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The Wealth of Nations
9.5Adam Smith
Adam Smith's eighteenth-century anatomy of how markets work — the founding text of modern economics and the intellectual scaffolding of every capitalist economy on earth.
GBM Assessment (Score: 9.5/10)
The Wealth of Nations is the foundational text of modern economics, a work that established the discipline as a field of systematic inquiry. Adam Smith's concepts of the invisible hand — the notion that individual self-interest can produce collective prosperity — and the division of labor as the engine of productivity have shaped economic thinking and policy for nearly two and a half centuries.
Printed in 1776, the same year as the American Declaration of Independence, The Wealth of Nations appeared at a pivotal moment in the transformation of the Western world from agrarian to industrial economies. Karl Marx's Das Kapital was conceived in part as a response to and critique of Smith's vision of capitalism, making The Wealth of Nations the starting point for the great economic debates that have defined the modern era.
The Revolutionary Decade, 1776-1781
1776: the Declaration of Independence is signed, Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations, and Gibbon begins his Decline and Fall — three foundational texts within months. Five years later, Kant publishes the Critique of Pure Reason — a 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy. The ancien regime in France is already rotting from within.
Awards & Adaptations
Foundation of economics. Core in economics programs.
Recommended Edition
First ed. (1776); E. Cannan (1904)
