Adam Smith

Smith viewed markets and capital as doing good work within their own sphere, but first, they required support from other institutions—including public services such as schools—and values other than pure profit seeking, and second, they needed restraint and correction by still other institutions—e.g., well-devised financial regulations and state assistance to the poor—for preventing instability, inequity, and injustice. --Amartya Sen, Capitalism Beyond the Crisis, The New York Review of Books, March 26, 2009


Recommended reading:
by Adam Smith at Reading Rat


Criticism (articles, essays, reviews):

Tammy Wynen stands near the back of a crowd outside a paper mill in Kimberly, Wisconsin. At a bank of microphones, speakers rail against Adam Smith; one, from the United Steel Workers, literally blames The Wealth of Nations for the mill’s impending closure. --The Economist, Of beer and bikers, September 11, 2008

Books That Changed the World, address by P. J. O'Rourke to the Commonwealth Club of California, February 2, 2007

See The God Squad

Adam Smith, the sensible philosopher, by David Frum, on The Life of Adam Smith, by Ian Simpson Ross, The New Criterion, March 1996

A Smith for All Seasons, by Michael Novak, First Things, August/September 1993