It seems unlikely that the question [i.e. the charge of plagiarism against Adam Smith] can ever be answered for certain. (Keynes 1938, p. 43)

I will be presenting one of my works-in-progress, Die Adam Smith Probleme, at the next meeting of the International Adam Smith Society (IASS), which will take place at Waseda University in Tokyo next month. In this particular paper, which I am now honored to be co-authoring with a highly esteemed and much-cited Smith scholar (Salim Rashid), my co-author and I survey and discuss the many still unresolved mysteries surrounding the great Scottish philosopher — open questions about Adam Smith’s life and work that remain contested to this day — which is why the title of our new paper is the plural version of “Das Adam Smith Problem“. (For further details, see the chart in the post that I am reblogging below.)

To the point, Professor Rashid and I have been updating the original paper to include a new set of open and unresolved Adam Smith problems. Take, for example, Adam Smith’s famous example of a “pin factory”. In the words of my co-author (Rashid 1986, quoted in Peaucelle 2006, p. 489, available here), “It has been said of the first chapter of the Wealth of Nations, which deals with the division of labour, that it is beyond all comparison, the most popular chapter of the Wealth of Nations; no part of the work has been so often reprinted . . . no part of it is so commonly read by children, or so well remembered by them“. But did Adam Smith personally observe the factory or did he “develop his example from contemporary writings of his time” (Peaucelle 2006, p. 489), or to put it less delicately: did Smith, in fact, plagiarize from the great French Encyclopédie and other sources? (Paging my colleague and friend Brian Frye!) Stay tuned: in preparation for the IASS meeting in Tokyo, I will share many more Adam Smith problems in the days ahead.

Works Cited

Keynes, J. M. 1938. Review of W. R. Scott, Adam Smith as Student and Professor. Economic History, 4(13): 33-46.

Peaucelle, Jean-Louis. 2006. Adam Smith’s use of multiple references for his pin making example. European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 13(4): 489-512.

Rashid, Salim. 1986. Adam Smith and the division of labour: a historical view. Scottish Journal
of Political Economy, 33(3): 292-297.