This paper questions the common view that Darwinian biology is a straightforward extension of classical political economy. Our analysis contrasts the economists' classification scheme - whereby all humans were presumed natural kids, to be equally competent for economic and political decision...

Social media have made it possible for us to display our vanity and court the attention of others at an unprecedented scale. This article engages Adam Smith's account of vanity to offer a fresh perspective on the online attention economy, focusing primarily on users' desire for attention and...

Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the Enlightenment ideology, which includes Adam Smith's moral theory, lacks any sense of telos and will, therefore, fail in the long run. This article accepts MacIntyre's challenge and examines Smith's moral philosophy arguing that Smith did not completely discard...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans — social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.We share with the 18th century Scots...

Where should we place Frank Knight in the passage from classical liberalism to neo-liberalism? The argument has recently been made by that Knight should be placed among the group of liberals of an “older generation” that neo-liberals generally, and the Chicago School in particular, separated...

My university – George Mason University – has announced a Task Force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence. I gave a lecture about the discourse of those advocating such agendas. The lecture draws on Adam Smith and suggests that improprieties riddle such discourse. I treat improprieties of...

Entangled Political Economy, the idea that the economy and the polity are a nexus of interrelations often with unplanned outcomes, is close to the concept of economics that Adam Smith presents, a concept which was not shaped by strict discipline barriers. I show that Adam Smith analyzes the...

In the field of business ethics, Adam Smith has generally been viewed with a measure of suspicion. Smith's famous invocation of the invisible hand - according to which self-interest promotes the greater good - has generally been seen as a fundamental challenge to a discipline committed to the...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans - social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the 18th century Scots...