So, I read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations a number of years back. But it’s been nagging at me to do a re-read. So I’m reading a few books in preparation. I want to really be primed this time.
Adam Smith has been inappropriately made into an oracle of free-market capitalism. The Business Dept. at one of the institutions I teach at gives out the Adam Smith award, I think, annually. He has become a high priest for those who adhere to the catechism of neoliberal corporate globalization. He is not.
When one actually reads the entirety of the Wealth of Nations, one discovers that just about everything said about him is wrong. He’s like Karl Marx in that way. Many economics professors gush and swoon about the division of labor and the “invisible hand.” However, I strongly suspect most—as in a majority—of economics professors do not read the whole text. They read the first twenty pages like everyone else, and then turn him into whatever they want him to be.
One of the books I’m reading is (so far) an excellent analysis by scholar Glory Liu. In her book, she runs through the history of how and why Smith was canonized as a saint of laissez-faire capitalism. Her book does contain one deep flaw: Noam Chomsky for decades has been saying precisely what she says.
I emailed her and asked her about this, and she danced around the question, and said she couldn’t get to everybody. She couldn’t get to everybody?? She couldn’t get to one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century? Couldn’t even squeeze him into a footnote?
Professor Liu was educated at Brown, Stanford, and Berkeley. She’s taught at Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard. She is therefore a master careerist and knows well that mentioning Chomsky in one’s book is considered ill-mannered at those institutions; to use Chomsky’s language, it’s a “violation of scholarly ethics.” (He was talking about historian Gabriel Kolko, whose work is also dismissed to this day as “Marxist.”) She knows this, hence her dance.
Nevertheless, the book is so far pretty good. She is a solid researcher and a very clear writer.
So, I’ll be preparing probably through the spring semester. And then come summer, I will dive in. Maybe prior to summer, but thereabouts. I plan on an essay, a podcast episode, and a lecture or two. Quite excited.
If you have three and a half minutes, here’s Chomsky talking about the invisible hand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qfX0ASvg3Y
