Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Deformation

Next Big Idea Club Nominee Fall 2020

“With an unsurpassed mastery of Adam Smith’s work Daniel Diatkine has written an important revisionist interpretation. By a determined concentration on the problems Smith himself saw and tried to solve, rather than the problems we may have wanted him to see and solve, Diatkine is able to set aside a good deal of the anachronism that still distorts our understanding of the Scottish thinker. Here a striking contribution is Diatkine’s focus on class as an important factor in Smith’s analysis of the detrimental role of the people who wielded capital.”