Adam Smith's Theory of Violence and the Political-Economics of Development

Weingast, Barry R.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2881042

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This method imposes barriers to understanding many arguments of historic politicaleconomic theorists because these ideas are not part of the contemporary neoclassical economics on which most HET scholars base their assessments of historic theorists. Smith puts his most detailed arguments about the emergence of liberty in Book III of the Wealth of Nations, the least read and most misunderstood by economists of Smith's five books (but see Skinner, 1975;Aspromourgos, 2009: ch 5;Weingast, 2017;Liu and Weingast, 2021). A casual reading of Book III is likely to be insufficient to see the theory underlying Smith's narrative.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Smith asked, how did liberty emerge from feudal society? -which he considered a terrible predicament, being not only a no-growth society (or one nearly so), but also a stable equilibrium lasting for centuries (Weingast, 2017;. 19 Before turning to the analysis, let me state the military competition hypothesis.…”

Section: Smith's Positive Argument For How Liberty Emerged Out Of The...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Liberty and the neoclassical fallacy

Weingast

2023

Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Does liberty matter for economics? To address this question, I distinguish among three different types of liberty: Adam Smith’s, the neoclassical, and the so-called “classical liberal.” They differ in that the neoclassical and the classical liberal perspectives presume the existence, typically without noting it, of the four conditions that comprise the foundation of liberty, namely, secure property rights, enforcement of contracts, absence of government predation, and security. In contrast, Adam Smith sought to explain these foundations. In this article—an extraliterary review of one of the central themes of Acemoglu and Robinson (2019)—I draw the implications of Smith’s approach, and I explain why neoclassical economics—which takes the foundations of liberty as given—is unable to understand the work of Smith on this topic and, hence, on economic development. I also show that the neoclassical and the classical liberal approaches rest on a foundation of magic: they both presume the foundational conditions just noted but fail to explain how they arise. Put simply, the neoclassical approach has no explanation for the origin of liberty or of the mechanisms that sustain it. If markets require the four conditions of the foundation of liberty, then a complete explanation of the origin and development of markets must include an explanation of how these conditions come to hold. The Smithian economic perspective is especially important for today’s developing countries, most of which, at best, struggle to create the four foundational assumptions of liberty.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Smith's Positive Argument For How Liberty Emerged Out Of The...mentioning

confidence: 99%