Commerce and Strangers in Adam Smith

Commerce and Strangers in Adam Smith
Author: Shinji Nohara
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2018-05-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9811090149

This book offers unique insights into how Adam Smith understood globalization, and examines how he incorporated his knowledge of the world and globalization into his classical political economy. Although Smith lived in society that was far from globalized, he experienced the beginning of globalization. Smith considered the most developed society the commercial society: the society that results from people meeting with strangers. Among Enlightenment thinkers, Smith was one of the most important figures with respect to interaction in the world, and it is through his lens that the authors view the impact of the mixing of diverse peoples. Firstly, the book describes how Smith was influenced by information from around the world. Leaving eighteenth-century Europe, including Smith’s native Scotland, people travelled, traded, and immigrated to far-flung parts of the globe, sometimes writing books and pamphlets about their travels. Informed by these writers, Smith took into consideration the world beyond Europe and strangers with non-European backgrounds. Against that background, the book reinterprets Smith’s moral philosophy. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith developed his moral philosophy, in which he examined how people form opinions through their meetings with strangers. He researched how encounters with strangers created the sharing of social rules. As such, the book studies how Smith believed that people in dissimilar communities come to share common concepts of morality and justice. Lastly, it provides an innovative reading of Smith’s political economy. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith established the market model of economic society. However, he saw the limitations of that model since it does not consider the impact of money on economy and international trade. He also recognized the limitations of his own equilibrium theory of market, the theory that is still influential today.

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life
Author: Russ Roberts
Publisher: Portfolio
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2015-10-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1591847958

"How the insights of an 18th century economist can help us live better in the 21st century. Adam Smith became famous for The Wealth of Nations, but the Scottish economist also cared deeply about our moral choices and behavior--the subjects of his other brilliant book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Now, economist Russ Roberts shows why Smith's neglected work might be the greatest self-help book you've never read. Roberts explores Smith's unique and fascinating approach to fundamental questions such as: - What is the deepest source of human satisfaction? - Why do we sometimes swing between selfishness and altruism? - What's the connection between morality and happiness? Drawing on current events, literature, history, and pop culture, Roberts offers an accessible and thought-provoking view of human behavior through the lenses of behavioral economics and philosophy"--

Adam Smith's Discourse

Adam Smith's Discourse
Author: Vivienne Brown
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134865449

Adam Smith's name has become synonymous with free market economics; The Wealth of Nations is taken as the definitive account of the benefits of free competitive markets. Yet recent scholarship has challenged this view and given us a richer, more nuanced figure, steeped in the intricacies of enlightenment social and political philosophy. Adam Smith's Discourse both develops this literature and gives it a radical new extension by taking into account recent debates in literary theory.

The Oxford Handbook of Freedom

The Oxford Handbook of Freedom
Author: David Schmidtz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2018-02-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199989435

We speak of being 'free' to speak our minds, free to go to college, free to move about; we can be cancer-free, debt-free, worry-free, or free from doubt. The concept of freedom (and relatedly the notion of liberty) is ubiquitous but not everyone agrees what the term means, and the philosophical analysis of freedom that has grown over the last two decades has revealed it to be a complex notion whose meaning is dependent on the context. The Oxford Handbook of Freedom will crystallize this work and craft the first wide-ranging analysis of freedom in all its dimensions: legal, cultural, religious, economic, political, and psychological. This volume includes 28 new essays by well regarded philosophers, as well some historians and political theorists, in order to reflect the breadth of the topic. This handbook covers both current scholarship as well as historical trends, with an overall eye to how current ideas on freedom developed. The volume is divided into six sections: conceptual frames (framing the overall debates about freedom), historical frames (freedom in key historical periods, from the ancients onward), institutional frames (freedom and the law), cultural frames (mutual expectations on our 'right' to be free), economic frames (freedom and the market), and lastly psychological frames (free will in philosophy and psychology).

The Rights of Strangers

The Rights of Strangers
Author: Georg Cavallar
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 499
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351540963

This study investigates the thinking of European authors from Vitoria to Kant about political justice, the global community, and the rights of strangers as one special form of interaction among individuals of divergent societies, political communities, and cultures. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it covers historical material from a predominantly philosophical perspective, interpreting authors who have tackled problems related to the rights of strangers under the heading of international hospitality. Their analyses of the civitas maxima or the societas humani generis covered the nature of the global commonwealth. Their doctrines of natural law (ius naturae) were supposed to provide what we nowadays call theories of political justice. The focus of the work is on international hospitality as part of the law of nations, on its scope and justification. It follows the political ideas of Francisco de Vitoria and the Second Scholastic in the 16th century, of Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, Christian Wolff, Emer de Vattel, Johann Jacob Moser, and Immanuel Kant. It draws attention to the international dimension of political thought in Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith, and others. This is predominantly a study in intellectual history which contextualizes ideas, but also emphasizes their systematic relevance.

The Company of Strangers

The Company of Strangers
Author: Paul Seabright
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2004
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780691118215

This is a wonderful book, very well written and accessible to a wide audience.