Making Wealth, Making Poverty: A Smithian Prometheus
Conquering Scarcity: (Smith's Dialectical Relationship to Marx?)?
Adam Smith is certainly one of the greatest political philosophers in the modern tradition. Our world, as some have argued, is principally the byproduct of the system that Smith outlined in this classic work, together with a judicious mating of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. The "Wealth of Nations," though the most well known of Smith's writings, is not representative of his entire system of thought, if he has a system: Some authors insist that there is a paradox in Smith's work, when considered in light of "The Theory of Moral Sentiments"? I do not know if this is the case, but the degree to which Smith's ideas have shaped our world cannot be questioned: If it were questioned in this forum, one would only have to point to the existence of this forum to show that Smith was right; the global structure of capitalism today and its development, which has been explored by thinkers after Smith is an undeniable fact. For these reasons, Adam Smith is, in my judgement, one of the most important thinkers in modernity, and he may well have a stake in shaping an arguably post-modern world: But that is not, perhaps, the last word.
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