Abstract
Shakespeare did not say it, but it is true that some men are born small, some achieve smallness, and some have smallness thrust upon them. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, has had to cope with a good deal of such thrusting. That conclusion is inescapable, reading some of the recent pronouncements of conservative extremism (especially in Britain), with persistent attempts to implicate Adam Smith in justifying the straight and the narrow. The invoking of Adam Smith and ‘the invisible hand’ is a widespread phenomenon, varying from explicit attribution to implicit use of Smith’s authority (in, say, the spirited outpourings of the so-called ‘Adam Smith Institute’).
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Notes
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; Everyman’s Library, London: Dent, 1910), Vol. I, Book I, p. 13.
See D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, ‘Introduction’, in Raphael and Macfie (eds) The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p.24.
See my ‘Famine’, World Development, 8 (1980), and Poverty and Famines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), Section 10.4; and S. Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
P. Streeten, The Frontiers of Development Studies (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 129.
The useful and varied collection of papers on Adam Smith that can be found in A. S. Skinner and T. Wilson (eds) Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) includes some discussions of this problem. See also Raphael and Macfie, ‘Introduction’, op. cit.
See also Donald Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
On some limitations of ‘consequentialist’ reasoning, see Bernard Williams, ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in J. J. C. Smart and B. Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
See also A. Sen and B. Williams (eds) Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
F. Y. Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences (London, 1881), p. 52.
M. Morishima, Why Has Japan ‘Succeeded’? Western Technology and the Japanese Ethos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
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© 1986 Sanjaya Lall and Frances Stewart
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Sen, A. (1986). Adam Smith’s Prudence. In: Lall, S., Stewart, F. (eds) Theory and Reality in Development. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18128-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18128-5_2
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