The Routledge Guidebook to Smith's Wealth of Nations
本书逐章逐节翻译并阐释《国富论》，帮助读者理解斯密的原意，揭示其道德与效率并重的财富观，适合经济学、政治学及思想史研究者快速把握经典。
The Wealth of Nations has long been an economized text. I mean this in two senses of the term. First, it is a text that has been all too vulnerable to foreshortening, oversimplification, and being quoted out of context. Attempts to abridge, condense, and extract the essence of The Wealth of Nations extend almost as far back as when Smith first published the work. One of the earliest “commentaries,” published in 1778, was John Gray's The Essential Principles of the Wealth of Nations, Illustrated, in Opposition to Some False Doctrines of Adam Smith, and Others. In the nineteenth century, the proliferation of economics textbooks in the anglophone world cemented Smith's reputation as the discipline's founding father. In 1937, Nashville's Parthenon Press published their Synthetic Wealth of Nations, described—albeit somewhat oxymoronically—as “condensed and extended.” In 1948, the Great Books Foundation published a “simplified, shortened, and modernized” version of The Wealth of Nations, whittling it down to the first nine chapters of book 1 only. A 1957 publication of Selections from “The Wealth of Nations,” edited by none other than the Nobel Prize–winning Chicago economist George Stigler himself, amounted to a mere 116 pages of reprinted excerpts from book 1, book 4, and book 5. This historical pattern reveals a second way in which The Wealth of Nations is often “economized.” It is a text whose language, primary contribution, and legacy is in modern economics. One might argue that, ironically, these past attempts at understanding Smith by way of economizing The Wealth of Nations have arguably contributed more to misunderstanding the totality and complexity of his thought. It hardly needs restating that much of Smith scholarship for at least the last three or four decades has been to challenge the “economization” of Adam Smith.Maria Pia Paganelli's latest volume upends this paradigm of economization. A leading Smith scholar and historian of economic thought, Paganelli's book expands rather than narrows the definition of what it means to publish a condensed “guidebook” to Smith's Wealth of Nations. It is not, as many of examples discussed above are, an abridgment or compilation of passages, sliced and diced to the server's liking. It is also not a commentary on key themes or interpretive problems (for instance, Samuel Fleischacker's seminal 2004 philosophical companion, or Christopher J. Berry's more recent Very Short Introduction, the latter of which covers the wider Smith corpus). Nor is it a traditional economic analysis of Smith's thought, the gold standard being something like Mark Blaug's Economic Theory in Retrospect. Rather, it is book-by-book, chapter-by-chapter translation of The Wealth of Nations. Relying on plain, terse prose, Paganelli enables Smith—whose writing Thomas Jefferson once described as “prolix and tedious”—to speak more clearly and directly. Lest one think that more is lost than gained in this pocket-size volume, Paganelli is quick to put those worries to rest. Every chapter of every book of The Wealth of Nations is discussed and distilled into clipped and concise sections that not only adhere to but also bring into focus the overall organization of Smith's original work. She has an unrivaled ability to render some of the most challenging aspects of Smith's thought into clear, compelling, and accessible terms without sacrificing technical rigor or skimping on historical context. In terms of structure, it most closely resembles Jerry Evensky's 2015 volume, Adam Smith's “Wealth of Nations”: A Reader's Guide, but there are key differences. Whereas one can sense a stronger rehabilitative project in Evensky's Guide—he attempts to recover a “Kirkcaldy Smith” in contrast to a “Chicago Smith” or even a “Marxist Smith”—in Paganelli's volume that objective is even more in the background. And while Paganelli does offer an overarching argument of sorts, what distinguishes her Guidebook is less the substance of the argument and more the interpretive and analytical tools with which she equips the reader.The book opens with an overview of Smith's life, followed by a very brief survey of the economic, political, and intellectual context of the Scottish Enlightenment. