Smith at 300: Adam Smith and the idea of "police"

Smith at 300: Contribution by Alexandre Mendes Cunha "The election of an excerpt from the Early Draft (ED) of the Wealth of Nations (WN) that was later suppressed as a favorite Smith quote may seem like a criticism of the author’s judgment. Nonetheless, that is not the aim. On the contrary, WN was probably better and less confusing without the passage and its emphasis on “police regulations”. What I want to highlight here is precisely this little-visited topic of Smith’s approach to the role of “police” in the economic order, differentiating the author’s use of the terms “police” and “policy”. Excerpt’s content is principally associated with Smith’s interest in the Hume-Tucker debate on trade, as already pointed out by Hont (2005: 71-2). What is of interest to me here is the reason for the suppression, which seems to be related to his intention to remove any association that might sound like praise for the idea of police (in this case, the view that a good police could be the solution for the rich country) from the WN. This was, however, in direct contrast to the prominence of the topic in Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence (LJ), in which police served as a broad category, associated with the internal administration of a country and the means for promoting economic order."