Below is the epilogue to my forthcoming survey of open Adam Smith problems with Salim Rashid (footnotes are below the fold):

“We conclude our work with, perhaps, the most difficult and contested open questions of all: who was Adam Smith, really? How should he be remembered? What is his true legacy? Are his ideas and writings still relevant today? For our part, given Smith’s many foundational contributions to the fields of moral philosophy and political economy, we are tempted to see Smith as the world’s first (and perhaps only) moral economist.[1] But the deeper we dig into Smith’s life and work, the more surprises and contradictions we continue to find: college dropout (but why did he drop out?), freelance lecturer (but where are those lectures?), absent-minded college professor (was he really absent-minded or was it just an act?), competent university administrator (how did Smith juggle his teaching and administrative duties?), jurisprude and doctor of law (yet he never practiced law, did he? [*]), advisor to statesmen (yet his advice was never taken, was it?), tourist and tutor (but why give up his professorship?), solitary author (but how much of his Wealth of Nations did he borrow and how much did he steal?), and customs officer (cognitive dissonance, anyone?). Doctor Smith was and did many things (all of which pose many more questions than answers).

“At the same time, we have a nagging suspicion that none of these various pigeonholes or sundry labels truly capture the many-sidedness of Adam Smith. We therefore conclude with the following conjecture: what if we have been getting Smith and his legacy completely wrong all along? After all, although Adam Smith is credited with creating an entirely new discipline,[2] his writings extend far beyond political economy and moral philosophy, for he thought about and contributed fresh insights to such diverse fields as education, history, law, linguistics, logic, politics, religion, rhetoric, taxation, and the arts.[3] Given this multiplicity of intellectual pursuits, how did the flesh-and-blood Adam Smith see himself? Was it not, first and foremost, as a man of letters, a prose poet? For us, Smith’s love of language and les belles lettres is the golden thread that unifies the many-sidedness of Smith’s life and works. Perhaps we are wrong, but in the words of our colleague and friend Paul Sagar: ‘what is the point of any of this if we are not willing to debate things through?’”[4]  

[1] Cf. Liu 2022, pp. 284-285 (introducing the concept of a “moral economy”).

[*] Although Smith never practiced law as a profession, as my colleague, co-author, and friend Alain Alcouffe has pointed out to me, Smith did play a small role in the Douglas cause, a celebrated inheritance dispute that unfolded during the 1760s (see here). More specifically, in October of 1765 Smith took the deposition of his friend, the Abbé Colbert de Castlehill.

[2] See generally Norman 2018. Cf. Raich & Roy 2023, p. 117: “While today’s world looks radically different to Smith’s time, we continue to learn much from his thinking and approach. Most of all his unwavering commitment to evidence and respectful discourse.”

[3] Smith not only wrote about these many different topics and fields, he made major contributions to them. Cf. Cowen (2023, pp. 289-290), for example, the Scottish philosopher “developed an approach to education and political philosophy that merits comparison with Plato, Tocqueville, and other world-historic thinkers on these topics.” See also Raich & Roy 2023, p. 112.

[4] Sagar 2024.