The Wealth of Nations is a stupendous palace erected upon the granite of self-interest. Thus George Stigler, and thus, with minor qualifications here and there, two centuries of misinterpretation of Adam Smith, especially by economists. To claim that Smith endorses the notion that people should, or inevitably do, act selfishly is severely to misread his text, especially in relation to other theories of human motivation at the time. That misreading arises, especially, from a misunderstanding of the famous “butcher and baker” paragraph in Book I, chapter ii of the Wealth of Nations – a misunderstanding that virtually inverts the true meaning of that paragraph. I explore the paragraph in depth here, commenting on sections of it line by line, so as to bring out what I take to be its overall argument. The result points, among other things, to a deep kinship, as well as certain significant differences, between Smith and Aristotle.

This chapter shows how thin the legal-economic analysis of property law has been and responds to a few particular arguments in that field, including arguments about the general structure of property law, adverse possession, and dead-hand control.

This chapter describes the motivations for an analytical, “internal” critique of the law-and-economics movement. In particular, it discusses earlier types of critiques and shows that, while they are probably successful on their own terms, they have done little to dislodge economic-style thinking as a dominant force in American private law. Instead, a critique on the law-and-economics movement’s own terms is needed. The chapter also identifies several recurring problems, or “antipatterns,” in legal-economic reasoning.

This chapter summarizes the problems of the law-and-economics movement and tries to outline new ways for economic thinking to make a more lasting contribution to law.

This chapter develops and critiques the major economic arguments in tort law, focusing mostly on the model of bilateral precaution, which attempts to analyze the foundational choice between negligence and strict liability. It also responds to “least-cost avoider” arguments and shows how little progress economic thinking has made in understanding most of tort law. The commonplace conclusion that tort law has easily succumbed to the law-and-economics movement is incorrect.

This chapter responds to leading arguments about contract remedies, including the theory of efficient breach, contract interpretation, rules of disclosure (or permitting nondisclosure), consideration, and other topics in contract law. It shows how little progress the law-and-economics movement has made in understanding most areas of contract law, despite the obvious connections between contracts and economics.

Chapter 16 concerns national, public credit, with two axes. First, it argues that Staël’s theory of credit is richer than that of the tyrants, from Convention to Empire, who exiled the woman they owed two million francs. She calls such tyranny myopic, like building an economy on theft; modern states require public credit. Second, later history again denied Staël credit, exiling her from their all-male Revolution canon by seeing women’s chatter where her dialectic stood. This dialectic is retraced throughout Staël’s works but primarily in her posthumous Considérations sur la Révolution française.

This chapter considers the problem of ‘heavy freight’, a problem posited by Anthony Snodgrass in the 1980s concerning how Greeks might have moved heavy goods like marble around the Greek world. A dataset of freestanding marble statues is presented, where the size and the shape of these statues is used to consider how much marble might have been used in the Greek world during various economic production processes. After estimating the scale of the industry, this chapter uses spatial network modelling to consider some of the routes along which marble might have been transported on the sea, using a rules-based system that ships will always have gone the most direct route from-anchorage-to-anchorage. The shape of these networks is then discussed in light of their implications for our understanding of the whole of the Greek world.

This chapter builds on the discussion of product shipping from the previous chapter, but by introducing a different sort of product: commodity or semi-luxury goods (in the words of Lin Foxhall), things transported in ceramic amphoras that were also loaded onto ships. The distribution of pottery from across various sanctuaries and urban sites is considered to make the point that certain sites ‘specialised’ in various products, and that there might be evidence for Greeks selecting certain products for import or export. This element of choice is indicative of a wide amount of economic knowledge circulating in the Greek world that is not immediately materially visible. Spatial network modelling is conducted for this dataset too, revealing similar shapes to those from the previous chapter, and making the case for possible ‘piggy-backing’ of goods shipped from similar production sites to points of consumption.

The dataset discussed in this chapter is coinage, specifically the first coinage minted in the Aegean Basin. The start of this chapter considers to what extent coinage was first used as either an economic or a political tool, and, therefore, whether any patterns in the dataset will reveal more about political or economic networks. In presenting continuities of the dataset using a network analytical model, this chapter illustrates how the spread of coinage across the Aegean from Ionian innovators is indicative of a pattern in the spread of technology. This pattern is juxtaposed with the distribution of amphoras pattern, indicating that there is a qualitatively similar economic pattern, albeit separated with a large time-lag. This pattern is a useful reminder that different types of economic network laid the foundations for one another, and that material evidence may not always be contemporary with the formation of networks.

This chapter examines the networks and institutions that fostered the production of explicitly ‘literary’ novels in Australia during the late twentieth century. It considers how economic changes to the publishing industry since 1980 affected the way that novels were produced and received. While literary novels were primarily produced by major trade publishers and university presses in the 1980s and early 1990s, they have increasingly been published by small presses. Literary novels arguably now have less influence within the larger literary field, but remain important within prestigious networks and institutions. The chapter then examines the careers of two authors – Gerald Murnane and David Malouf – who both began writing during the ‘conglomerate era’ and have continued to publish during the ‘age of Amazon’. While both authors have had national and international literary success, this success has relied on different institutions and networks. Malouf has had a broad success, in part because his works have been enthusiastically taken up in secondary and tertiary educational settings, whereas Murnane has relied on a more diffuse network of publishers and reviewers interested in experimental forms of writing.