JOEL MILLER: Adam Smith for Dummies On the Wealth of Nations (Books That Changed the World)
O'Rourke, P. J.
BOOKS IN REVIEW Publication of the book’s first volume in 1835 (the second was in 1840) made Tocqueville an instant celebrity in Paris. Accolades showered, from the Legion of Honor to...
...It could be a simple problem of misaligned expectations...
...O’Rourke also does a decent job of intellectual backfill...
...Any edition of this classic, published in 1776, Joel Milleris publisher of the books and culture division of Thomas Nelson...
...Two major works followed, The Old Régime and the Revolution, in which he described a France prisoner of its past and prey to class hostility, and Souvenirs, a sardonic, psychologically astute look at the mediocrity of French political leadership during the revolution of 1848...
...Still, if you want to get a sense of what Smith was trying to say and why it so radically changed the world, then O’Rourke provides an ideal point of departure...
...When Smith is going on about the history of currency, for instance, or handily disMAY 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67 BOOKS IN REVIEW mantling the theories of the French physiocrats, readers can know the ultimate relevance is tied to the Big Three...
...With authors such as Steven Landsburg, Tim Harford, even Steven Levitt, I’ve grown accustomed to popularizers of economics who explain things effectively, lightly, even humorously, without trying to punctuate every other sentence with a rim shot...
...And it happens to be a sequel...
...But in many respects, Smith was as radical as they come...
...I speak from experience when I say that had Smith submitted his manuscript to a modern publisher at nine in the morning, it would have been summarily rejected by noon...
...Sen...
...68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2007...
...Among Tocqueville’s continuing lessons for today is his contention that while freedom is indeed the natural destiny of man, “I would think it a great misfortune for humanity if liberty had to take the same form in every place...
...Finally, O’Rourke is working from home, which means it’s easier to drink on the job when the job requires it (and this one surely must have...
...Smith cannot complain that O’Rourke has missed some essential point buried 19 paragraphs into a wild goose chase that the distiller has just deleted...
...It’s no light chore...
...it’s a book about how to improve the station of humanity...
...He defended free trade at a time when His Majesty’s government managed international exchange for the benefit of empire generally and London specifically...
...The whole of the man’s corpus is important to keep in mind because the people who pretend that they’ve read Das Kapital like to think of Smith as a monomaniacal prophet of greed...
...Only by long, careful preparation and training of the people in its practice can it take root...
...While Brogan’s style is sometimes less than limpid, with little concession to those who prefer a strong narrative thread, this is an erudite, absorbing portrait of the perceptive, conflicted French nobleman who has had such enduring influence on our idea of ourselves...
...In the case of Karl Marx, this is no tragedy...
...To put it in more biblical terms, Smith’s books are the two tablets of the Law—one deals with more lofty concerns, the other says don’t boost your neighbor’s burro...
...Between the meandering sentences and discursive tangents, any reasonable editor would balk...
...Adam Smith,” writes O’Rourke, “helped produce a world of individuality, autonomy, and personal fulfillment, but that world did not produce him...
...This “trinity of individual prerogatives” makes a useful guidepost for meandering through the tangle...
...Accolades showered, from the Legion of Honor to membership in the French Academy...
...Even intellectuals should have no trouble understanding Smith’s ideas [of...
...Though criticizing the American colonists as freeloaders, Smith nonetheless advised that “Great Britain should voluntarily give up all authority over her colonies, and leave them to elect their own magistrates, to enact their own laws, and to make peace and war as they might think proper...
...Smith’s first book, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, deals with improvement from a moral perspective, while Wealth comes at the same subject from the material angle...
...His job is to be substantive while making readers snigger...
...On all of these points, Smith was eventually vindicated...
...Contempt for duty, honor, and country, the crassest hostility to excellence in socalled education, monkey-house sexuality, and the drug-fueled party that never ends are now entrenched Algis Valiunasis a literary journalist living in Florida...
...What was that about Obama...
...He attacked the guild system and government planning when these were considered part of the natural order—as British as bad teeth and kidney pie...
...As for Smith’s politics, O’Rourke writes that his views were “conventional” and “mildly reformist...
