“IN POLITICAL OECONOMY, I think Smith’s wealth of nations the best book extant.” So Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend. Three hundred years after Adam Smith’s inauspicious birth in Kirkcaldy, it’s not hard to make the case that it’s still true.
Claiming the endorsement of the greatest of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers for one’s own arguments has been a successful rhetorical gambit for at least as long as Smith’s books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, have been available to the public.
Jefferson’s lifelong opponent Alexander Hamilton lifts entire passages from in his “Report on Manufactures” to Congress, for instance, only to be met—as Yuval—by James Madison, citing Smith (rather more credibly) in opposition to Hamilton’s proposal for a national bank.
