INTRODUCTION

It is hopefully clear by now that “the market” is not something that can do anything to us of its own volition. It is not an essential being; it has no innate force that demands obedience; it does not ask us to think carefully about our preferences or tell us that we must satisfy its interests; it plays no active role in our lives in and of itself. It really is not a thing to which agential characteristics might be ascribed. And yet this is still the most likely image that is being created when appeal is made politically to “the market”. There remains, then, a tension between the market understood conceptually and “the market” understood ideologically. The absence or the presence of the inverted commas still does make a big difference. The objective of the final substantive chapter is to explore the extent to which this gap remains fundamentally unbridgeable by seeking to learn more about the political rhetoric of “the market” and how it is not always clear whether that rhetoric is being applied to something that most obviously reflects the conceptual or the ideological use of the word.

If the market concept as developed in economic theory provides no basis for saying that “the market” is something that does anything to anyone, there must still be something in it that has allowed this idea to become so prevalent. There might remain a jump, a big jump even, between the market concept and market ideology, but that jump must still appear to be navigable to at least some degree if market ideology is to resonate with people’s sense of what is going on in their everyday lives. That is, there might still be aspects of the market concept that anchor the images that are transmitted through the use of market ideology. It is very difficult to think that this something, whatever it is, relates to the descriptive market concept, where the market is understood as a physical marketplace with all the attendant personal interactions that bring such physical spaces to life in human experiences.

THE POWER OF “THE MARKET”

In May 1981 François Mitterrand was elected President of France, the first Socialist Party President of the Fifth Republic. The Socialists then gained a handsome parliamentary majority in a legislative election held just six weeks later, enabling Mitterrand to enact the radical programme for government on which he was elected. This was the so-called “Cent Dix Propositions pour la France” (Cole 1994: 35). The sixteenth to thirty-fifth propositions largely covered economic policy, attempting to create new sources of domestic demand that would lead to high levels of job creation. Mitterrand’s egalitarian instincts saw him use the tax system to redistribute income from the wealthiest to the least wealthy members of society. The real value of transfer payments rose significantly, the minimum wage likewise, workers were given the right to more paid leave and the length of the standard working week was capped at a much lower level than previously (Tiersky 2003: 133). The Socialist leader’s political popularity remained sufficiently strong for him to win the next presidential election in 1988 with a substantially enlarged majority, and the French electorate never voted down his reform programme. However, Mitterrand made a spectacular U-turn just two years into it, compelled to give up on his dream of a more equal society, it appeared, by pressure on the French franc making it more difficult for him to execute his European policy of ever deeper integration (Dyson & Featherstone 1998: 92; Callaghan 2000: 107; Parsons 2003: 170). So the conventional account of this episode has it, “the market” forced him into a significant change of heart.

In July 1997 the monetary authorities of Thailand decided to allow their country’s currency, the baht, to find its own price level on global foreign exchange markets. Later that month the monetary authorities of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and South Korea took exactly the same decision (Griffith-Jones 1998: 4).

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.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership was intended to be the cornerstone for a new multilateral trading system. The agreement would lower costs for firms doing business on both sides of the Atlantic. It would raise employment related to the trade in goods and services in Europe and the United States. And it would promote a new pattern of regulatory cooperation that would leverage the common values shared by Americans and Europeans to create binding standards for manufactured products, service provision, labour relationships, investment protection and conservation of the environment. In short, it was a deal that had something for everyone and offered few incentives for opposition from those who would be part of the agreement. Non-participating countries such as China might complain about the necessity for dealing with a Euro-American condominium, and yet the principals on both sides of the transatlantic partnership had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Paraphrasing the Scottish poet Robert Burns, “the best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray”. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership was not negotiated on “one tank of gas”, as US Trade Representative Michael Froman promised in July 2013. Instead, it languished in the shadows of the US-led Transpacific Partnership negotiations on the American side of the Atlantic, while confronting unexpected (and unexpectedly intense) opposition in Europe. Business leaders in large multinational corporations remained enthusiastic about the prospects for an agreement, and trade negotiators remained committed to fulfilling their brief. Nevertheless, the new partnership fell prey to a growing distrust of complex trade agreements, outright rejection of third-party arbitration, and a lingering sense that the dense web of trade and investment that makes up the global economy is not a good thing.

