Research
Book: Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish philosopher became an icon of American capitalism. (Princeton University Press, 2022)
Book Preview (Table of Contents, Introduction)
Originally published in 1776, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was lauded by America’s founders as a landmark work of Enlightenment thinking about national wealth, statecraft, and moral virtue. Today, Smith is one of the most influential icons of economic thought in America. This book traces how generations of Americans have read, reinterpreted, and weaponized Smith’s ideas, revealing how his popular image as a champion of American-style capitalism and free markets is a historical invention.
Drawing on a trove of illuminating archival materials, Adam Smith’s America tells the story of how an unassuming Scottish philosopher captured the American imagination and played a leading role in shaping American economic and political ideas. It shows how Smith became known as the father of political economy in the nineteenth century and was firmly associated with free trade, and how, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the Chicago School of Economics transformed him into the preeminent theorist of self-interest and the miracle of free markets. It also explores how a new generation of political theorists and public intellectuals has sought to recover Smith’s original intentions and restore his reputation as a moral philosopher.
Charting the enduring fascination that this humble philosopher from Scotland has held for American readers over more than two centuries, Adam Smith’s America shows how Smith continues to be a vehicle for articulating perennial moral and political anxieties about modern capitalism.
Reviews/Awards
One of The Wall Street Journal’s Five Best Biographies of Economists
2023 PROSE Award Category Winner in Economics—Association of American Publishers
Modern Intellectual History—”Better to Receive Than to Give” (by Daniel Wickberg)
EH.net—Review by Lanny Ebenstein
The Boston Review— “The Localist” (by Jon Levy)
Global Intellectual History—(by Robin Douglass)
The New Republic—”The Betrayal of Adam Smith” (by Kim Phillips-Fein)
Foreign Policy—Why is Adam Smith Still So Popular?” (by Ashley Lester)
Tocqueville21—”Who is Adam Smith?” (by Zack Rauwald)
Law and Liberty—”Reintroducing Adam Smith” (by Jesse Russell)
TLS—”Makers of American Ideology” (by David Armitage)
The Wall Street Journal— “The Wealth of a Nation” (by Barton Swaim)
Slate Magazine—”Why the Philosophers Libertarians Love Always Come Out Worse for the Wear” (by Rebecca Brenner Graham)
The Stranger—”Adam Smith, The Worst Influencer” (by Adam Willems)
The New Statesman—”Decoding Adam Smith” (by Colin Kidd)
"Smith Scholarship: Past, Present, and Future”. In Interpreting Adam Smith: Critical Essays, ed. Paul Sagar. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
This article situates Smith scholarship in a long historical view. In doing so, it highlights the kaleidoscopic nature of reading and writing about Smith from the eighteenth century to the present. A brief survey of the early reception of Smith’s works in the anglophone world demonstrates how and why Smith was initially read as a practical resource before being transformed into an intellectual and political authority. Interpretive problems like “Das Adam Smith Problem” and the Chicago School Smith, introduced in the nineteenth and twentieth century, then became starting points for critical and revisionist historiography. With roots in the first wave of historical revisionist scholarship, contemporary scholarship has been marked by several distinctive features: an increasing interest in Smith as a philosophical thinker, the centrality of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, engagements with Smith to proliferate new defenses and critiques of liberalism, and the reformulation of older categories of analysis. I suggest that the ambiguity and contestability of Smith’s intentions as well as the slipperiness of the conceptual categories that he inspired has engendered shifting meanings, emergent problematics, and the enduring political relevance of his works and ideas.
The economist George Stigler. Photo courtesy of Stephen Stigler.
“Rethinking the Chicago Smith Problem: Adam Smith and the Chicago School, 1929-1980” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 17 no. 4 (2020), pp. 1041-1068.
Repudiating interpretations of Smith “as if he were a co-conspirer of Chicago-style thinking,” and attempting to “free [him] from a ‘reputation’ as a Chicago-style economics professor avant la lettre” continues to fuel much of revisionist Smith scholarship. This article challenges the idea that the “Chicago Smith” is simply a misinterpretation of Smith’s ideas. To that end, it reexamines the role that the Chicago School of economics played in developing and propounding a distinct vision of Adam Smith, not only within the profession of economics, but also for the broader American public in the twentieth century. My claim is that the readings, teachings, and interpretations of Smith from Chicago economists across different generations amount to more than just superficial symbolism, claims of intellectual authority, or rhetorical window-dressing. Rather, Chicago’s engagement with Smith’s ideas constitute important interpretative and substantive arguments about the essence of Smith’s contribution to economics and the role that Smith’s ideas could play in shaping public policy.
