The Fight over Adam Smith

Unlike other philosophers or economists of the past, Adam Smith is a uniquely tussled over figure.  Both left and right claim Adam Smith as their own. As a result as Gavin Kennedy's blog demonstrates, Smith is consistently misappropriated and misrepresented by journalists and by scholars. I was wondering why this was? I suppose one reason is that unlike Hobbes, Rousseau, Ricardo or Marx, or even his contemporaries  like David Hume, Smith is perceived to be 'the' thinker of modern liberal capitalism. Nevertheless, this leads to some painful attempts at 're-interpretation'.

Why are these reinterpretations so often inaccurate? One reason for this is to be found in Emma Rothschild's Economic Sentiments. Though I do not agree with all of the arguments in it, this is one of the best books that I am aware on the politics of Smith. The author makes the point that

'Our sense of the familiarity of eighteenth-century thought is an illusion, above all, because of our own unequal knowledge' (44)

'The grand political coalition of the period which followed the French Revolution, to take a different example, has remained the same, in very general terms, for almost two hundred years. The politics of economic reform, of individual rights, of right to property , were linked, in the 1770s and 1780s to the objective of constitutional cgange, in Paine's politics or in Condorcet's. But the events of the Revolution destroyed the possibility of political coalition between the supports of market freedom and the supportors of Revolutionary freedom' (48)

in other words, Smith's writing predate the structural break of the French Revolution. Therefore Smith cannot be categorised according to political labels that arose only after his own death. This problem undermines attempts to link Smith with modern political parties or positions even well researched and well argued books such as this one.

Update  To see what I'm talking about by the way one only has to look at the Wikipedia talk page on Adam Smith here particularly the section entitled the `The Betrayal of Adam Smith'.