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Adam Smith and the division of labor: cure or curse?
The first three chapters of The Wealth of Nations (WN, I.i-iii) are devoted to the division of labor. Although Adam Smith will later have some bad things to say about the individual effects of the division of labor in Book … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, division-of-labor, Economics, History, Philosophy, Politics, specialization, the-wealth-of-nations
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Rousseau’s theory of original sin
As we saw in a previous post (see here), three passages in Rousseau’s Second Discourse may have resonated with a young Adam Smith. Yesterday, we saw the first of these three fragments; today, we will take a closer look at … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, original-sin, Property, rousseau, second-discourse
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Rousseau’s just-so story
Yesterday, I transcribed three separate passages from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Second Discourse, and I then asked: why would someone like Adam Smith have singled-out those three specific selections in his 1756 letter to the Edinburgh Review? For reference, Smith’s translation of … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, division-of-labor, History, just-so-story, Philosophy, rousseau
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Three passages in Rousseau’s Second Discourse that may have resonated with a young Adam Smith
I will begin my survey of Jean-Jacques Rousseau below the fold with three not-so-random fragments or extracts from his celebrated Second Discourse:
Adam Smith counterfactual
A counterfactual is a statement about what would have happened if a past event had been different. It’s a “what if?” scenario, considering an alternative reality where something that actually occurred did not, or vice versa. On this note, below … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, cognitive-dissonance, commissioner-of-customs, Economics, History
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The Lost Year
Below is an excerpt from Chapter 6 (“Adam Smith’s Lost Year: 1747”) of my forthcoming survey of open Adam Smith problems with Salim Rashid (footnotes are below the fold): “There is a small but significant gap in Adam Smith’s biography: … Continue reading
Another Adam Smith problem: Arthur Cole’s puzzle
What is “Arthur Cole’s puzzle”? This enigma refers to an obscure but curious Adam Smith problem identified by Arthur H. Cole (pictured here), an economic historian at Harvard and the head librarian of the Harvard Business School back in the … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, arthur-h-cole, history-of-economic-thought
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Mapping the salons of pre-revolutionary Paris
In our previous post, Alain Alcouffe and I mentioned that we would be using an 18th-century map of Paris, the Plan de Turgot (a reproduction of which is pictured below in its final assembled form), to map Adam Smith’s proximity … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, france, pre-revolutionary-paris, salons, Travel
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Adam Smith and the Countess of Boufflers
(Author’s note: below is Part 3 of my series of blog posts on Adam Smith’s second visit to Paris.) I never saw so much wit, grace, and beauty united in one person. Mme de Boufflers, at the age of thirty, … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, comtesse-de-boufflers, History, Philosophy, pre-revolutionary-paris
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A provocative Parisian pamphlet
(Author’s note: below is Part 3 of 3 of my series of blog posts on Adam Smith’s first visit to Paris.) The pamphlet, Richesses de l’etat, took Paris by storm and stirred up an enormous debate about royal finances. (Darnton … Continue reading
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Tagged adam-smith, Economics, finance, History, Paris, Politics, roussel-de-la-tour, taxation
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prior probability 