Alternate title: “Die Adam Smith Probleme, nine honorable mentions”

My work-in-progress “Die Adam Smith Probleme“, which I am now co-authoring with Salim Rashid, surveys a wide variety of unresolved mysteries surrounding the life and work of Adam Smith. As it happens, however, typing the words “another Adam Smith problem” (with the quotation marks) into Google Scholar’s search engine generates only nine results: one book, two book chapters, and six research articles. (Hey, at least nine hits are better than none!) The book is Mike Hill and Warren Montag’s The Other Adam Smith: Popular Contention, Commercial Society, and the Birth of Necro-Economics (Stanford U Press, 2014), which is available here via Amazon, where the authors note: “… the first problem one encounters in writing on Adam Smith is the sheer volume and diversity of extant interpretations [of Smith’s works]”. (See Hill & Warren 2014, p. 7, footnote omitted.) The remaining works — two book chapters and six scholarly papers — are as follows (in alphabetical order, by author):

1. Lauren Brubaker, “Does the ‘wisdom of nature’ need help”, in Leonidas Montes & Eric Schliesser, editors, New Voices on Adam Smith (Routledge, 2006), pp. 168-192, which is partially available here. Alas, this book chapter citation is a false positive, for Brubaker (2006, p. 177) writes, “I do not claim to have discovered yet another Adam Smith problem”, so we can exclude her work from my collection of Adam Smith problems.
2. Robert L. Heilbroner, “The socialization of the individual in Adam Smith”, History of Political Economy, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1982), pp. 427-439, available here. Professor Heilbroner’s Adam Smith problem is “the question of whether a virtuous society, not merely a viable one, can be constituted from the socio-psychological premises on which Smith builds both books”, i.e. Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations. See Heilbroner 1982, p. 427. Say what? I have no idea what that quotation even means!
3. Kwangsu Kim, “New light on Adam Smith’s view of taxation via the concept of equity”, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought (published online 24 June 2023), pp. 1-24, available here. Again, we have another false positive, for Kim argues — contra the conventional view — that there are, in fact, no inconsistencies in Smith’s four maxims of taxation: equality, certainty, convenience, and economy. Really?
4. Catherine Labio, “The solution is in the text: a survey of the recent literary turn in Adam Smith studies”, The Adam Smith Review, Vol. 2 (2006), pp. 151-176, the first four pages of which are available here. Sadly, the rest of this 2006 article is gated (seriously?), nor is it available at my university library, so I have requested a copy via an inter-library loan.
5. Kevin Quinn, “Losing the world: another Adam Smith problem”, Journal of Economics and Politics, Vol. 20, No. 1 (2012), pp. 84-92, available here. Professor Quinn’s Adam Smith problem is “how to reconcile the existence of [human memory and public realm] in the earlier book [Theory of Moral Sentiments] with its disappearance in the latter [Wealth of Nations].” Hmmm.
6. Hisanori Tsuge, “‘Citizen’ and ‘Man of Virtue’: Another ‘Adam Smith Problem’,” Ethica, Vol. 16 (2023), pp. 27-50, available here (in Japanese). [柘植, 尚則],〈市民〉と〈有徳な人〉 : もう一つの「アダム・スミス問題」, エティカ, 16 (2023), 27-50.] From what I can tell, Prof Tsuge’s Adam Smith problem — what Tsuge refers to as “Problem #2” or とにしたい2 — is the distinction between the “citizen” and the “man of virtue” in the works of Smith; specifically, how does a “citizen” become “virtuous”? Sounds a lot like Heilbroner’s Adam Smith problem.
7. A. M. C. Waterman, “Is there another, quite different, ‘Adam Smith problem’?”, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Vol. 36, No. 4 (2014), pp. 401-420, available here. In brief, Prof Waterman’s Adam Smith problem is the existence of an “irreconcilable contradiction” in Book 1 of Smith’s Wealth of the Nations, a contradiction between Smith’s description of the division of labor and one of the assumptions of Smith’s theory of price. Okay?
8. Amos Witztum, “Division of labour, wealth, and behaviour in Adam Smith”, in Pier Luigi Porta, Roberto Scazzieri, & Andrew Skinner, editors, Knowledge, Social Institutions, and the Division of Labour (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2001), pp. 137-152. Unfortunately, this book chapter is not only gated even though it was published over 20 years ago (jeesh!); the obscure book in which it appears is not available at my university library, so I have requested a copy via an inter-library loan.

To sum up, two of the Google Scholar hits are false positives (the papers by Brubaker and Kim), two are gated (the works by Labio and Witzum), while the remaining five works (the book by Hill & Warren and the contributions by Heilbroner, Quinn, Tsuge, and Waterman) present five different “Adam Smith problems” that may merit further investigation. All nine works are new to me, so I will have more to say about them soon — once I obtain complete copies of the two gated articles — and I will also add them to “Die Adam Smith Probleme“.