IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/gtechp/978-0-230-22754-5_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

General Introduction: Why Adam Smith?

In: Adam Smith

Author

Listed:
  • Gavin Kennedy

Abstract

Graduate economists, thoroughly conversant within the neoclassical paradigm and therefore numerate, who read the first few pages of Wealth of Nations confront an entirely different method of political economy to that which their academic training prepares them. If they persist, they find a literary style (no mathematics) that can be irritatingly obscure, seemingly long-winded and occasionally ambiguous, and given to ‘diversions’ of apparently questionable relevance, certainly when compared to the kinds of problems with which they are familiar. It is unlikely that they have an immediate resonance with Adam Smith’s style of discourse. Yet within his books there is much that may enlighten some of their deeper questions, and some they might find disturbing to their mastery of general equilibrium theory. For today’s economists, Smith’s corpus is the veritable and venerable ‘elephant in the room’: how did modern economics develop from such an unpromising source and why is he credited as the ‘Father of Economics’?

Suggested Citation

  • Gavin Kennedy, 2008. "General Introduction: Why Adam Smith?," Great Thinkers in Economics, in: Adam Smith, pages 1-12, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:gtechp:978-0-230-22754-5_1
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230227545_1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:gtechp:978-0-230-22754-5_1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.