More than two centuries after his death, Adam Smith is inescapable. His face adorns the £20 note; his ideas adorn politicians’ speeches. A think tank – the Adam Smith Institute – bears his name.
But fame has bred imprecision. The Scottish economist is typically hailed – or reviled – as the intellectual godfather of neoliberalism: unrestrained free markets and self-interested individualism. Yet as the Conservative MP and transport minister Jesse Norman writes in his new book Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why it Matters, this is mere caricature. Smith, one of the pillars of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment, was a profoundly nuanced thinker.
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