We’re joining our friends at Liberty Matters in their celebration of the 250th anniversary of the publication of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations through a series of six weekly essays.
In this third essay, Dennis C. Rasmussen explores Book III of Wealth of Nations, where Smith uses a story about economic and political development to explain how commercial societies free the ordinary people living in them from dependence and war. From the article:
If I were asked to name the single most important passage in Adam Smith’s corpus, my nominee would be the climactic claim of Book 3 of The Wealth of Nations: “commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency on their superiors. This, though it has been the least observed, is by far the most important of all their effects” (WN III.iv.4). Smith is, of course, best known as a defender and promoter of commercial society, and this is his most explicit and emphatic statement about what he saw as so beneficial about this kind of society: the promotion of liberty and security is by far the most important of all of commerce’s effects. In order to understand how exactly commerce helps to promote liberty and security, and why it is so critical that it do so, in Smith’s view, it will be helpful to step back and look at the broader narrative of Book 3.
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