The central core of the work of Adam Smith is identified here, with particular reference to his own words. His argumentation is full of surprises and paradoxes, and it offers key insights for sociology, especially as it allows us to better understand key features of the modern world.

This article examines the issue of prices from a sociological standpoint. We show that, contrary to popular belief, price setting is always the result of social practices. We identify two main perspectives in the relevant literature. The first deals with the central notion of quality: price setting is a matter of judgement, arbitration and equipment. The second focuses on measurement practices, such as valuation and pricing, which occur before or during the transaction. These two complementary perspectives reveal a variety of processes that both determine prices and can be used to construct a typology based on two criteria: the moment of price setting, and the level of competition. Four different types of pricing mechanisms are distinguished: self-regulated, administered, composed, and bargained. We use examples to describe these different pricing types, and to show how such an approach contributes to our understanding of the economy.

Until the 19th century, the UK state stayed out of education. Only in 1833 would Parliament first pass an act that subsidized education for the poor. By 1914, 160 education acts had been passed, consolidating into the state schooling system we recognize today. This paper seeks to explain this remarkable progression. I argue that the emergence of social-knowledge institutions across the West was a powerful force of cultural construction. What I term social scientization, this process was multidimensional and translocal, entailing the elaboration, reification, and diffusion of functionalist theories of the nation-state that centered national education as means to greater cultural rationalization. Longitudinal analyses on comprehensive population data comprising over 10,100 UK parliamentary acts support the core historical insight of this piece: increasingly routine and aggressive forms of state intervention in education were the progressive instantiation of the 19th-century nation-state model, which was fundamentally epistemic in character and inextricably linked to the expansive cultural content of the ascendant social sciences.

In 1963, a young French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, together with two assistants—Luc Boltanski and Jean-Claude Chamboredon—conducted the first sociological study of the credit practices of a major French bank, entitled “The Bank and Its Customers”. This article discusses the context, the findings and the legacy of this study. First, the article sketches the landscape of the emerging mass credit market in France in the early 1960s. Then, the paper summarizes and analyses the report itself. We also demonstrate how bank-customer interactions and credit continued to be a subject of interest for Bourdieu throughout his subsequent career. Finally, the paper seeks to contribute to comparative research on the varieties of national configurations of private indebtedness in relation to the level of development of the welfare state.