Books, Arts & Manners: Free at Last

Adam Smith in His Time and Ours: Designing the Decent Society, by Jerry Z. Muller (Free Press, 272 pp., $22.95)

BOTH enemies and doctrinaires of the free market have become accustomed in recent years to representing Adam Smith as a species of proto-libertarian, an advocate of market institutions who believed that they needed only the motive of self-interest to make them work for the general good. On this interpretation of his thought, as a precursor of the modern antinomian heresy of libertarianism, Smith viewed the market as a kind of perpetual-motion machine, which, once it had been emancipated from governmental interference, needed none of the traditional virtues to remain at work as an engine of wealth-creation and a motor of human progress. Market institutions on this view were free-standing expressions of a system of natural liberty which in no way needed the support of strong moral traditions for their stability or justification.

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John Gray

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Adam Smith in His Time and Ours: Designing the Decent Society, by Jerry Z. Muller (Free Press, 272 pp., $22.95)

BOTH enemies and doctrinaires of the free market have become accustomed in recent years to representing Adam Smith as a species of proto-libertarian, an advocate of market institutions who believed that they needed only the motive of self-interest to make them work for the general good. On this interpretation of his thought, as a precursor of the modern antinomian heresy of libertarianism, Smith viewed the market as a kind of perpetual-motion machine, which, once it had been emancipated from governmental interference, needed none of the traditional virtues to remain at work as an engine of wealth-creation and a motor of human progress. Market institutions on this view were free-standing expressions of a system of natural liberty which in no way needed the support of strong moral traditions for their stability or justification.