The Other Adam Smith [Hardcover]

The Other Adam Smithrepresents the next wave of critical thinking about the still under-examined work of this paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker. Not simply another book about Adam Smith, it allows and even necessitates his inclusion in the realm of theory in the broadest sense. Moving beyond his usual economic and moral philosophical texts, Mike Hill and Warren Montag take seriously Smith's entire corpus, his writing on knowledge, affect, sociability and government, and political economy, as constituting a comprehensivethough highly contestablesystem of thought. We meet not just Smith the economist, but Smith the philosopher, Smith the literary critic, Smith the historian, and Smith the anthropologist. Placed in relation to key thinkers such as Hume, Lord Kames, Fielding, Hayek, Von Mises, and Agamben, this other Adam Smith, far from being localized in the history of eighteenth-century economic thought or ideas, stands at the center of the most vibrant and contentious debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Mike Hill and Warren Montag's revelatoryThe Other Adam Smithreveals just how important Smith is to [the] debates on sovereignty and life . . . Hill and Montag's brilliant book challenges the reader to think about Adam Smith in new ways and for new purposes. This outstanding interdisciplinary achievement spans English literature, social theory, history of philosophy, history of the book, social theory, and political history in what is a socially important and largely original re-evaluation of the argument for a market society and Liberal political economy more generally. An account of Adam Smith that explores how his minor and major writings together constitute a comprehensiveif highly contestablesystem of thought, this book looks at Smith's writing on knowledge, affect, sociability and government, and political economy in order to challenge both the old view of Smith as a narrow market fundamentalist and the new orthodoxy tl³g