Adam Smith

Why did Chicago become the headquarters of free market fundamentalism? Adam Smith offers a clue.

How conservatives made him their icon and distorted his ideas.

Smith's influence on American politics, and the misunderstanding at the heart of our idea of the "champion of capitalism."

How to understand Adam Smith’s politics.

Who is the father of American capitalism?

Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek have been through the wringer.

The language of “sacrifice” reveals we’re stuck in a colonial mindset.

Far from a partisan for free markets, the Founding Father insisted on the need for economic planning. We need more of that vision today.

Smith wasn’t warning about government intervention in the market; he was warning about government capture.

A review of a "The Low Road," a “mordantly anti-Hamiltonian” play that made its debut at New York's Public Theater this spring.

On the origins of America's hegemonic foreign policy.

How Ibn Khaldun influenced the president and a generation of conservative tax policy.

Any attempt to understand the complexities of American economic thought without considering the significant role of religious beliefs is incomplete.

The key measure of a healthy economy has long been growth, yet if production and consumption expand at their current rate we risk the health of the planet.

New books examine the place of work in our lives—and how people throughout history have tried to change it.

Planning, market coordination, and the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933.

An intellectual history of inequality in economic theory reveals the ideological reasons behind the field’s resurgence in the last few decades.

American elites accepted the economic theory of "comparative advantage" mainly because it justified their geopolitical agenda.

The free market used to be touted as the cure for all our problems; now it’s taken to be the cause of them.

The proto-Taylorist methods of worker control Charles Babbage encoded into his calculating engines have origins in plantation management.