Book : The Wealth Of Nations Books 1-3 (penguin Classics) -.

-Titulo Original : The Wealth Of Nations Books 1-3 (penguin Classics)

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Penguin Classics

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. moFrom the introduction by Robert ReichAdam Smiths ideas fit perfectly with this new democratic, individualistic idea. To him, the wealth of a nation wasnt determined by the size of its monarchs treasure or the amount of gold and silver in its vaults, nor by the spiritual worthiness of its people in the eyes of the Church. A nations wealth was to be judged by the total value of all the goods its people produced for all its people to consume. To a reader at the start of the twenty-first century, this assertion may seem obvious. At the time he argued it, it was a revolutionary democratic vision.Smith was born in 1723, in the small Scottish port of Kirkcaldy, which sits across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. His father was a collector of customs-a job that literally embodied the old mercantilist philosophy that Smith would later argue against. He was educated at the University of Glasgow, whose professors passionately debated the new concepts of individualism and ethics (one of his teachers, Francis Hutcheson, was prosecuted by the Scottish Presbyterian church for spreading the false and dangerous doctrines that moral goodness could be obtained by promoting happiness in others and that it was possible to know good and evil without knowing God), and then at Oxford, whose professors didnt debate or teach much of anything. In fact, the lassitude of Oxfords dons prompted Smith to suggest, in The Wealth of Nations, that professors be paid according to the number of students they attract, thereby motivating them to take a more lively interest in teaching-one of Smiths few suggestions with which todays tenured professors of economics generally disagree.In 1748 Smith returned to the University of Glasgow, first as a professor of logic and then of moral philosophy, filling Francis Hutchesons chair. There he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, which brought him instant fame. In it, Smith asked how a normal self-interested person is capable of making moral judgments, when the essence of morality is selflessness. It was a question that troubled many of the new thinkers of the eighteenth century, who had liberated themselves from both theology and codes of aristocratic or chilvaric virtue. Smiths answer foreshadowed Sigmund Freuds superego: People possess within themselves an impartial spectator who advises them about moral behavior.Smith resigned his professorship in 1764 to become tutor to the son of the late Duke of Buccleuch. The boys mother, Countess of Dalkeith, had just remarried Charles Townshend, one of Smiths many admirers, who later became Britains chancellor of the exchequer, and was responsible for imposing the taxes on the American colonies that prompted some Bostonians to throw large quantities of tea into Boston Harbor. For the next two years, Smith traveled throughout the Continent, beginning work on the book that was to become The Wealth of Nations. He visited Voltaire in Geneva, and in Paris met François Quesnay, a physician in the court of Louis XV who had devised a chart of the economy-a tableau economique he called it-showing the circulation of products and money in an economy analogous to the flow of blood through a body. Quesnay and his fellow Physiocrats believed that wealth came from a nations production that enlarged the flow rather than from its accumulation of gold and silver, as the prevailing mercantilists believed, and that governments should therefore remove all impediments to the flow of money and goods in order to increase production.Smith took these notions to heart, although he didnt agree with everything the Physiocrats propounded (such as their view that agricultural production was the only true source of wealth). Returning to Glasgow in 1766, he spent the better part of the following decade working out his theories. Occasionally hed travel to London to discuss them with luminaries such as the philosop