Moral Propriety within Political Economy: The Work of Adam Smith

2005 ◽  
pp. 100-119
Author(s):  
Matthew Watson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Adam Smith

Adam Smith and Rousseau

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Edinburgh Review

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith are two of the foremost thinkers of the European Enlightenment, thinkers who made seminal contributions to moral and political philosophy and who shaped some of the key concepts of modern political economy. Among Smith’s first published works was a letter to the Edinburgh Review where he discusses Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Smith continued to engage with Rousseau’s work and to explore many shared themes such as sympathy, political economy, sentiment, and inequality. This collection brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of Adam Smith and Rousseau scholars to provide an exploration of the key shared concerns of these two great thinkers in politics, philosophy, economics, history, and literature.

Comparative Political Economy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Menz
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Comparative Political Economy ◽  
Technological Parameters ◽  
Private Debt

This new and comprehensive volume invites the reader on a tour of the exciting subfield of comparative political economy. The book provides an in-depth account of the theoretical debates surrounding different models of capitalism. Tracing the origins of the field back to Adam Smith and the French Physiocrats, the development of the study of models of political-economic governance is laid out and reviewed. Comparative Political Economy (CPE) sets itself apart from International Political Economy (IPE), focusing on domestic economic and political institutions that compose in combination diverse models of political economy. Drawing on evidence from the US, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, and Japan, the volume affords detailed coverage of the systems of industrial relations, finance, welfare states, and the economic role of the state. There is also a chapter that charts the politics of public and private debt. Much of the focus in CPE has rested on ideas, interests, and institutions, but the subfield ought to take the role of culture more seriously. This book offers suggestions for doing so. It is intended as an introduction to the field for postgraduate students, yet it also offers new insights and fresh inspiration for established scholars. The Varieties of Capitalism approach seems to have reached an impasse, but it could be rejuvenated by exploring the composite elements of different models and what makes them hang together. Rapidly changing technological parameters, new and more recent environmental challenges, demographic change, and immigration will all affect the governance of the various political economy models throughout the OECD. The final section of the book analyses how these impending challenges will reconfigure and threaten to destabilize established national systems of capitalism.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-240
Author(s):  
Laura J. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Points Of Interest

This chapter turns to Joseph Addison's Spectator and finally to Adam Smith, who transformed the theatrical cosmopolitanism of the Restoration into a theory of emotions and cosmopolitics. Like many philosophers in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith aims to understand both emotions and political economy. The chapter explains that the book shows how these two points of interest were profoundly intertwined in the Restoration. In order to try to understand the significance of this intersection, the book turns, as does Smith, to the theater for insight. Restoration theater has been underestimated, partly because the two worlds of Amber and Bruce Carlton have been often read in different contexts and in different kinds of critical projects. While certainly theater audience members of the Restoration period would have had different expectations for comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, and heroic drama, they nevertheless witnessed them in the same moment of imperial ambition, political turbulence, and cosmopolitan explorations. Restoration plays have sometimes been read as frivolous entertainment or nationalist propaganda, but the book characterizes them as more ambitious and more capacious, often too edgy or insufficiently nationalistic for subsequent contexts. It makes the case for key theater experiences that were produced with wit, daring, and insight as not expressing the last gasp of absolutist monarchy, but instead engaging some beginnings: of war capitalism, of the embrace of sophistication, of England's entrance into the slave trade in earnest, and of new possibilities for human passions redirected for this expanding world.

Adam Smith in the chairs on political economy in Spain, 1780–1823 1

2021 ◽  
pp. 172-185
Author(s):  
Javier San Julián Arrupe
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The Chairs

The Proper Context of Business

2019 ◽  
pp. 31-66
Author(s):  
James R. Otteson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Proper Context

Chapter 2 investigates the explanation Adam Smith gave in his famous Wealth of Nations (1776) for why some places are wealthier than others, and what political, economic, and other social institutions are required for increasing prosperity. The chapter discusses the conception of “justice,” as opposed to “beneficence,” that Smith offered The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), as well as Smith’s economizer, local knowledge, and invisible hand arguments from his Wealth of Nations that form the basis of his political economy. We look at the duties of government implied by Smithian political economy, including both what he argues government should do and what it should not do. We also look at empirical evidence to answer the question of whether Smith’s predictions on behalf of his recommendations have come true in the intervening centuries.

Loving Children: The Political Economy of Design

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Orr
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Child Nutrition ◽  
Public Involvement ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Dysfunctional Families ◽  
Yale University ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Cold Blood ◽  
Level I

We are shocked when violence erupts in schoolyards or when a sixyear- old child kills another in cold blood. But the headlines, which sensationalize such tragedies, reveal only the tip of what appears to be a larger problem that, given our present priorities, will only intensify. Youthful violence is symptomatic of something much bigger evident in diffuse anger, despair, apathy, the erosion of ideals, and rising level of teen suicide (up three-fold since 1960). Nationwide, 17 percent of children are on Ritalin, a central nervous system stimulant. Adults often respond with rejection and hostility, making a bad problem worse. We hire more psychologists and sociologists to study our children and more counselors to advise them about issues such as “anger management.” As a result there are libraries of information about childhood, child psychology, child health, child nutrition, child behavior, and dysfunctional families, much of it quite beside the point. Then in desperation we hire more police to lock children up. We are crossing into a new pattern of relations between the generations, and much depends on how well we understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what is to be done about it. The deeper causes of this situation are not apparent in the daily headlines and news reports. Dysfunctional families, depression, youthful violence, and the rising use of chemicals to sedate children are symptoms of something larger. Without anyone saying as much and without anyone intending to do so, we have unwittingly begun to undermine the prospects of our children and, at some level, I believe that they know it. This essay is a meditation on the larger patterns of our time and their effects on children. My argument is that the normal difficulties of growing up are compounded, directly and indirectly, by the reigning set of assumptions, philosophies, ideologies, and even mythologies by which we organize our affairs and conduct the business of society—what was once called “political economy.” The study of political economy began with Adam Smith and continued on through Marx to the present in the work of scholars such as Yale University political scientist Charles Lindblom. Due to academic specialization and diminished public involvement in politics and community life, the field has declined.

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