In 2019, when the Conservative MP Jesse Norman released his excellent biography of Adam Smith, I made a present of it to a senior minister in Nicola Sturgeon’s government.
The book reclaims Smith from the clutches of the Thatcherite right, by layering his Theory of Moral Sentiments over the better-known Wealth of Nations. What emerges is a more rounded and accurate portrait of the great Scottish thinker than those that portray him as some sort of proto-capitalist shark solely committed to the “invisible hand” of the market.
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