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are devoted to book 1 of The Wealth of Nations. (Readers who might be surprised at the volume of these discussions would be reminded that book 1 is one of the longest books of the Wealth of Nations.) Chapters 6 and 7 cover books 2 and 3, respectively; this is also a departure from Evensky's Guide, which compresses the discussion of the two shorter books into one chapter. Chapters 8 and 9 cover book 4, followed by two chapters on book 5. It closes with a brief discussion of Smith's legacy. Over the course of the Guidebook, Paganelli advances two key arguments about how to read The Wealth of Nations. The first is that “Smith offers a moral justification of wealth, and prioritizes morality over efficiency in his justification of wealth,” a mildly contentious but not wholly novel claim. The second is a more interesting insight into Smith's method: that Smith “emphasizes what we commonly see is not necessarily what is” (12).Chapters 1 through 3 do the most work to support the first claim. Smith's important “Introduction and Plan of the Work” highlights labor, consumption per capita, and production per capita as the essential conceptual tools for understanding why some nations are rich and others are poor—Smith's central question. Any discussion of markets and prices, Paganelli reminds us, is conspicuously absent. The succinct and unadorned style of the work lends itself well to the stark nature of some of Smith's claims. “But why should consumption be so fundamental in understanding wealth?” Paganelli anticipates, “because if we cannot consume, we die” (15). This is what Smith tells us in the fourth paragraph of the whole work. This is not a crude mantra of “capitalism or death” (again: readers would be reminded that Smith did not use the word capitalism), but rather, one of the overarching themes of the whole work: that economic growth, for Smith, is not measured in coin or balances of trade, but “through the ability of a country to support an increasing number of people” (15). Another effect of the Guidebook's style is that it makes the reader more comfortable with Smith's mode of analysis and argumentation, one that often blends matter-of-fact scientific analysis with normative judgments. Paganelli's verbal “signposts” offer critical support structures that help the reader understand what Smith is up to. On the subject of apprenticeships in book 1, chapter 10, for example, Paganelli tells the reader exactly how to separate out Smith's argument: “Smith does not like apprenticeships. They are ‘a manifest encroachment of just liberty.’ . . . Here again notice Smith's move: justice is the primary motivation. Apprenticeship is a violation of just liberty. And it happens to be inefficient too” (65).The second claim—that not everything is as it seems—is made more consistently throughout the work, and, on my reading, an underappreciated and critical aspect of Smith's writing. Here, the presentation of Smith's notorious digression on silver is exemplary in this respect. Not many read this part of The Wealth of Nations, few venture to write about it, and even fewer manage to do so with such consistent clarity. As it turns out, Smith's digression on silver is the culmination of the central argument in book 1: we are often misled by what we see—whether about the extent of the division of labor, or about the value of silver in relation to increases in wealth. Changes in relative prices—not nominal prices—is where we need to look to understand the relationship between the value of silver and wealth. As Paganelli shows, it is Smith's four-century history that reveals “their disconnection, and therefore the error that is commonly believed” (81). Smith's reliance on history to test hypotheses and challenge reigning presuppositions comes into play again in chapter 7 (in book 3), which is styled in this instance as a “strange,” “impersonal,” and “unheroic” economic history that shows how “economic growth and development cannot be separated.” It is not, as we might think, the price signal but a messy history of human passions mixed with our rational desire to improve our condition that drove the “silent revolution of commerce” (123, 137).That correlation is not causation—something that the digression on silver clarified—resurfaces again in the discussion in chapters 8 and 9 (covering book 4). Paganelli draws her reader's attention to places where Smith is normally cautious and hesitant, and others where he “drops all hesitations” in excoriating the mercantile system. Take, for example, the moment where Smith exposes the flawed logic of the argument that Great Britain's Corn Laws are the sole reason for its prosperity. “Correlation is not causation, Smith again seems to warn his readers,” she writes. “Prosperity came at the same time as the Corn Laws, but it came at the same time as national debt too” (163). This attentiveness to how Smith unspools his arguments—where he hesitates, where he anticipates, where he is loud and clear—is extremely valuable for readers new and old. Chapters 10 and 11 (on book 5) contain additional guideposts for reading