Adam Smith - Jesse Norman

'A superb book' Financial Times, Books of the Year

Adam
Smith is now widely regarded as 'the father of modern economics' and
the most influential economist who ever lived. But what he really
thought, and what the implications of his ideas are, remain fiercely
contested. Was he an eloquent advocate of capitalism and the freedom of
the individual? Or a prime mover of 'market fundamentalism' and an
apologist for inequality and human selfishness? Or something else
entirely? Jesse Norman's brilliantly conceived \book gives us not just
Smith's economics, but his vastly wider intellectual project. Against
the turbulent backdrop of Enlightenment Scotland, it lays out a succinct
and highly engaging account of Smith's life and times, reviews his work
as a whole and traces his influence over the past two centuries.

But
this book is not only a biography. It dispels the myths and debunks the
caricatures that have grown up around Adam Smith. It explores Smith's
ideas in detail, from ethics to law to economics and government, and the
impact of those ideas on thinkers as diverse as Karl Marx, Charles
Darwin, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. Far from being simply
an economist, Adam Smith emerges as one of the founders of modern social
psychology and behavioural theory. Far from being a doctrinaire
'libertarian' or 'neoliberal' thinker, he offers a strikingly modern
evolutionary theory of political economy, which recognises the often
complementary roles of markets and the state.

At a time when
economics and politics are ever more polarized between left and right,
this book, by offering a Smithian analysis of contemporary markets,
predatory capitalism and the 2008 financial crash, returns us to first
principles and shows how the lost centre of modern public debate can be
recreated. Through Smith's work, it addresses crucial issues of
inequality, human dignity and exploitation; and it provides a compelling
explanation of why he remains central to any attempt to defend, reform
or renew the market system.