"The greatest and noblest of all characters" : knowledge, improvements, and Smith's "science of the legislator"

"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, the dynamism of specialisation and politics require a kind of dynamic, open, and contextual second-best approach, based on acknowledging the limits of system and historical contingencies - incompatible with technocratic scientism, utopian perfectionism, and reckless experimentation. I discuss reasons why the science of the legislator "died" (D. Winch), and did not become part of the modern mainstream, even though it has been re-invented time and again.