Events also conspired against the agreement. The June 2016 UK referendum vote to leave the European Union (EU) challenged fundamental assumptions about what a transatlantic partnership would mean. The US election of Donald Trump as 45th president the following November only deepened scepticism about the prospects for (and desirability of) agreement on both sides of the Atlantic.

Although European public opposition to TTIP has attracted the lion’s share of media and academic attention, the challenges of intra- and intergovernmental coordination, particularly in the US, contributed significantly to the limited progress of the TTIP negotiations prior to the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election. The challenges of coordination were particularly intense in the TTIP negotiations because of their focus on “behind-the-border” measures. The emphasis on regulatory cooperation required, at the very least, the engagement of regulators and sometimes state and local governments in the US and member-state and subnational governments in the EU. Addressing public procurement and subsidies crucially engaged subcentral governments. At the very least, the breadth of the agenda increased the number of actors that needed to be involved in the negotiations. The number and diversity of the governmental actors affected by the TTIP negotiations, therefore, presented substantial coordination problems.

These coordination problems were more acute in the US than in the EU. US regulators are more independent of central authority than their European counterparts, and US states are subject to fewer disciplines regarding government procurement and state aids than are EU member states. These institutional features impeded the US’s ability to make concessions sought by the EU. At the ratification stage, however, the EU’s multilevel polity asserts itself with a vengeance. TTIP would have had to be ratified by the EU as a mixed agreement, which would mean that European national and subnational legislatures would have to give their assent to it, in addition to the Council and the European Parliament (see Chapter 1). There would, thus, have been many veto players in the EU, which had the effect of amplifying the political implications of the popular opposition discussed in Chapter 5.

This chapter begins by describing how the ways that the EU and the US make regulatory policy mean that the US had greater horizontal coordination problems and it identifies how those problems have aff ected the TTIP negotiations. It then explores the vertical coordination problems experienced in the US and the EU, including a discussion of the likely ratification process in the EU and how that heightened the policy significance of popular opposition.

Traditional trade negotiations centre on exchanges of market access: one jurisdiction offers improved access to its own market in some areas in exchange for greater access to the other jurisdiction’s market in others. As discussed in Chapter 3, such reciprocal negotiations have both domestic and international political implications. Domestically, it is suggested that the primary contestation should be between export-oriented firms (and their workers), which support domestic liberalization affecting others in order to secure greater foreign market access for themselves, and import-competing firms (and their workers), which want to avoid increased competition from imports. Internationally, reciprocity suggests that firms in the same industry should be rivals – improved access for one jurisdiction’s firms means increased competition for the other jurisdiction’s firms in the same industry. The business politics of TTIP looked nothing like this.

There was strikingly little opposition to TTIP from business interests on either side of the Atlantic. Thus, domestic contestation among firms was unusually muted. Moreover, European and American manufacturing, services and peak associations cooperated extensively, adopting common positions on a range of issues. Such extensive transnational cooperation is unique to TTIP.

This chapter argues that the prevalence of transatlantic business alliances in TTIP was due to two reinforcing factors. First, extensive cross-investment means that the same firms are established in both markets and are prominent in the associations in both jurisdictions. As a result, they are not dealing with rivals, but with themselves. Second, for manufacturers and service providers, the main aim of the TTIP negotiations was to enhance their effi ciency by eliminating nuisance tariffs and mitigating the adverse trade effects of regulatory differences. Such effi ciency gains do not have the same distributional implications as market access: all parties expect to gain, albeit not necessarily equally, rather than some gaining at the expense of others. These conditions do not exist in transatlantic agricultural trade and are largely absent from other preferential trade negotiations. The extensive business support for TTIP encouraged expectations that the negotiations would be relatively easy and swift.

There is today a resurgence of interest in the history of economics, but students often lack the opportunity of taking a systematic course that introduces them to the ideas, policies and writers who played a part in the development of economic thinking from the seventeenth century up to the present day. This book offers a partial solution to this problem by providing a template for students and teachers seeking orientation in the subject. It is based on the material that we have taught to third-year undergraduates at the University of Birmingham for several years, augmented with some material that one of us has covered with graduate students at the University of Oporto and at Erasmus University Rotterdam, expanding it a little beyond our 20 two-hour lectures. We have structured it in such a way that shorter courses could be based on a selection, and we make some suggestions regarding this below.

