Making Room on the Left for Adam Smith: Pedagogical and Research Implications

Issues of economic and social justice in British history are commonly taught through engagement with the work of Karl Marx, E. P. Thompson, Raphael Samuel, and Anna Clark, yet it can be difficult to get students to engage with the content of these works, rather than the caricature of the Marxist perspective. Pairing these works with the full text of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations has the power to disrupt this dynamic. Smith’s theory contains numerous ethical checks, such as the natural price, which were only abandoned later by political economists who increasingly reduced individual misery to mathematical equations. Marx and Smith both have a profound respect for the productive forces most associated with the middle class, and both judged the value of an economic system by its ability to improve the lives of the majority. In between 1776 and 1850 individuals outside political power fashioned oppositional projects that harnessed market forces for socially progressive ends, with Robert Owen only the most famous example. It was forcefully argued in the period that modern productive methods left unchecked by state intervention in key areas would produce only a society of ignorant cowards, but this was Smith’s assertion, not Marx’s. Re-emphasizing Smith’s justifications for state intervention and the ethical checks he placed on market forces provides an effective means of getting students initially hostile to questions of social justice to seriously consider them, and this presentation elaborates a pedagogical and research program based on incorporating Smith into the questions and concerns of New Left historiography.