When
Palgrave Macmillan published “
Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy” in 2005, I opened the
Lost Legacy Blog and have kept it going almost daily since, and in these past few weeks I have been reflecting on its achievements, its success in attracting readers (and keeping them), and readers’ responses in the comments sections and in private correspondence.
Overall, I am pleased, but I want to improve
Lost Legacy in any way I can that is feasible and, to quote common enough word today, that is sustainable. One idea that has been gaining support from within my own thinking at least, is that I need to broaden out from my mainly reactive challenges to the almost daily verbal ‘atrocities’ against
Adam Smith’s writings and correspondence in the world’s media.
Much of these incorrect attributions are written by economists who ought to know more about the history of economic thought (this set includes several Nobel Prize winners) and those educated by academic faculties across North America and British universities, who were not required to read for themselves the works and correspondence of
Adam Smith (or for that matter any other major contributors to economic theories) and have taken their tutor's assertions as authoritative (as most of whom probably took their tutors views as 'gospel' too).
The result overall is that a purely fictional ‘
Adam Smith’ emanating from Chicago is widely believed to be the authentic
Adam Smith (the one born in Kirkcaldy in 1723), even though the authentic Kirkcaldy philosopher’s work is checkable in their original format, whereas the Chicago version is a parody of them.
What I intend to do in future weeks and months is add to
Lost Legacy’s output by shifting its emphasis from repetitive polemics against repetitive atrocities to more thoughtful short pieces, with a few longer essays on the thoughts and context of
Adam Smith, both as he wrote them, and as they can be shown to have relevance today.
Thus, instead of repeating regular expositions of what he meant by his use of the metaphor of ‘an invisible hand’, I shall refer readers to my paper on ‘
Adam Smith and the invisible hand: from metaphor to myth’, which is downloadable by readers from the
Lost Legacy Home page. As I produce other papers, I shall add them to the downloadable list.
Meanwhile, I shall produce more expositions of themes and thoughts from
Adam Smith’s considerable published output, some a few paragraphs long, others more substantial. I shall also experiment with short series versions of connected ideas as expressed by
Adam Smith - consider these as in the style of ‘companion’ compositions to the Works and Correspondence of
Adam Smith. Readers may collect these together for their future reference.
I shall write these in my role as an educator, not as a doctrinal authority; where I am shown to be wrong in my assessments I shall acknowledge my errors and re-present the ideas as corrected. Where readers ask questions of clarification I shall be delighted to provide such explanations as I can honestly provide.
To start this new approach off, I shall be bearing in mind this new role as I continue my current research project which aims to assess the extent, if any, to which
Adam Smith had a religious theme in his works, beginning with his
Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). This work may produce potential postings on other things beside my main theme on possible religious roots in
Smith’s thinking. These past few weeks I have noted several other topics worth me commenting on for the interest of readers (please let me know if they prove to be of interest or not).
I shall commence posting on them once I return from Rome and the 20th annual conference of the
European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (of which more later).
Labels: Lost Legacy