This paper examines the diversity of uses of Adam Smith’s ideas in nineteenth-century American debates about the tariff. Legislative debates about American trade policy ran almost uninterrupted from the 1820s to the end of the century; as a result, they provide an abundance of examples of the ways in which legislators marshaled economic ideas to shape political discourse and influence policy. Smith’s causal ideas about free trade and its effects were referenced in policymaking, and Smith’s intellectual authority was often invoked as a legitimating device for partisan ideology. These uses, I argue, contributed to the sloganizing of Smith as the “apostle of free trade” and his enduring popularity as a political icon in American politics.
"Deriving 'General Principles' in Adam Smith: The ubiquity of equilibrium and comparative statics analysis throughout his works" (With Barry Weingast) The Adam Smith Review vol. 12, pp. 134-165.
This paper contributes to the debate over the unity in Smith's corpus by emphasizing his pervasive use of an analytic method. Specifically, Smith consistently relies on equilibrium arguments to explain why a given pattern of economic, political, or social interaction is stable; and comparative static arguments to explain how a stable pattern changes. Our paper focuses on several examples central to his work: the political economics of development in the Wealth of Nations and the Lectures on Jurisprudence; the learning and of and adherence to moral norms in the Theory of Moral Sentiments; and the development and evolution of language in Smith’s essay on the “First Formation of Languages.” We argue that Smith’s analysis of patterns of central tendencies and “general rules”—equilibria—and the conditions under which those rules change are defining features of his “science of man.” Not only do they anticipate analytic modes in modern social science, Smith’s use of equilibrium and comparative statics arguments demonstrates how his approach to social science was exportable and applicable to many realms of human behavior beyond economics.
Working Paper: "What's the Matter with 'Inequality?' Evidence from Surveys."
What explains the gap between widening inequality and demands for redistribution? Empirical scholarship that seeks to explain this puzzle has often suggested that public opinion is either ill-informed about inequality, or too tolerant of it. This paper offers an alternative explanation by drawing on normative theory to inform the empirical study of American beliefs about inequality and fairness. What is objectionable about inequality, for the majority of Americans, is not simply the difference between the haves and have nots, but rather, that some people have too little or that opportunities to move up in society are unfair. To test these claims empirically, I draw on data from two original surveys. The first is an observational study that investigates whether Americans think poverty or inequality is more unfair. The second is an experimental study that leverages a conjoint survey design to tease out the extent to which three different objections to inequality inform American beliefs about fairness: a sufficientarian objection (not having enough), a limitarian objection (having too much), and what I call an “opportunitarian” objection (lack of opportunity for upward mobility). Two key conclusions can be made. First, when it comes to the fairness (or unfairness) of inequality, Americans’ evaluations stem from a plurality of values, some of which do not have strictly egalitarian bases; on average, Americans weigh concerns about sufficiency and opportunity much more than equality. Second, my findings reveal a heterogeneity of views that falls along partisan lines. Democrats and Republicans alike weigh sufficientarian concerns more than egalitarian ones, but Democrats tend to view greater inequality as unfair, while Republicans view it in the opposite way.
Working Paper: "Economic Ideas and Trade Policy." (with Judith Goldstein and Robert Gulotty)
This paper examines the conditions under which certain frameworks for understanding the nature of trade become salient in politics. Using computer-assisted techniques, we analyze a large corpus of "texts"--over half a million Congressional floor speeches directly related to trade and tariffs--across three key periods: 1870-1900, 1947-1960, and 1979-1991. Our findings suggest that the overwhelming majority of political discourse about trade falls into at least one of our three ideational frames: a market efficiency frame, a distributional frame, or an international competition frame. The changing weight of these frames over time illustrates how policy changes (i.e., towards greater trade liberalization) are not wholesale switches from policy to the other, but the result of the gradual adoption of one frame over time.
Other papers I’m writing…
Modern State Capacity in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (With Barry Weingast)
The Politics of the Excluded: The Political Thought of Wong Chin Foo (new working paper!)