Book Review: The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are two non-religious books that have impacted the world in the last two and a half centuries, both dealing with economics that would result in dueling worldviews. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith was published the same year as the signing of the Declaration of Independence by the nation that would be his “champion” in the 20th century.

The predominate economic thought of the 18th century was mercantilism that sought to maximize exports and minimize imports to accumulate resources, i.e. money. Yet Smith viewed this theory and the French theory that focused solely on land value as inadequate for the growing Industrial Revolution that is just commencing, and this his magnum opus was a paradigm shift for economics. However, for many of certain of today’s defenders and proponents of Smith, they claim fly in the face of the author’s actual words including the very lauded phrase “invisible hand”. But even as Smith’s defenders twist his words, some of his detractors overlook many of his passages that support their critiques of him or what is thought he says by those who use his words out of context. Though this is primarily a philosophical treatise on economics that doesn’t stop Smith from revealing his antislavery views as well as his belief that competition in religion would lead to a more tolerate government—this later point would influence James Madison and the separation of church and state. While these two non-economic points were interwoven within the text as a way to emphasize Smith’s economic arguments, Smith’s use of economic data—or overabundant use—was detrimental to the book especially in his digressions and in the last chapter of Book V when covering Public Debt when he went over the history of England/Great Britain’s debt he could have literally halved the section and had a stronger argument to end his treatise. Smith’s very readable treatise comes in at over 1200 pages in this edition and there are many chapters that like the chapter on Public Debt could have been shortened and been just as, if not more, powerful in argument.

The Wealth of Nations is Adam Smith’s magnum opus that resulted in him becoming the “Father of Capitalism” and has been one of the most important economic books of all time, along with Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and the world has been debating his work ever since.

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