More than 245 years ago, an unassuming Scottish tutor to a young British duke published a sprawling manuscript about how, when, and why nations become materially prosperous. At first glance, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations might not have seemed likely to become an intellectual landmark. To call it wide-ranging is an understatement; the opposite of a tightly focused, logical argument, its five volumes and 1,000-plus pages range over everything from the problems with apprenticeship to the origins of money to the “discouragement of agriculture in the ancient state of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.”
Adam Smith, its author, looked skeptically at the mercantile policies of the European crowns, with their focus on accumulating silver and gold. But he also viewed the rising merchant class as suspect, not believing its unctuous claims to act in the public good. The Wealth of Nations is replete with contradictory ideas; in this, the book is a bit like the social and economic order that it would help shepherd into being.
But by the late twentieth century, Smith’s ideas would become fully adopted by the right—especially by libertarians and free-market conservatives. The full complexity of his thinking was reduced to the catchphrase “the invisible hand,” even though (as intellectual historian Emma Rothschild has noted) the words appeared just a few times in his entire corpus of work, and only once in The Wealth of Nations. Thanks to Milton Friedman—who enjoyed sporting a necktie emblazoned with cameo portraits of Smith—Smith’s ideas became synonymous with free-market capitalism, even though, as many Smith scholars have observed, the thinker himself was much more ambivalent toward laissez-faire than Friedman would suggest.
How did this happen? How did Smith’s ideas become so thoroughly integrated into conservative defenses of the free market against regulation? And are these the only ways of reading his work? These are the questions at the heart of Adam Smith’s America, Glory M. Liu’s intriguing account of Smith’s reception in the United States. Her capacious monograph demonstrates the variety of uses to which Smith’s work has been put since its publication in the late eighteenth century, showing how politically contested readings of Smith always have been. In so doing, she illustrates a broader point still: The vision of the free market that emerged in the late twentieth century is itself highly specific to our historical moment—it was not the way that people (even economists) thought about economic life before and likely not the only way they will conceive of it in the future.