and understanding the structure of Smith's arguments. To provide another example, whenever Smith begins a section, paragraph, or sentence with “It has been said” (or “commonly said” or “commonly believed”), it should immediately set off a warning light: reader, something is wrong in the argument ahead (200, 201).The Guidebook delivers a style that is mostly curt and candid but also playful at times. Tackling Smith's refutation of bounties (subsidies), Paganelli writes, “If exports increase, the balance of trade would increase too. Win. Not” (156). Paganelli turns on a dime, just as Smith often does; just as one begins suspecting that Smith is arguing for one thing, he in fact argues the opposite, or at least offers a counterintuitive argument. These twists and turns in Smith's prose are substantially less dizzying in Paganelli's reconstruction. She also manages to capture the wit, irony, and sarcasm (yes, Adam Smith had a sense of humor) in twenty-first-century English. She lingers on points of ambiguity, such as the meaning of our “natural inclinations” in book 3 (124–25), encouraging the reader to embrace the complexity and pluralism of Smith's own thought. The final section on public debt and the North American colonies throws into high relief the way in which Smith was able to treat a polemical and delicate subject with such systematic and deliberate consideration. The last few paragraphs of this volume are point-by-point reconstructions of an objection, followed by Smith's response in straightforward terms. This way of “translating” each chapter of The Wealth of Nations makes it abundantly clear that Smith's book is surprisingly conversational and intended to guide statecraft. It reveals how deeply engaged Smith was in dissecting the arguments of his contemporaries, but also how carefully and methodically he refuted them and anticipated their objections. What Paganelli's volume offers, then, is a masterclass in crafting Smithian-style arguments.Though one can hardly call this new guidebook an economistic reading of The Wealth of Nations, its economistic tendencies occasionally come up. Smith's naive account of money is a problem without marginal utility theory, and his subsequent theory of value is near untenable (30–31); his analysis of tax incidence is inconsistent at best and incorrect at worst (224). These are “problems” with Smith's account insofar as they are judged against a contemporary (read: correct) understanding of value, price elasticity, and so forth. The majority of references included in the “further readings” at the end of each chapter, especially the chapters on book 1, are publications by economists or about the economics—as opposed to the philosophy or politics—of The Wealth of Nations. My view—perhaps an unorthodox one among political theorists—is that this is not so much a problem as it is a function of the economics profession's grip on Smith scholarship for so long. To her credit, Paganelli dexterously weaves in references to The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the “History of Astronomy” essay without making grandiose claims about the consistency or coherence of Smith's entire oeuvre. Rather, she draws out the more nuanced, intertextual, and theoretical connections in Smith's analysis of religious sectarianism (214–15), the role of the imagination (28), or the aesthetics of systems-building (147–48), to provide a few examples.However, the overarching claim—inspired by the economist James Buchanan—that The Wealth of Nations “can be read as a book about justice, about a just system that could also be an efficient system” (256), still rings partly hollow. On the one hand, the Guidebook's summation of book 5 shows how human institutions, especially the ones for the administration of justice, coevolve with human society. In my view, the Guidebook is at its strongest in revealing how Smith saw the design of distinctly political institutions embedded the alignment of incentives of different actors; moreover, these institutions could be designed to promote not only economic growth but human happiness. On the other hand, it is an altogether different claim that The Wealth of Nations is centrally concerned with the problem of justice. There is no question that normative language is scattered throughout The Wealth of Nations. But it is not clear to me that the normative tone of certain statements or even the choice of questions that Smith asks implies that he was principally concerned with defending commercial society on the grounds of justice. This is not a fault of Paganelli's exclusively. Rather, I think it is indicative of the shifting circumstances, demands, and meanings that we bring to bear on a text as timeless as Smith's Wealth of Nations.