On the Wealth of Nations Read Online Free PDF

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    Smith set out to discern how systems of morality, economics, and government arise and how, by comprehending the way these systems work, people could better their ethical, material, and political conditions. It was a splendid opportunity to be a blowhard. Consider a recent thinker – a Herbert Marcuse, a Newt Gingrich, an Al Franken – launching into the subject. Fortunately Adam Smith had the Enlightenment's knack for posing deep thoughts without making us cringe. His secret was to be an idealist but to not take that impertinent and annoying next step of being a visionary. Smith didn't presume to have a 'blueprint for society' and did presume that the ignorant and incompetent builders of society – he and the rest of us – couldn't follow one anyway. 'To expect, indeed,' he wrote in
Wealth,
'that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it.' 1
    Smith chose his absurdity comparisons with an eye to the Newt Gingriches and the too visionary visions that preceded the Enlightenment. Utopia was Thomas More's sixteenth-century made-up island with people living communally and all property held in common, its name a pun on the Greek words
eutopos
and
outopos,
'a good place' and 'no place'. Oceana was a similar locale, concocted a hundred years later by JamesHarrington who mooted even more unlikely social policies such as elimination of agricultural subsidies for rich farmers and term limits. The eleventh edition of
The Encyclopaedia Britannica
calls Harrington's book,
Oceana,
'irretrievably dull'.
    The writings of Adam Smith are never irretrievably so. In book 3 of
The Wealth of Nations
there's a twenty-page passage on the Corn Laws that is a trial to read. But at the end one's fugitive attention is caught and brought back by the charm of Smith's humility in postulating an ideal. He denounced the Corn Laws, the British prohibitions on the export of grain, as the crass inequity they were (and would prove to be when they starved my family out of Rosscommon seventy years later). Then Smith
didn't
proceed with the rant that we now expect from people who feel themselves to be, a little too obviously, in the right. Instead, Smith – keeping the inevitable follies of politics in mind – came to a humble conclusion: 'We may perhaps say of [them] what was said of the laws of Solon, that, though not the best in themselves, [they are] the best which the interests, prejudices, and temper of the times would admit of.' 2
    Without this humility, reading in Adam Smith's philosophical project would be as grim as living in Kim Jong Il's philosophical project, North Korea. Smith's humble attitude extended beyond the ideal to ideas themselves, to his
amour propre
. In an early essay, 'The History of Astronomy', Smith wrote that he was 'endeavouring to represent all philosophical systems as mere inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phenomenaof nature.' 3 He went on to chastise himself for agreeing too much with Sir Isaac Newton's physics, making 'use of language expressing [their] connecting principles … as if they were the real chains which Nature makes use of to bind together her several operations.' 4 It would take, literally, an Einstein to show how right Smith was.
    Adam Smith intended to publish three 'inventions of the imagination':
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Wealth of Nations,
and a third on jurisprudence, that is, on those most inventive and imaginary connections, law and government. The last was never finished, and just before Smith died he had his notes and drafts burned. Perhaps with reason. Many of Smith's ideas about law and government are apparent in
Moral Sentiments
and
Wealth
. The students' notes recording the lectures he gave on jurisprudence in the 1760s do not add much to the sum of Smith's thinking. Let us