MoneyWeek book review: Adam Smith and the pursuit of perfect liberty
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Adam Smith’s theories are often quoted to make sense of the modern world, so it’s a shame this new book sheds no fresh light on his legacy
More than two centuries after his death, Adam Smith remains a much fought-over philosopher, as James Buchan notes in the introduction to his new biography. Both free-marketers such as Margaret Thatcher and modern socialists like Gordon Brown have claimed to be the true inheritors of his legacy and have quoted Smith in defence of their reforms. Diverse thinkers from Karl Marx to Thomas Paine have been influenced by his ideas. But Buchan believes that all of these followers are wrong: they are guilty of kidnapping Smith, he says, and trying to twist his writings for their own ends. In Adam Smith he sets out to show that Smith was a very different figure to the man depicted by any of his professed successors.
It’s a laudable effort, but unfortunately the book falls short. Although Buchan scornfully dismisses Alan Greenspan’s appraisal of Smith as a towering contributor to the development of modern free-market capitalism, Smith’s work is clearly at least a partial endorsement of these ideas. For example, in a lecture twenty-five years before the publication of his most famous book, the Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that “little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice”. But equally, he was no radical anti-statist, supporting government provision of security, public services, infrastructure and education.
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Given this ambiguity, a genuinely unbiased appraisal of the full range of Smith’s ideas would have been highly interesting. But Buchan quickly swerves off-course in pursuit of a shadowy, ill-defined argument that Smith was much more than an economist and that the ideas that we associate with him were just part of a much broader, even more ambitious enterprise.
On the first point, there is little dispute: his carefully observed writings show that Smith was an economist-philosopher-psychologist and more besides. But this does not make him unique – many other giants of economics, such as John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes, are notable for the range of their interests and their concern with the real world, in contrast to the narrow theorising of most who work in the field today. Meanwhile, the argument that what we have from Smith are just fragments of what he would have written, given time, is irrelevant in assessing his legacy. Since the remainder of his grand plan will never be completed, speculating as to what he might have said is a pointless exercise. Ultimately, Buchan has produced a short, elegant biography, but certainly not the major re-examination of Smith that he initially promises.
Adam Smith and the Pursuit of Perfect Liberty by James Buchan is published by Profile and costs £14.99
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