1989: The Adam Smith Address the Suicidal Impulse of the Business Community

Abstract

As business economists, you straddle two fields: economics and business. Those two fields are not synonymous by any manner of means, as Adam Smith, whose name has been given to this series of lectures, clearly recognized. Adam Smith is correctly and properly regarded as the father of modern economics and particularly of the idea that a free, private market society is capable of combining material prosperity with human freedom. Although that idea has been expressed by others before and since, Adam Smith’s two great books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, are the classical works on that theme.