Wealth of Nations

“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.”

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is one of the most important and influential works ever published on economic theory and is the foundation of classical economics. In it, Adam Smith stresses the importance of the division of labor to economic progress. He criticizes the arguments for economic planning and offers a detailed theoretical and historical case for free trade.