Shannon C. Stimson, "Classical Political Economy", in Coole, Diana H.; Gibbons, Michael; Ellis, Elisabeth et al., The encyclopedia of political thought (2014)

Francis Hutcheson · Bernard Mandeville · David Hume · Adam Smith · Jean-Baptiste Say · Thomas Malthus · James Mill · Francis Place · David Ricardo · Henry Thornton · John Ramsay McCulloch · James Maitland, 8th Earl of Lauderdale · Jeremy Bentham · Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi · Johann Heinrich von Thünen · John Stuart Mill · Henry Charles Carey · Nassau William Senior · Edward Gibbon Wakefield · John Rae · Frédéric Bastiat · Thomas Tooke · Robert Torrens

Contents

Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care; and as he is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so.

Adam Smith, who has strong claim to being both the Adam and the Smith of systematic economics, was a professor of moral philosophy and it was at that forge that economics was made.Letter to Alexander Wedderburn 14 August 1776. The Correspondence of Adam Smith edited by E.C. Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press 1986. The Future Hope in Adam Smith’s System, Paul Oslington When the happiness or misery of others depends in any respect upon our conduct, we dare not, as self–love might suggest to us, prefer the interest of one to that of many. The man within immediately calls to us, that we value ourselves too much and other people too little, and that, by doing so, we render ourselves the proper object of the contempt and indignation of our brethren. Neither is this sentiment confined to men of extraordinary magnanimity and virtue. It is deeply impressed upon every tolerably good soldier, who feels that he would become the scorn of his companions, if he could be supposed capable of shrinking from danger, or of hesitating, either to expose or to throw away his life, when the good of the service required it. Justice, however, never was in reality administered gratis in any country. Lawyers and attornies, at least, must always be paid by the parties; and, if they were not, they would perform their duty still worse than they actually perform it. If the importation of foreign cattle, for example, were made ever so free, so few could be imported, that the grazing trade of Great Britain could be little affected by it. Live cattle are, perhaps, the only commodity of which the transportation is more expensive by sea than by land.

What an excellent work is that with which our common friend, Mr Adam Smith, has enriched the public!—an extensive science in a single book, and the most profound ideas expressed in the most perspicuous language.Section II, Chap. III; cited by Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 19441, 24-25. Adam Smith discovered a remarkable property of a competitive market economy. Under perfect competition and with no market failures, markets will squeeze as many useful goods and services out of the available resources as is possible. But where monopolies or pollution or similar market failures become pervasive, the remarkable efficiency properties of the invisible hand may be destroyed. The discovery of these words came like a breath of fresh mountain air. This was William Morris and Ruskin all over again. Why were we socialists allowing the Thatcherites to disguise and distort these revelations of the dangers and inadequacies of the market economy? We were the real custodians of the "great society". Letter to Henry Dundas (1 November 1779), quoted in Adam Smith, The Correspondence of Adam Smith, eds. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (1987), p. 241 True, Smith was a firm believer in the market economy, but he was not a doctrinaire advocate of laissez-faire. His ideas for the role of government were obviously limited by the stage of development reached in the eighteenth century, when the state's activities comprised mainly defence, maintenance of the rule of law and the provision and construction of a transport system of roads, bridges and canals. But in one field he was prepared for the government to intervene to the point of being dictatorial – education. This sprang from his recognition of the social costs of the market economy. The growing phenomenon of the division of labour led, he maintained, to the mental mutilation of those condemned to spend their working lives on a few simple and repetitive operations, which bred "torpor of the mind". And he added, "In every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."