Happy Monday! Now that we have concluded my detailed chapter-by-chapter survey of The Wealth of Nations (see my post from 11 April), I want to conclude this extended series of elaborate blog posts — by my count, 78 substantive posts in all, not including my 20 additional posts on Book IV, Chapter 2 from around this time last year! — on a more general and personal note by sharing what Adam Smith and his magnum opus mean to me. Smith scholar Maria Pia Paganelli once wrote, “We pose questions to Adam Smith. And he still answers, even if both the questions and answers change over time.” [1] I, however, think it’s the other way around: Adam Smith poses questions and problems to us, and he leaves it up to us to provide our own answers. And on this note, my colleague and friend Salim Rashid and I have both been collaborating on a new project, which is now tentatively-titled Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics, and Society (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), in which we explore some of the many questions, open problems, and unresolved mysteries that Smith poses to us today, not just in The Wealth of Nations, but also in his other great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as well as in the two books he was purportedly working on his entire life but never published — one on jurisprudence, the other on the arts. Starting tomorrow, then, I will begin a new series of blog posts in which I explore the most important questions that Adam Smith poses to us today. In the meantime, help us pick out a book cover.

[1] Paganelli, M. (2015). Recent engagements with Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment. History of Political Economy, 47(3): 363–394, p. 363