That this is not a conventional textbook will be apparent from the formal presentation of each lecture, beginning with aims, then providing an annotated bibliography and the relevant chronology before moving on to the subject matter of the lecture. Each lecture ends with a series of questions for discussion that could provide a framework for class discussion or individual reflection. In scope and presentation, then, there is a clear difference here from Roger Backhouse’s Penguin History of Economic Thought (published in North America by Princeton University Press as The Ordinary Business of Life), the textbook we recommend our students to read for initial orientation and which covers the history of economic thought from the ancient Greeks onwards. Likewise, chapter 2 of Keith Tribe’s Economy of the Word provides an extended overview of the transformation in the use of the word “economy” from the Greeks to the 1960s that provides a more discursive initial orientation.

From the 1920s onwards economic argument rapidly became more formalized and academic, so that what had hitherto largely been public economic debate increasingly becomes debate between academic economists. Before the 1920s economic thinking was both more diverse and less institutionally defined; indeed, part of the story we tell here is the conversion of a broad tradition of political economy into the new university discipline of economics.

Aims of the lecture

• 1. To demonstrate that, by the later 1880s, there was a broad international consensus that a “modern” economics centred on the choices made by an economic agent, and not on a framework of production and distribution involving land, labour and capital.

• 2. To emphasize that while Walras pursued a complex algebraic approach to this problem that provided the foundations of general equilibrium analysis, he regarded his work as part of this general line of thinking, not as separate from it.

• 3. To emphasize that while there was some diversity in approach to economic analysis, there was no imperative to reduce this variety to uniformity.

Bibliography

The reference text for Carl Menger is the four-volume Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1968–70) edited by Friedrich von Hayek. For Walras the reference text is the fourteen-volume Oeuvres Économiques Complètes of Auguste and Léon Walras, edited by Pierre Dockès et al. (Paris: Economica, 1987–2005).

There are modern English translations of the principal works of Walras and Pareto. For Léon Walras, see Elements of Theoretical Economics: Or, The Theory of Social Wealth, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), and for Vilfredo Pareto see Manual of Political Economy, A Critical and Variorum Edition, Aldo Montesano, Alberto Zanni, Luigino Bruni, John S. Chipman and Michael McLure (eds) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

An older but still usable translation of Menger’s Grundsätze published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute (2007) is available, but unfortunately it is marred by introductions by Peter G. Klein and Friedrich von Hayek that are best ignored for our purposes here. Indeed, much of the commentary to be found on the web relating to Menger and Walras is questionable, in terms of both scholarly reliability and judgement. Besides the work of Yagi and Endres noted here, you will generally find that commentary that is contemporary with the immediate reception of Menger’s work is far more illuminating than anything written since. The problem with commentary on Walras is rather different; the development of general equilibrium theory “creatively” modified Walras in a way that obscured the qualifications and reservations that he had made, progressively distorting later understanding of his work.

In the face of European public opposition and American coordination problems, the TTIP negotiations were struggling, if not on the ropes, in mid-2016. The second half of 2016, however, saw two body blows land on the negotiations. On 23 June, the British public voted by 52 per cent to 48 per cent to leave the European Union. On 8 November, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States on a populist, vigorously anti-trade agenda. Both of these developments dramatically undermined the prospects for reaching agreement on the broad agenda launched in 2013.

Even before the Brexit vote and Trump’s election, officials and observers on both sides of the Atlantic had anticipated that TTIP negotiations would eff ectively halt for the first half to three-quarters of 2017. Any new US administration takes time to find its feet, and the USTR tends not to be a high-priority appointment. In addition, the French presidential elections in April/May and parliamentary elections in June, and the German elections in September were expected to preoccupy Europe. Brexit and Trump’s election, however, have had a more profound effect than simply pausing the talks.

