilbert famously identified 23 unsolved problems in mathematics in 1900. Following Hilbert’s example, this paper contributes to the literature on Adam Smith by identifying several unsolved problems involving the life and work of the great...

Adam Smith vigorously uses methodological individualism, but his individuals are radically social and entangled with each other. All social phenomena and institutions, for Smith, are not the product of any human wisdom, nor are they motivated by public spirit, but they are the unintended and...

Adam Smith sees religion both as having a useful and a dangerous role. People create gods to explain what they do not understand and appease their desire of justice when human justice is perceived to fail. These are socially useful functions of religion. But when religion is used as a political...

Adam Smith envisions an economic order which is primarily just, and that happens to be efficient. His proposal mainly attends to the fact that the rules that govern relations between people are fair, that they respect the freedom and equality of people, and a secondary effect of their...

Perhaps the most important and fundamental lesson of Adam Smith’s theory of jurisprudence for contemporary lawyers is that successful communities share a commitment to the rule of law and to the primacy of justice. As represented by the metaphor of the impartial spectator, the rule of law...

The History of Economics Society was founded at a time when the History of Economic Thought was being expelled from the Economics post-graduate curriculum in many universities, and was one of the key institutions around which the sub-discipline successfully re-organised itself and continued to...