![]() This Adam Smith is seen not as the apostle of the free market but as one of the fathers of the French Revolution, albeit the nicer, warmer bits of the French Revolution. ![]() Yet a very different Smith is current in the academy. He is to most of us the invisible-hand guy, the Scottish face on the British twenty-pound note-the one who showed that greed was good, that the market, left to its own devices, would always set the right price and favor the right goods, Milton Friedman in a kilt. Why do classical economists believe that free trade is good for everyone? Why does the amount of gold kept in the treasury not make much difference to a country’s wealth? Why don’t better machines for making pins eliminate jobs for good, instead of making more jobs of another kind? Why, for that matter, does it not matter whether we’re productive in farming or manufacturing so long as we’re productive? What does productivity even mean? Complex ideas-the division of labor, the advantages of trade-become lucid to the non-economist for the first, and perhaps last, time.īut where Gibbon is a clear figure in shadowy light, a figure of the Enlightenment who found his place in the twilight of history where reason fell, Adam Smith is a shadowy figure in clear light. ![]() Gibbon’s is still a model of the tone with which truly enlightened history is written Smith’s is still the best account of the foundations of market economics. Then, a month later, his friend Adam Smith published his big book, “The Wealth of Nations,” which put an end to any attempted defense of the mercantile system of colonial dependence on a mother country.Ĭlassics of English prose, Gibbon’s and Smith’s books don’t just belong to the history of ideas they helped establish the ideas of history and economics. In February, Edward Gibbon published the first volume of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” which included the hymn to Roman republican virtues and the great chapter explaining the rise of Christianity in terms of men, not miracles. Our own big-deal Declaration was, in its way, the small pugnacious summary of Enlightenment ideas that had reached their apex that winter, in London. It was also a big year for good ideas, an even rarer one. Smith’s favored words were “active” and “productive.” Illustration by David Hughesġ776 was a good year for big ideas, a rare thing.
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