In January 2017, Peter Navarro, the head of Trump’s National Trade Council, said that the TTIP negotiations had been “killed”. European officials were marginally more optimistic. In December 2016, EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström described the negotiations as “in the freezer”. The metaphor of the freezer suggests that the negotiations might resume later in the Trump administration. As of the time of writing (June 2017), the administration had not taken a public position on TTIP. This chapter considers how the two developments have impacted the negotiations and argues that TTIP, as it was conceived, is dead.

The UK bows out

On 29 March 2017, the United Kingdom formally submitted its intention to leave the EU. The UK’s decision has two main implications for the TTIP negotiations, both of which reduce the likelihood of a successful conclusion.

Aims of the lecture

• 1. To outline the early history of economic argument and its emergence as a language of “counsel and advice” for the courts and administrations of seventeenth-century Europe.

• 2. To highlight the way in which the arguments advanced identified varying sources of wealth and power: population, commerce, manufacture, agriculture, mines.

• 3. To show that well into the eighteenth century comparative assessments of the strength of a nation relied upon empirical, rather than analytical, arguments.

Bibliography

There is no reliable modern survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European economic argument that brings together developments in Western, Central, Northern and Southern Europe in an even-handed manner, although there are a few older sources that provide a useful perspective on some aspects of the early development of political oeconomy. Terence Hutchison’s Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) is the most generally useful older work; while it does have the usual Anglo-French bias, it is unusual in the space it gives to German-language and Italian writings. It also offers clear and helpful indexes for both authors and subjects, a chronology (pp. 441–55) and a section “References and Literature” (pp. 419–41) that is divided up by chapter, separately listing within each chapter original writing and commentary upon that writing.

Istvan Hont, “Jealousy of Trade: An Introduction”, in his Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 1–156, provides the best modern overview of European political economy through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Ryan Walter, A Critical History of the Economy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), provides a brief synthetic overview of the development of economic thinking in Britain from the later-seventeenth to the early-nineteenth century, making use of insights drawn from the history of political thought, where both historiography and range of analysis are far more sophisticated than usually encountered in the history of economic thought.

Jacob Viner, “Power Versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, World Politics 1:1 (1948), 1–29. Viner was very knowledgeable about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century commercial writing and in this article he identifies the relationship between wealth and the political power of states that characterizes the seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century literature.

Aims of the lecture

• 1. To outline the main phases in the development of macroeconomics since the Second World War.

• 2. To explain how macroeconomists conceived their subject in what was called “the age of Keynes”.

• 3. To explain how economists responded to the dramatic events of the 1970s.

Bibliography

The reading list for this lecture is fairly short, though two of the items are very substantial. The early history has already been covered in lecture 19, some of the reading for which is relevant here. It leaves out any discussion of the Phillips curve, a major part of modern macroeconomics, on the grounds that this will be discussed in detail in lecture 21.

Starting with the attempts to reinterpret Keynes in the late 1950s and 1960s, R. E. Backhouse and M. Boianovsky’s Transforming Modern Macroeconomics: The Search for Disequilibrium Microfoundations, 1956–2003 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) focuses on attempts to analyse economies in which markets are not in supply-and-demand equilibrium; this is contrasted with the more influential approach of assuming equilibrium, and the authors tell the story of how these two approaches evolved and eventually came together.

M. De Vroey’s A History of Macroeconomics from Keynes to Lucas and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) looks at the history of macroeconomics from a Lucasian perspective. This means that it shows very clearly how a post-Lucas macroeconomist is likely to view older theories, pointing out their alleged failings in an unsympathetic way. It is, however, the most comprehensive treatment of macroeconomics after Lucas. The nature of the material makes it difficult reading in places, but that is the price paid for covering material that others leave out.

Given the current emphasis on “microfoundations” and the tendency to dismiss earlier work as lacking them, K. D. Hoover’s “Microfoundational Programs” in Microfoundations Reconsidered: The Relationship of Micro and Macroeconomics in Historical Perspective, P. G. Duarte and G. T. Lima (eds) (Cheltenham: Elgar, 2012), argues that since Keynes, economists have sought microfoundations, and that this is overlooked because they approached the problem in a different way from the one that became fashionable in the 1980s.

Aims of the lecture

• 1. To introduce some popular twentieth-century writers on economics.

• 2. To place these economists in the context of economists’ involvement in public life more broadly.