...THE BEST EXAMPLE of O’Rourke’s concision also happens to be the most important for the book, boiling the entire thing down to a simple elevator pitch: “The Wealth of Nations,” he writes, “argues three basic principles and, by plain thinking and plentiful examples, proves them...
...But with this volume it sometimes seems as if the shtick is stuck...
...Not a bad day at the office...
...Adam Smith for Dummies DESPITE THEIR OBVIOUS DIFFERENCES, Das Kapital and The Wealth of Nations share at least one similarity: Nobody reads them...
...he was interred in the churchyard of the Tocqueville fief on Normandy’s Cotentin peninsula...
...It’s the Cliffs Notes version or, better, Adam Smith for Dummies (which a quick Amazon search reveals does not yet exist...
...Like all books, this one is a mixed bag...
...That is no small task...
...He is a master of this delivery, having pulled off this combo brilliantly in the past...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Publication of the book’s first volume in 1835 (the second was in 1840) made Tocqueville an instant celebrity in Paris...
...SOME OF SMITH’S ARGUMENTS now seem so obvious that readers may wonder why our forebears didn’t see things that way (or why Congress still doesn’t in some cases...
...In handling Smith, O’Rourke has several advantages over the editors...
...As O’Rourke quotes Smith, “A great bridge cannot be thrown over at a place where nobody passes, or merely to embellish the views from the windows of a neighboring palace...
...The insights are excellent, but the style is at times awkward—perhaps an odd thing to say of such an accomplished stylist...
...This act of goodwill might dispose Americans “to favour us in war as well as in trade, and, instead of turbulent and factious subjects, to become our most faithful, affectionate, and generous allies...
...Next, O’Rourke is better paid and working on a more luxurious deadline than the typical editor—which means he can be more patient and gracious with his dearly departed author...
...The Dreams of Your Youth THE RESIDUE OF THE SIXTIES that is not mere folderol, rodomontade, or Ben ’n’ Jerry’s tends to have the toxic throw-weight of mamba venom cut with methedrine...
...That underpaid proletariat known as editors would have raised pitchfork and laptop at any text so unnecessarily long...
...The result is a usually pleasant, generally useful, and refreshingly insightful distillation of Smith: from 900 pages down to 242...
...First, his author is dead...
...All the Trouble in the World and Eat the Rich are both minor triumphs in their scope and depth and snigger stimuli...
...O’Rourke is a wag, a wit, a wisenheimer...
...Smith attacks merchants and government officials (mercantilists) not out of a bizarre devotion to abstract principles but precisely because they are advancing their own good on the backs of others...
...It’s either that or slogging on your own through Smith’s tangent about the “Variations in the Value of Silv...
...He was thinking of France, but Americans can easily see its application to other parts of the world and its implications for nation building...
...Thanks to the colorful antics of history (many of them sticky and sanguinary), anyone can see that the On the Wealth of Nations bewhiskered dreamer was (Books That Changed the World) full of crap...
...But The Wealth of Nations is not a self-help book...
...His poor health finally caught up with him at age 53...
...There are points at which I wanted more lecture and less lark...
...A common but woefully misinformed criticism of Smith is that he was simply counseling selfishness...
...This book is a recovery effort, to acquaint a new generation with Smith’s work and his world...
...Between American Idol and the latest Barack Obama coverage, who’s got the time...
...The critics have it exactly backwards...
...By P. J. O’Rourke Not so with Adam Smith, (ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, 242 PAGES, $21.95) whose tome revealed profundities from which anyone Reviewed by Joel Miller would profit—that is, unless you count the cost of actually digesting The Wealth of Nations...
...pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and freedom of trade...
...Even capitalists think that’s bad...
...is big and dense enough to double as a doorstop...
...The value added for O’Rourke readers is that he shows the myriad ways in which Smith is still being vindicated, bringing the arguments and observations of Wealth to bear on such current headache inducements as the debates over globalization, privatization, even pork-barreling...
...Ted Stevens, call your office...
...Taking a cue from that thoroughly modern doctrine, “To each according to his attention span,” in steps P. J. O’Rourke to explicate the truths of the great Scottish philosopher...
Vol. 40 • May 2007 • No. 4
