Sixteen different editions of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations are located within.

Adam Smith is well recognized as the forefather of modern economics, but his success can be attributed not only to what he wrote but also to his use of language. In this exciting new book, Willie Henderson shows how Smith engaged creatively in writing about the economy, and analyzes the extent to which he tried to ensure that the reader is drawn into the text and informed by it. Demonstrating analysis methods that are helpful to new researchers on Smith's works, Evaluating Adam Smith sets his work in the cultural context of the eighteenth century and explores the lexical and conceptual inter-relations between Smith and the sources he consulted. Issues explored include Smith's use of irony and his work in the context of wealth, virtue and happiness as presented in the Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations. Henderson's informative study employs the literary techniques of close reading and close textual analysis and applies them to sustained passages of Smith's writing.

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations continues to be an important and relevant reference for modern economists. This collection of essays commemorates the bicentenary of the publication of that book. Most of the papers were delivered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in early 1976 as the Harry Girvetz Memorial Lectures. Many of the papers are innovative in character. They stress Smith's consideration of and attention to the historical and political elements in economics. Each chapter illuminates a different aspect or impact of Smith's theory. Together these papers reassess one of the most important books in western intellectual history and in the history of economics.

Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and was strongly influenced by his critique. In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith's sympathy with Rousseau's concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend commercial society against these charges. These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmatic in nature, not ideological: it was Smith's view that, all things considered, commercial society offered more benefits than the alternatives. Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith's approach can be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons of commercial society today and thus contributes to a debate that is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.

As one of the first titles in Atlantic Monthly Press' "Books That Changed the World" series, America's most provocative satirist, P. J. O'Rourke, reads Adam Smith's revolutionary The Wealth of Nations so you don't have to. Recognized almost instantly on its publication in 1776 as the fundamental work of economics, The Wealth of Nations was also recognized as really long:  the original edition totaled over nine hundred pages in two volumes--including the blockbuster sixty-seven-page "digression concerning the variations in the value of silver during the course of the last four centuries," which, "to those uninterested in the historiography of currency supply, is like reading Modern Maturity in Urdu." Although daunting, Smith's tome is still essential to understanding such current hot-topics as outsourcing, trade imbalances, and Angelina Jolie. In this hilarious, approachable, and insightful examination of Smith and his groundbreaking work, P. J. puts his trademark wit to good use, and shows us why Smith is still relevant, why what seems obvious now was once revolutionary, and why the pursuit of self-interest is so important.

Guided by the thoughts of Alexis de Tocqueville, Samuel Gregg's The Commercial Society identifies and explores the key foundational elements that must exist within a society for commercial order to take root and flourish. Gregg studies the challenges that have consistently impeded and occasionally undermined commercial order.

Since 2008, profound questions have been asked about the driving forces and self-regulating potential of the economic system, political control and morality. With opinion turning against markets and self-interest, economists found themselves on the wrong side of the argument. This book explores how the past of economics can contribute to today's debates. The book considers how economics took shape as philosophers probed into the viability of commercial society and its potential to generate positive-sum outcomes. It explains how dreams of affluence, morality and happiness were built upon human greed and vanity. It covers the bumpy road of the construction and reconstruction of this dream, exploring the debate on the foundations, conditions and limitations of the idea of the social utility of greed and vanity. Revisiting this debate provides a rich source of ideas in rethinking economics and the basic beliefs concerning our economic system today.

Looks at all aspects of the pivotal intellectual relationship between two key figures of the Enlightenment This collection brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau scholars to explore the key shared concerns of these two great thinkers in politics, philosophy, economics, history and literature. Rousseau (1712-78) and Smith (1723-90) are two of the foremost thinkers of the European Enlightenment. They both made seminal contributions to moral and political philosophy and shaped some of the key concepts of modern political economy. Among Smith's first published works was a letter to the Edinburgh Review where he discusses Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Smith continued to engage with Rousseau's work and to explore many shared themes such as sympathy, political economy, sentiment and inequality. Though we have no solid evidence that they met in person, we do know that they shared many friends and interlocutors. In particular, David Hume was Smith's closest intellectual associate and was also the one who arranged for Rousseau's stay in England in 1766.

This book explores, through an ethnographic examination of life stories of wealthy men, a historical analysis of the moral meanings of wealth and power in Western capitalism, and a mapping of different symbolic spaces in contemporary American culture.