• 3. To show how the role of economists in public discourse has changed during the twentieth century.

Note that there is considerable potential overlap between this lecture and lectures 23 and 24 in that, in democracies, there are connections between public discourse and the making of economic policy.

Bibliography

T. Mata and S. G. Medema (eds), The Economist as Public Intellectual, annual supplement to History of Political Economy 45 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). This volume contains an introduction that offers a framework for thinking about the role of economists in public life and a series of case studies. The introduction contains an extensive bibliography to which readers should turn to find more elaborate discussions of the issues discussed here.

C. D. W. Goodwin’s Walter Lippmann: Public Economist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) gives an account of the economist who was, with little doubt, the leading journalist and interpreter of economics in the United States for much of the twentieth century.

R. Parker’s John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2005) is an intellectual biography of the economist, political adviser and public figure who was probably the most well-known economist in the 1950s and 1960s.

Lecture summary

Popular economics

Economics has always had its popularizers, but in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as economics became a specialized academic discipline, and a fortiori as it became more mathematical, the need for popular interpretations increased. Though the boundaries between them are very blurred, it can be useful to distinguish between three types of popular writing. Some popular writers translated academic work into material that non-specialists could understand. This covers both textbook writers, simplifying the subject for students, and writers who simplify in order to reach any interested reader. There are also economists who, though having good academic credentials, choose to develop some of their ideas in works that can be read by the general public.

Aims of the lecture

• 1. To show how reading what economists actually wrote can sometimes be enough to challenge a history that virtually all economists accept. The fact that economists are near unanimous in what they know about the history of their discipline does not necessarily mean that their history is correct.

• 2. To tell the story of how economists have analysed the relationship between inflation and unemployment.

• 3. To speculate on how and why erroneous versions of the history became established.

This lecture is a lesson in the importance of reading original texts carefully and not assuming that commentators, who may not have read the papers they discuss, are necessarily correct.

Bibliography

This lecture is essentially based on one book: J. Forder, Macroeconomics and the Phillips Curve Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Some of the material can be found in articles Forder wrote en route to the book, and an article on incomes policy serves as a reminder of how differently labour market problems were conceived from the 1950s to the 1970s: J. Forder, “Friedman’s Nobel Lecture and the Phillips Curve Myth”, Journal of the History of Economic Thought 32:3 (2010), 329–48; J. Forder, “The Historical Place of the ‘Friedman–Phelps’ Expectations Critique”, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 17:3 (2010), 493–511; R. E. Backhouse and J. Forder, “Rationalizing Incomes Policy in Britain, 1948–1979”, History of Economic Thought and Policy 1:1 (2013), 17–35.

The lecture focuses on three papers: A. W. Phillips, “The Relation Between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861–1957”, Economica 25:100 (1958), 283–99; P. A. Samuelson and R. M. Solow, “Analytical Aspects of Anti-Inflation Policy”, American Economic Review 50:2 (1960), 177–94; and M. Friedman, “The Role of Monetary Policy”, American Economic Review 58:1 (1968), 1–17.

K. D. Hoover’s “The Genesis of Samuelson and Solow’s Price-Inflation Phillips Curve”, History of Economics Review 61 (2015), 1–16, provides a detailed reconstruction of the way in which Samuelson and Solow calculated the Phillips curve in their paper.

Aims of the lecture

• 1. To uncover the “historical” John Maynard Keynes.

• 2. To illustrate an important approach to the history of ideas: through biography.

• 3. To explain how Keynes came to his major work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).

• 4. To place Keynes’s economic theory in relation to his view of capitalism and a social philosophy that was related to his life and activities.

Recovering the historical Keynes is more difficult than it sounds because, being widely considered the most important economist of the twentieth century, his name has been used by many people – politicians and journalists as well as economists – to represent policy positions that they want to defend or attack, many of which are not informed by facts about Keynes’s life and work.

Bibliography

As is the case with Adam Smith, the enormous volume of literature on Keynes presents a problem for anyone wanting to understand the historical figure. Much of this literature on Keynes is written by people whose main interest lies in developing economic theory or defending a policy position; it deals as much with “Keynesianism”, “Keynesian economics” and “Keynesian policies” as with the ideas of Keynes himself. Such interests are perfectly legitimate but are not always consistent with developing an understanding of Keynes himself and his thinking. When reading material on Keynes it is important to think about what its author is trying to achieve.

