Content area
Full text
Aspromourgos, Tony. The Science of Wealth. Adam Smith and the Framing of Political Economy. Abingdon: Routledge. 2009. Pp. xx + 396. ISBNlO: 0415-46385-8 (hb) and ISBNlO: 0-203-88957-6 (pb). $US150.
Another book on Adam Smith. Aren't there already too many? There are and there aren't. This new book by one of the leading scholars on pre-classical and classical economics is a most valuable contribution to understanding Smith's economics as 'a unified intellectual piece, an engine for understanding economic society in general and liberal capitalism (not Smith's term) in particular, a fundamental frame of reference for economic analysis and social theory' (p. 3). A particular concern of the author is with examining the pre-histories of the key concepts that Smith used. The study is designed among other things to throw light on how the social sciences should go about their business. The author therefore confronts Smith's project of political economy with modern economics and thus contributes to what has been known as Methodenstreit since the heated debate between Carl Menger and Gustav von Schmoller towards the end of the nineteenth century. Aspromourgos is convinced 'that there are respects in which Adam Smith's outlook and approach to economic analysis are superior to those which have resulted from more than two centuries of subsequent development in the discipline' (p. 255). Put differently: the market for economic ideas, methods and doctrines is not that perfectly functioning selection mechanism that preserves everything that is true and valuable and weeds out everything that is not. The publication of the book is timely, since the recent financial and economic crisis was also understood by many scholars, and for perfectly good reasons it seems, as a crisis in parts of economics, especially macroeconomics and financial theory. Aspromourgos stresses: 'Economics by its very nature is always and everywhere vulnerable to ideological corruption or capture' (p. 255). This view was shared, among others, by such diverse authors as Karl Marx and Joseph A. Schumpeter and has recently re-emerged in terms of a discussion of the bad effects of the destruction of variety in economics and of the emergence of 'group think'.
A large part...