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...

These brief, casual remarks were delivered at an event to discuss Russell Roberts’s book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. I provide nine quotations from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, each quotation stating a source of vice, disorder, and corruption in human life. Smith...

In The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich Hayek wrote, the belief in individual responsibility...has always been strong when people firmly believed in individual freedom (1960, 71; see also 1967, 232). He also observed that during his time the belief in individual responsibility has markedly...

We interpret Adam Smith on reputation, commutative justice, and defamation laws. We address two major questions. The first question concerns whether Smith thought that “one’s own” as covered by commutative justice included one’s reputation. Several passages point to the affirmative. But...

Martin Pánek asked me to write a Foreword to a new edition of a Czech translation of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He gave me permission to post my original English-language text here. The book will be published by the Liberální Institut, edited by Pavel Chalupníček,...