The main source for Keynes’s works is the 30-volume Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (London: Macmillan, 1971–89), which contains his major economic works, including The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919, volume II), A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923, volume IV), A Treatise on Money (1930, volumes V and VI) and The General Theory (1936, volume VII) as well as articles and correspondence, usefully grouped according to themes. The Index (volume XXX) is very useful in locating material in the voluminous writings. Of course much of this material is available elsewhere, in other editions and on the Internet.

Aims of the lecture

• 1. To argue that the publication in 1861 of Mill’s critique of Bentham provided a platform for Jevons’s “mathematical political economy” of 1862, extending the argument made in lecture 7 regarding the importance of J. S. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848) for the political economy of the later nineteenth century in Britain.

• 2. To suggest that during the mid-nineteenth century, English political economy followed a separate but broadly parallel path to German and French political economy, ending up in the 1880s in roughly the same place: a new subjectivist economics.

• 3. To demonstrate that Edgeworth first developed his understanding of the calculus of economic action from the exposition of the hedonistic calculus in Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics (1874), and then subsequently learned his economics from Jevons.

Bibliography

Commentary upon the development of political economy in Britain during the last third of the nineteenth century has tended to focus on the work of Alfred Marshall in Cambridge, both during the 1870s and then after he returned there in 1885. As will be suggested below, this has tended to overshadow both the importance of Jevonian economics in Britain during the 1880s and the broader international significance of Edgeworth’s work in the twentieth century.

For Edgeworth, there is one central text that brings together his major writings with a useful introduction and a complete bibliography: Peter Newman (ed.), F. Y. Edgeworth’s Mathematical Psychics and Further Papers on Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). The Royal Economic Society gathered many of Edgeworth’s papers into a three-volume collection that remains widely available: Papers Relating to Political Economy (London: Macmillan, 1925). A further useful consideration of Edgeworth’s work is Stephen Stigler, “Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Statistician”, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A 141 (1978), 287–322.

Stanley Jevons was a polymath whose writings on political economy were only one part of his interests, albeit an important part. The best place to start is R. D. Collison Black’s entry for Jevons in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Collison Black also edited Jevons’s Papers and Correspondence, 7 volumes (London: Macmillan, 1972–81).

Aims of the lecture

• 1. To provide an overview of Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations.

• 2. To provide in the treatment of Wealth of Nations a model for the reading of complex texts.

• 3. To shift attention in this way from what Smith “really meant” to what he “actually wrote”.

Bibliography

In the publication history of Wealth of Nations there are many conspectuses, abbreviated versions and summaries, beginning with Jeremiah Joyce’s A Complete Analysis or Abridgement of Dr. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1797), which went through three editions by 1821 and was republished in an Oxford edition in 1877 and 1880. Robert Heilbroner’s The Essential Adam Smith (1986) is a useful modern compendium. Jerry Evensky has published two overviews: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (2005), summarizing Smith’s “moral philosophical vision” (and not directly Theory of Moral Sentiments) in Part I and Wealth of Nations in Part II (the summary of modern economists’ perceptions of Smith in Part III is of no interest here). Evensky has also published Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Reader’s Guide (2015), but it is marred by the use of inappropriate modern economic preconceptions and terminology.

There is, however, no substitute for reading Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, preferably in the Glasgow edition since you will then have access to a full editorial apparatus if you should need it. Just skimming these works will give you a clearer idea of their structure and argument than can be gleaned from most of the commentary.

For Theory of Moral Sentiments, useful orientation based on a close reading can be found in Terry Peach, “Adam Smith’s ‘Optimistic Deism,’ the Invisible Hand of Providence, and the Unhappiness of Nations”, History of Political Economy 46 (2014), 55–83.

For Wealth of Nations, Keith Tribe, “Reading ‘Trade’ in the Wealth of Nations”, Economy of the Word, chapter 4 explicitly sets out to provide a close reading of exactly where and what Smith writes about trade, rather than compare some things he wrote with some things others have since written.