Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from the last chapter (Ch. 13) of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold.)

“Which questions should we pose to Adam Smith, and which questions remain open or unanswered? Or is it the other way around? After all, as we have seen throughout the pages of this book, it is Adam Smith who still poses questions to us, and it is Smith who leaves it up to us to provide our own answers. We conclude, then, with the most difficult and contested open question of all, Das Legacy Problem. Who was Adam Smith, really? How should he be remembered? What is his true legacy?

“The deeper we dig into Smith’s life and work, the more surprises and contradictions we continue to find. He was a college dropout —but why did he drop out? He was a freelance lecturer — but where are those lectures? He is often described as an absent-minded college professor — but was he really all that absent-minded or was it just an act? He was also a tireless university administrator and general busybody — so how did Smith juggle his teaching and administrative duties? He was a jurisprude and doctor of law — yet he never practiced law, did he? He was an advisor to statesmen — yet his advice was never taken in his lifetime, was it? He was a tourist and tutor — but why give up his professorship? He was a solitary author — but how much of his Wealth of Nations did he borrow and how much did he steal? And he was a customs officer —cognitive dissonance, anyone? Doctor Smith was and did many things, all of which poses many more questions than answers.[1]

“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.[2] But we also have a nagging suspicion that none of these various pigeonholes or sundry labels can 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,[3] 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.[4] 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 (2024): ‘what is the point of any of this if we are not willing to debate things through?'”[5]

[1] For reference, we include a compendium of our set of still open Adam Smith problems at the end of this chapter. See Table 13.1.

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

[3] See generally Norman 2018.

[4] Adam Smith not only wrote about these many different topics and fields, he made major contributions to them. The polymath Tyler Cowen (2023, pp. 289-290) goes as far as to say that the Scottish scholar “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.

[5] 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.”