INTRODUCTION

There now exists something approaching a cottage industry of authors attempting to detail “what Adam Smith really meant”. His text provides the most reliable insights into his thinking, but on its own it can only take us some of the way towards his innermost thoughts. To get the whole way would require explanations of the relationship between the content of his work, the specific context in which it was written and why his ideas were being propelled in a certain direction at a certain moment in time. Such an account could only have come from his own hand, but unfortunately these were not reflections that he left for his subsequent interpreters to mull over. Meanwhile, almost all generations since Smith’s death in 1790 have put him to work trying to solve their problems as opposed to his. The Wealth of Nations is, after all, a famously open-ended book that permits multiple readings (Rothschild 2001). It acts almost as an invitation to read your own perspective into its pages, allowing later generations to persuade themselves that they have found there what they specifically set out to look for (Tribe 1999). Yet this means that they are positing a Smith of their own creation and not necessarily citing faithfully what he committed to the page in his own words.