This article as a sequel to Song (1995), 'Adam Smith as an early pioneer of institutional individualism', aims to depict what Smith's conception of social relations of production looks like, and draws a tentative conclusion that when grasped in the whole context of Smith's system of social...

Because economic affairs involve individual action, they must be understood on the basis of a theory which is both subjective, depending on a conception of individual decision-making and especially private interest, and objective, demonstrating how the objective forces of a system of interaction...

Adam Smith justified the contemporary usury laws and was severely criticised by Bentham and most modern writers with the important exception of J.M. Keynes. We argue that pace Bentham, Smith did not intend to preclude loan financing of all 'risky' ventures and give a 'monopoly' to safe...

This paper first considers the character of Smith's account of division of labour as a theory of technical progress. In so far as Smith's account does entail a vision of liberal or competitive commercial society as exhibiting ongoing technical progress, this must have implications for income...

The paper discusses the analyses of technical progress, capital accumulation and income distribution elaborated by three major classical economists: Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx. The interpretation given is partly inspired by Piero Sraffa's studies in his hitherto unpublished papers....

Both William Petty (1623 to 1687) and Adam Smith (1723 to 1790) were concerned with the question of how to increase productivity. In this connection, they both addressed the issues of technological invention and the organisation of the production process, but in very different ways. Petty...

Juan Hipolito Vieytes (1762-1815)was a hero of the May 1810 Revolution in Buenos Aires and one of the early economists in the River Plate area. Although Robert Sidney Smith dismissed Vieytes as a very minor figure in Spanish economic thought, this article attempts to show that Vieytes, an...

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the theory of division of labour and economic growth proposed by Adam Smith and developed by Alfred Marshall and Allyn Young. In their approach division of labour is the main engine of growth and plays a central role in capital accumulation and...

In this paper I argue that Bernard Mandeville, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith are confronted to the same question: how to explain values from a naturalistic origin of morality. An in-depth analysis of their theories of human nature and market society will show that Rousseau is further from...

At the beginning of The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith describes a pin factory. It is widely accepted that this example comes from Diderot's Encyclopaedia, published in France in the 18th century. The details in the text together with the conferences previously given in Glasgow clearly show that...