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Class Conflict and Adam Smith's “Stages of Social History”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Ingrid H. Rima
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Extract

The Wealth of Nations (WN) is not a book from which we expect much enlightenment about class conflict. In spite of well-known passages referring to the diverging interests of workers, landlords and capitalists, the impression most have of WN is one of relative harmony among the classes. Nevertheless, Book III, “Of the different Progress of Opulence in different Nations,” which is the briefest and also the least studied of the five books comprising WN, provides considerable insight into the historical origin of conflict among social classes that derive from economic causes, and the circumstances under which conflict promises to become a characteristic feature of the economic process in any society.1 A re-examination of Adam Smith's theory of natural price in the context of the “stages of social history” developed in Book III, leads to interpreting the prospect for class conflict as a more integral and substantive part of WN than is generally recognized by historians of economic thought.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 1998 , pp. 103 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

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