Dennis Rasmussen

He distrusts politicians, both their abilities and often even their intentions.

The Chicago School picked up a few aspects of Smith's thought and made it the whole of Smith's thought.

Prepare yourself for a tug of war.

There's raging debate in Smith scholarship among people who are sometimes called left Smithians and right Smithians.

OK, so the Chicago School picked up a few aspects of Smith's thought and made it the whole of Smith's thought.

They picked out the phrase the invisible hand, which he uses just two or three times in his writings, and made that the central feature of who Smith was.

To me, that's unfortunate.

I think one of the most valuable and interesting aspects of Smith's thought is precisely that he recognized the real potential drawbacks and dangers of commercial society, the ways that commerce can produce great inequalities, the ways that wealthy merchants and manufacturers collude against the public interest, and above all, the way that the desire for wealth often leads people to submit to

endless toil and anxiety in the pursuit of just frivolous material goods that will produce only fleeting satisfaction.

And so I think too many of the Chicago school thinkers, even today's self-proclaimed Smithians, read him as a mere apologist for commercial society, whereas I think he was anything but.

It's not that Smith didn't ultimately defend commercial society.

He absolutely did.

He's absolutely convinced that commercial societies...

faults, though real and important, are not nearly as numerous or as great as those of other forms of society.

That the security and liberty and prosperity that commercial societies make possible constitutes a real improvement over the alternatives.

My sense is the latter.

Smith isn't a particularly easy thinker to read or to understand.

I mean, he writes in English and it's modern English, so it can sometimes have the appearance of being very familiar and easy.

But to understand the nuance of his thought, you really have to spend some time with it.

I think most Smith scholars today would say that this problem isn't a problem, that the two are perfectly compatible.