Rather than pondering the local contexts of their own thought, thinkers more typically project themselves into the thoughts of those who lived before them, often long before them. From these encounters, much misreading and misunderstanding follows—but so, through creative appropriation, does much insight. The history of ideas chugs along.
That there is much to learn from these encounters, something different from what debating what Adam Smith really meant, is the premise of “reception history.” Glory Liu’s careful study of the role played by Smith in American intellectual life over the centuries, Adam Smith’s America, is an exemplary version of this genre of intellectual history, joining such notable studies as Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche (2011), Emily Jones’s Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1930–1914 (2017), and Claire Rydell Arcenas’s America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life (2022). (A much-anticipated study of Marx’s reception in the United States, by Andrew Hartman, is forthcoming.)
Liu presents Smith’s reception history as a unique window into what she calls the nation’s “politics of political economy.” She is right, but in some cases there is more to say about the contexts in which reception takes place than she lets on. As it happens, one of the greatest lessons of Smith’s work itself is that we too often ignore local context at our peril.
Smith published The Wealth of Nations the same year Americans signed the Declaration of Independence. Despite the uncanny coincidence of the date, there was not enough time for Smith’s book to have influenced the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton read Smith, who loomed over post-Revolutionary political economic debates, but not all that large. In the next chapter of Smith’s budding influence, early U.S. colleges used The Wealth of Nations as a textbook in their first courses in political economy. Then, over the nineteenth century, Smith commonly cropped up in public debates about the merits of U.S. industrial trade protection. Free traders cited Smith as their ally.
Smith was not yet a major figure. Still, Liu uncovers a noteworthy pattern. Those who leveraged Smith’s argument on behalf of free trade held it out as a universal truth—hard-won by a science of “political economy,” whose firm foundations Smith had set. Their antagonists did not dismiss The Wealth of Nations. Instead, they asserted that Smith, great though he was, was a thinker of his own times who must be read in historical context. In this instance, his criticisms of eighteenth-century British “mercantilist” trade policy did not directly translate into a convincing criticism of the nineteenth-century U.S. industrial trade tariff.
