I’m glad to have left the student phase of my life behind me, but it’s this back-to-school time when I see the syllabi professors have posted and remember how exciting it was to embark on new material. And would love to audit Kieran Healy’s class on social theory, which includes a piece on Adam Smith:
Although Smith is often presented as the champion of the individual, and opposed to thinkers who emphasize social structure or the state, it’s immediately clear when you read him that Smith was as much a “discoverer of society”—that is, of the idea that the social world is a human product consisting of myriad interlocking relationships dependent on specific institutions and human capacities—as any of the other theorists typically recognized as founders of modern sociology. His treatment of the problem of the division of labor also provides a platform to understand the others. Marx is much easier to understand once you know a bit about Smith, of course, but so are Durkheim’s ideas about social solidarity and the nonrational foundations of contractual exchange. And much of Weber’s work on the origins of capitalism was conceived explicitly with Smith in mind.
All right, now I need to actually read Wealth of Nations or Theory of Moral Sentiments.
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