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Zusatztext "Adam Smith's enormous authority resides! in the end! in the same property that we discover in Marx: not in any ideology! but in an effort to see to the bottom of things." --Robert L. Heilbroner Informationen zum Autor Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Work of Nations, Reason, Supercapitalism, and Aftershock . Klappentext Adam Smith's masterpiece, first published in 1776, is the foundation of modern economic thought and remains the single most important account of the rise of, and the principles behind, modern capitalism. Written in clear and incisive prose, The Wealth of Nations articulates the concepts indispensable to an understanding of contemporary society; and Robert Reich's Introduction both clarifies Smith's analyses and illuminates his overall relevance to the world in which we live. As Reich writes, "Smith's mind ranged over issues as fresh and topical today as they were in the late eighteenth century-jobs, wages, politics, government, trade, education, business, and ethics." Introduction by Robert Reich • Commentary by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner • Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide moFrom the introduction by Robert Reich Adam Smith's ideas fit perfectly with this new democratic, individualistic idea. To him, the "wealth" of a nation wasn't determined by the size of its monarch's 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 nation's 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 didn't debate or teach much of anything. In fact, the lassitude of Oxford's 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 Smith's few suggestions with which today's 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 Hutcheson's 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. Smith's answer foreshadowed Sigmund Freud's 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 boy's mother, Countess of Dalkeith, had just remarried Charles Townshend, one of Smith's many admirers, who late...
