This chapter situates Smith scholarship in a long historical view. 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 centuries, then became starting points for critical and revisionist historiography. 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 have engendered shifting meanings, emergent problematics, and the enduring political relevance of his works and ideas.

Economics of visual art defies many principles of economics while also relying on them. This makes economics of art a creative and political practice unto itself. The big question in the field is whether economics can explain art – encapsulated economic value – or whether it cannot but is still a useful tool for structurally supporting art. Under the Nothing But argument, all value, including artistic value, can be represented by price. Under the Hostile Worlds argument, art can never be fully described by markets and should be kept separate. We find that economics and art are highly related in systems of institutional and commercial value. Our starting point for the book is looking at artists who make things.

Richard A. Musgrave (1910-2007) is the architect of modern public finance. Born and educated in Germany, Musgrave was a widely read scholar who fought attempts to narrow the scope and methods of economics. He had always been critical of what we now call welfarism, and more generally of strict methodological individualism. This chapter reviews the history of Musgrave’s connection with the idea of community. Musgrave’s limited opening – often implicit – for the idea of community provides a basis for an alternative conception of welfare. He realised the importance of a social or communal frame late in his life and left cursory remarks. Musgrave never fully articulated a coherent vision of what the idea of community belonging might entail for a democratic theory of the government’s budget. Yet, securing an ontological status for societies or communities allowed him to theorise a larger scope for public interventions than other economic models of the state. It provided a new meaning to his concept of merit wants. Reframing merit wants as ‘community wants’ is explained by the revival of moral and political philosophy in the 1970s and revisiting older German theories.