The purpose of this paper is to examine Smith's four stages theory of history as an account of economic and social development, with an emphasis on the arguments and evidence he used to support it. In his biographical account of Smith's life, his friend Dugald Stewart described Smith’s method...

The invisible hand as it appears in the Theory of Moral Sentiments is commonly treated as an afterthought in discussions of the version in the Wealth of Nations, but it deserves attention in its own right. I will argue that there is an entirely coherent (if not entirely plausible) economic...

David Hume thought that a taste for luxury was desirable because it promoted economic and political development (it brought down feudalism, among other things). Adam Smith's early works follow a very similar line though, unlike Hume, he saw a taste for luxury as rather contemptible despite its...

This paper draws attention to two relatively neglected features of Adam Smith's analysis of rent and profit. First, he assumed that all land is used for something and that there are many agricultural products. There is no zero rent margin in David Ricardo's sense but the decision to invest in...

Schumpeter argued, long ago, that Quesnay's tableau economique was based on Cantillon, but this claim has never been spelled out in detail and seems not to have been generally accepted, since many writers still write of the tableau economique as though it were Quesnay's alone. This paper...