Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-160
Author(s):  
Dan Sinykin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Adam Smith

Giovanni Arrighi ends The Long Twentieth Century with a vision of “capitalism burning up humanity ‘in the horrors (or glories) of…escalating violence’” (Chakrabarty 200). This is a tidy summary of the worldview shared by the texts studied in this book. Thirteen years later, in Adam Smith in Beijing...

Adam Smith en Pekín. Orígenes y fundamentos del siglo xxi de Giovanni Arrighi

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (153) ◽  
Author(s):  
HUGO RODAS MORALES
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
New Left ◽  
Fredric Jameson

Este libro completa otro, cuyo título destaca el largo periodo que estudia: The Long Twentieth Century. Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994), adoptado elogiosamente por la teoría posmoderna —“Cultura y capital financiero” de Fredric Jameson—. El que se reseña fue anticipado parcialmente a los lectores de los números 20 y 32 de la conocida publicación internacional New Left Review, en 2003. Del declive militarista euroestadounidense y el prometedor ascenso social y capitalista chino deriva esta mirada occidental (auto)crítica que anticipa sus desafortunadas páginas finales: declarar que Smith y Marx no han sido bien comprendidos reduce toda obra interpretativa anterior sobre dos océanos de conocimiento y otros tantos de errores.

Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Labour Productivity ◽  
The West ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Widespread Agreement ◽  
The Way ◽  
Social Property

During the first half of the twentieth century there was widespread agreement as to whether the way to understand the historical emergence of economic development in the West was through the theoretical lens provided by Adam Smith. This chapter critiques Smith's view of the transition through which the pre-capitalist social property relations were transformed into capitalist property relations – a transition that is believed to have been mistakenly attributed by Smith to the expansion of trade. It is argued instead that the rise of capitalist social property relations in England, which led to economic development, was instead catalyzed by the growth of specialization, investment, and the rising labour productivity in agriculture. In addition, it is argued that industrial and economic development were caused by the separation of the manufacturing from the peasantry.

The Anglosphere as a Principle of Progress

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-37
Author(s):  
Michael Gardiner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
First Empire ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Language Area ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The Anglosphere is not only a linguistic entity, it is more fundamentally based in a binding of linguistic improvement, commerce, and historical advance, and it can be read in linguistic aspirations specifically set against the improving background of the Scottish Enlightenment. Enlightenment rhetoric guides answered the imperative of adjustment to British union and a desire to level the ground for individual public advance, and they define the language area in terms of a teleology, pointing inevitably towards commercial society. For literati like Adam Smith, linguistic improvement was the raw material of exchange, exchange was a clear historiographical good, and this good can moreover be demonstrated more or less empirically. The Anglosphere should be understood as a space that is simultaneously linguistic, economic, and historiographic, remaining readable in Victorian statecraft, and in Greater Britain’s ‘linguistic ethnicity’, and in the lost colonies of Britain’s ‘first empire’. It is doubtful, however, whether the Anglosphere in this understanding has retained its direction after the attenuations of the late twentieth century, the new pressures on property creation, and the undoing of the original ethical knot of language, economy, and historiography.

Adam Smith's Philosophy of Riches

Philosophy ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 44 (168) ◽  
pp. 101-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. G. West
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Central Planning ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Central Control ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Divine Origin ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the name of Adam Smith was popularly associated with the sort of ‘laissez faire’ policy that is expounded with all the fervour of a religious faith. Smith, so the story ran, in his eagerness to combat the excessive mercantilist government intervention of his day, had resorted to supra-natural claims in his general onslaught against central control and planning by governments. Such intervention was ‘unnatural’ and conflicted with Deistic Design. Only through private actions could mankind reach satisfying and ‘natural’ fulfillment. Action through private self-interest was twice blessed; it. blessed him who profited and his fellows who were ‘profited from’. True there was a kind of central planning that was of supreme importance; but it had a divine origin and it worked not through governments but through individual free trade. Private actions in fact were directed by an Invisible Hand which brought society into a grand and spontaneous Natural Harmony.

