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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
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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*Smith in the City* update
I forgot to mention that I have been making some substantial revisions to my paper “Adam Smith in the City of Lights”. Below is my revised introduction: The general outline of Adam Smith’s grand tour has been retold many times, … Continue reading
Das Adam Smith Metaproblem?
I presented Die Adam Smith Probleme — a burgeoning work-in-progress that I have co-authored with Salim Rashid, who wrote The Myth of Adam Smith (available here) — at a special joint session of the History of Economics Society (HES) and … Continue reading
*The Friedman Doctrine Revisited*
That is the title of my latest work-in-progress — a compilation of some of my previous blog posts on business ethics, along with some new material. Below is the abstract: In a brief digression in his best-selling book Capitalism and … Continue reading
