In the first edition of the Wealth of Nations, published in London in 1776, the author-works list is presented in a very unusual place: directly opposite the table of contents. That placement suggests a continuity and unity in Adam Smith’s published works. A photograph provides a touchstone to...

We explore the 1764 pamphlet, In Vindication of the Continental Colonies of America, from A Censure of Mr Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. With some Reflections on Slavery in General. Authorship has been attributed to Arthur Lee. We doubt that attribution and here simply treat the...

These brief, casual remarks were delivered at an event to discuss Russell Roberts’s book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. I provide nine quotations from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, each quotation stating a source of vice, disorder, and corruption in human life. Smith...

This article is part of a symposium (in Society) on a target article by Amitai Etzioni. Using that article as a point of departure, I take the opportunity to elaborate a reading of Adam Smith's moral philosophy that sees it as quite non-foundationalist. Whereas foundationalism's metaphor is a...

Martin Pánek asked me to write a Foreword to a new edition of a Czech translation of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He gave me permission to post my original English-language text here. The book will be published by the Liberální Institut, edited by Pavel Chalupníček,...

This document includes the Introduction and table of contents of a project: Think Spiral: Essays on Adam Smith. The Introduction has the following sections: (1) A Social Grammar(2) The Three Justices: Commutative, Distributive, and Estimative(3) The Liberal Program(4) The Theory of Moral...

My university – George Mason University – has announced a Task Force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence. I gave a lecture about the discourse of those advocating such agendas. The lecture draws on Adam Smith and suggests that improprieties riddle such discourse. I treat improprieties of...

Adam Smith infused the expression “impartial spectator” with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which normally would aptly take the definite article the, and which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator of an...