Ireland and the Black Atlantic in the eighteenth century

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (126) ◽  
pp. 174-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nini Rodgers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Western World ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Actual Operation

In the second half of the twentieth century few subjects have excited more extensive historical debate in the western world than black slavery. American investigation has centred upon the actual operation of the institution. An impressively wide range of historical techniques, cliometrics, comparative history, cultural studies, the imagination of the novelist, have all been employed in a vigorous attempt to recover and evaluate the slave past. In Britain, the first great power to abolish the Atlantic trade and emancipate her slaves, the emphasis has been on the development of the anti-slavery movement, described by W. E. H. Lecky in 1869 as ‘a crusade’ to be rated ‘amongst the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations’, and therefore an obvious candidate for twentieth-century revision. Any discussion of black slavery in the New World immediately involves the historian in economic matters. Here the nineteenth-century orthodoxy launched by Adam Smith and developed by J. S. Mill and his friend J. E. Cairnes, author of The slave power (1862) and professor of political economy and jurisprudence in Queen’s College, Galway, saw slavery as both morally wrong and economically unsound, an anachronism in the modern world. Since the 1970s this view has been challenged head-on by American historians arguing that, however morally repugnant, slavery was a dynamic system, an engine of economic progress in the U.S.A. Such a thesis inevitably revives some of the arguments used by the nineteenth-century defenders of slavery and has equally inevitably attracted bitter anti-revisionist denunciation.

Editorial Introduction to the Symposium on Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-38
Author(s):  
Liam Campling
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Systems Theory ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
World System ◽  
Editorial Introduction ◽  
Modern World ◽  
World Systems ◽  
World Systems Theory

AbstractGiovanni Arrighi (1937‐2009) was a leading figure in the development of world-systems theory and also contributed to a range of debates in Marxist thought. This symposium engages with Arrighi’s last book, Adam Smith in Beijing, which was the final instalment in his ‘trilogy’, following The Long Twentieth Century (1994) and Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (with Beverly Silver, 1999). This Editorial Introduction traces the broad trajectory of Arrighi’s ‘trilogy’ and its concern with systemic cycles of accumulation, highlights additional major contributions by Arrighi, and sketches some of the central arguments of the five symposium articles.<xref ref-type="fn" rid="FN0">*</xref>

Adam Smith and the Dark Nightingale: On Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTIN STOKES
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
The 1950S

AbstractThis article reconsiders sentimentalism in the light of the writings of Adam Smith and the career of Abd al-Halim Hafiz, Egypt’s ‘Dark Nightingale’ and film-star crooner of the 1950s and 60s. It explores competing representations of emotionality, the limits of enchantment, and the contemporary politics of nostalgia and melodrama in Egyptian public culture. Eighteenth-century sentimental theory provides a critical and productive angle on twentieth-century popular musical culture, angles that this paper explores by imagining Adam Smith watching Abd al-Halim Hafiz’s first film, Lahn al-Wafā‘ (1955).

‘Mere Inventions of the Imagination’: A Survey of Recent Literature on Adam Smith

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivienne Brown
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Full Range ◽  
The Political ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

As late twentieth-century discourses of modernity and postmodernity invoke their Enlightenment heritage in a search for the origins of their present achievements and predicaments, Adam Smith's works are still seen as a canonic representative of that heritage. Smith has long been evoked as the ‘father’ of economics and the original proponent of laissez-faire capitalism, but the political changes in recent decades have reconstituted his iconic status. With the full range of Smith's published and unpublished writings and lectures now widely available, there has been a huge growth in the scholarly literature on Smith which has subjected this traditional view to searching questions. The overwhelming conclusion to emerge is that Smith's works display a subtlety and complexity that is at odds with the received image of Smith as the spokesman of modernity, but the diversity of interpretation raises some difficult methodological issues.

‘Utility’ and the ‘Utility Principle’: Hume, Smith, Bentham, Mill

Utilitas ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas G. Long
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Liberal Tradition

David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are often viewed as contributors to or participants in a common tradition of thought roughly characterized as ‘the liberal tradition’ or the tradition of ‘bourgeois ideology’. This view, however useful it may be for polemical or proselytizing purposes, is in some important respects historiographically unsound. This is not to deny the importance of asking what twentieth-century liberals or conservatives might find in the works of, say, David Hume to support their respective ideological persuasions. It is only to insist that attempts to use selected arguments, or parts of arguments, from great eighteenth-century thinkers to shore up twentieth-century programmatic political positions must be categorically distinguished from attempts to understand what Hume, Smith, Bentham or Mill actually meant, or could imaginably have meant, to say.

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, 1790, and 1976

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-73
Author(s):  
Neven Brady Leddy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Institutional Context ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Introductory Essay ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Theory Of Moral Sentiments

This article traces the institutional context for the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith in the 1960s and 1970s. It explores the origins of the stoicization thesis advanced by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie in their introductory essay to the TMS. Using the correspondence between the editors held at Glasgow University Special Collections, this article presents the development of editorial positions that would shape the twentieth-century reception of Smith's works.

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