After Adam Smith:
A Century of Transformation in Politics and Political Economy
Murray Milgate & Shannon C. Stimson

Cloth | 2009 | $35.00 / £24.95
320 pp. | 6 x 9

e-Book | 2009 | $35.00 | ISBN: 978-1-4008-3101-2

Shopping Cart | Endorsements | Table of Contents
Chapter 1 [PDF]

Few issues are more central to our present predicaments than the relationship between economics and politics. After Adam Smith looks at how politics and political economy were articulated and altered in the century following the publication of Smith's Wealth of Nations. It considers how grand ideas about the connections between individual liberty, free markets, and social and economic justice sometimes attributed to Smith are as much the product of gradual modifications and changes wrought by later writers.

Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and other liberals, radicals, and reformers had a hand in conceptual transformations that culminated in the advent of neoclassical economics. The population problem, the declining importance of agriculture, the consequences of industrialization, the structural characteristics of civil society, the role of the state in economic affairs, and the possible limits to progress were questions that underwent significant readjustments as the thinkers who confronted them in different times and circumstances reworked the framework of ideas advanced by Smith. By exploring how questions Smith had originally grappled with were recast as the economy and the principles of political economy altered during the nineteenth century, this book demonstrates that we are as much the heirs of later images of Smith as we are of Smith himself.

Many writers helped shape different ways of thinking about economics and politics after Adam Smith. By ignoring their interventions we risk misreading our past--and also misusing it--when thinking about the choices at the interface of economics and politics that confront us today.

Murray Milgate is fellow and director of studies in economics at Queens' College, University of Cambridge. Shannon C. Stimson is professor of political science and the history of political thought at the University of California, Berkeley.

Endorsements:

"This work represents the best of contemporary scholarship on the history of political, economic, and social thought. A signal contribution of this book is the demonstration of how far Smith's original vision was from the image that has been conveyed in so much of the secondary literature and which has come to inform contemporary views of markets and politics. Milgate and Stimson have provided an indispensable resource for thinking through the issues manifest in the recent revival of concerns with political economy and its significance for democratic theory."--John G. Gunnell, University at Albany, State University of New York

"After Adam Smith is a superior piece of scholarship, engagingly written and impressively erudite. Milgate and Stimson are first-rate historians of economic ideas."--Ian Shapiro, Yale University

"This is a fascinating and elegant study of the development of political economy and its relationship to political thought. It is a major contribution to economic and political theory, and to the often neglected but hugely important intersections between the two. It tells a compelling and original story, based on extensive scholarship as well as acute competence in economics."--Hannah Dawson, University of Edinburgh

Table of Contents:

Preface vii
CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 1
CHAPTER TWO: Adam Smith's Political Odyssey 10
CHAPTER THREE: The Rise and Fall of Civil Society 33
CHAPTER FOUR: Economic Life and Political Life 60
CHAPTER FIVE: The Economic Machine and the Invisible Hand 77
CHAPTER SIX: The Figure of Smith 97
CHAPTER SEVEN: Population and Political Economy 121
CHAPTER EIGHT: Utility, Property, and Political Participation 139
CHAPTER NINE: Economic Opinion on Parliamentary Reform 160
CHAPTER TEN: Utopias and Stationary States 186
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Labour Defended 217
CHAPTER TWELVE: Individual Liberty and the Liberty of Trade 237
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Two Critiques of Classical Political Economy 258
References 269
Index 299

Another Princeton book by Shannon C. Stimson:

• Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1880.

Subject Areas:

• Economics
• Political Philosophy
• Political Science and International Relations
• European History
• Philosophy

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Cloth: $35.00 ISBN13: 978-0-691-14037-7

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Cloth: £24.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-14037-7

Our e-Book editions are available from many of these online vendors

Prices subject to change without notice

File created: 11/4/2009

Questions and comments to: webmaster@press.princeton.edu
Princeton University Press