Spectator Books: Jesse Norman on Adam Smith
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.3 • 826 Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
Adam Smith is the most quoted and misquoted economist of all time. Sam Leith talks to Jesse Norman MP, author of the new Adam Smith: What He Thought and Why It Matters (reviewed in last week’s Spectator by Simon Heffer). Norman argues that we can only understand Smith in the round by reading his Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as the Wealth of Nations; and by putting him in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment and the thinkers such as Hume who surrounded and influenced him. But he also says that a proper appreciation of Smith’s thought has relevance for us right to the present day. And he even ventures a thought on what the Sage of Kirkcaldy would have made of Brexit.
Presented by Sam Leith.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith. |
| 0:11.0 | Hello and welcome to The Spectator Books Podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator. |
| 0:15.9 | And this week I'm pleased to be joined by Jesse Norman, who as well as being the MP for Hereford, |
| 0:20.5 | is the author of a new book on Adam Smith called Adam Smith, What He thought and Why It Matters. Jesse, welcome. |
| 0:28.1 | Hello, Sam. Now, Adam Smith is, as you set out in your introduction, the most famous economist who ever lived, pretty much. |
| 0:36.8 | But most people who cite him seem to know about, you know, two or three things about him. |
| 0:42.0 | They know something about a pin factory. |
| 0:43.7 | They know something about the invisible hand. |
| 0:45.5 | And they know that, you know, no collection of businessmen ever met in a room but to plot the restraint of trade. |
| 0:52.1 | Yes. |
| 0:53.0 | He has been claimed, as you say, it is a sort of patron saint for all sorts of different |
| 0:57.7 | economic thoughts, hasn't he? |
| 0:59.5 | Yes, he has. |
| 1:00.2 | Either patron saint or devil incarnate and kind of stalking horse. |
| 1:04.5 | No, he is by far the most influential economist, whoever lived, adding these great |
| 1:10.1 | citation analyses they do |
| 1:11.5 | in academia, he's like three or four times more than anyone else in the field, including such |
| 1:17.8 | luminaries as Marx and Keynes and the like. So he's fantastically influential, but precisely for that |
| 1:22.8 | reason, he's very heavily contested. And it's the combination of people really either loving him and thinking |
| 1:29.6 | he's the great laissez-faire economist and the liberator of markets and the enemy of state |
| 1:35.1 | intervention and all that. And then on the other side, of course, you have people who think of him |
| 1:41.0 | as a great market fundamentalist, a defender of inequality and greed and an |
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