Political Economy as Moral Philosophy: Dugald Stewart of Edinburgh (original) (raw)
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Journal of the History of Economic Thought
Nicholas Curott attempts to correct some misrepresentations of Adam Smith’s monetary and banking analyses. However, failing to recognize Smith’s adoption of David Hume’s quantity theory of price levels and the price-specie-flow mechanism, Smith’s distinction between money and credit and their sources, and Smith’s suggestion of real, rather than “fictitious,” bills as safer for private bank lending, Curott denigrates Smith’s theory of money and banking as inferior to some modern writers’. Curott also mischaracterizes Smith’s money demand function, which is best represented as a rectangular hyperbola. I draw from the Wealth of Nations to correct Curott’s misrepresentations of Smith’s analyses.
Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, 2024
This paper 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 judgment, and at their different moral and economic theories. In this way, this paper offers not only a new perspective on Reid's critique of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, but also new insights into the intellectual roots of the genuinely Scottish debates about sense perception and the task of scientific philosophy. "Reiding" Smith can thus offer a unique vantage point from which to understand the connections between epistemological and economic issues in Smith's work. With a focus that is at once historical and philosophical, this undertaking serves three purposes: a) to familiarise economists with the philosophical and economic works of Thomas Reid, b) to sharpen our understanding of Adam Smith's intellectual context in the Scottish Enlightenment, and c) to better understand the paradoxical role that individual human judgment plays in Adam Smith's analysis of the economy.
Adam Smith’s Moral Science Of Economics
2003
Jeffrey Young is well-known in history of economic thought circles in Australia because of his collaboration with the late Barry Gordon. This collaboration is shown again in the book under review, where two chapters are based on this teamwork. Young’s intellectual debt is also shown in the dedication of the book to Barry Gordon and Kenneth Boulding. Through the prior publication of some articles in scholarly journals, a moderate portion of the book has already become known to the history of economic thought community. Nevertheless, there are a number of new things in this publication. The content of Young’s book is better indicated by the sub-title, The Political Economy of Adam Smith, than by the title, Economics as a Moral Science. The title is a better indication of the approach adopted to the study of Smith. As Young says ‘In this book I attempt to offer a coherent interpretation of Smith based on the interplay of economics and moral philosophy’ (p. ix). The view that ‘moral con...
ADAM SMITH AND MODERN ECONOMICS
In his Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith created an agenda for the study of the economy that is reflected in the structure of modern economics. This paper describes Smith's contributions to four central areas of economic theory: The theory of price formation, the relationship between market outcomes and the public interest, the role of the state in the economy, and the sources of economic growth. In each case, an attempt is made to relate Smith's contribution to the state of contemporary economics, showing both the similarities and contrasts between the respective approaches.
Adam Smith's Theory of Money and Banking
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012
This paper addresses a long-running debate in the economics literature-the debate over Adam Smith's theory of money and banking-and argues that recent reinterpretations of Smith's monetary theory have erroneously diverted historians of monetary thought from the correct, but briefly articulated, initial interpretations of Thornton (1802) and Viner (1937). Smith did not present either the real-bills theory or a price-specie-flow theory of banknote regulation, as is now generally presumed, but rather a reflux theory based upon the premise that the demand for money is fixed at a particular nominal quantity. Smith's theory denies that an excess supply of money can ordinarily make it into the domestic nominal income stream or influence prices or employment.
PSN: Liberal Market Economies (Topic), 2007
Despite his fame, there is still widespread ignorance about the breadth of Adam Smith's contributions to economics, politics and philosophy. In Adam Smith - A Primer, Eamonn Butler provides an authoritative introduction to the life and work of this 'founder of economics'. The author examines not only The Wealth of Nations, with its insights on trade and the division of labour, but also less well known works, such as The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the lectures, and the writings on the history of science. Butler therefore provides a comprehensive, but concise, overview of Adam Smith's intellectual achievements. Whilst earlier writers may have studied economic matters, it is clear that the scope of Smith's enquiries was remarkable. In relating economic progress to human nature and institutional evolution he provided a completely new understanding of how human society works and was very much a precursor of writers such as Hayek and Popper. Indeed, with poor governan...