Adam Smith on Empire, the Invisible Hand and the Progress of Society

Sorbonne Symposium - Guest EditorInternational audienceFrom the 3 to 6 July 2013, Jean-François Dunyach from the Centre Roland Mousnier of the University of Paris IV Sorbonne organized, at the Sorbonne in Paris, the 26th annual international conference of the Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society which was, for the first time, organized in partnership with the International Adam Smith Society. Keynote speakers included Amartya Sen, Emma Rothschild, and Michael Biziou. The general topic of the conference was “Scotland, Europe and Empire in the Age of Adam Smith and Beyond.” This section of the book comprises a selection of papers on Smith, drafts of which were presented to the conference and then prepared and submitted to The Adam Smith Review, which followed its usual review process. Of the six selected papers, three deal with the main topic of the conference: Smith’s analysis of colonialism and the British Empire. They offer new insights on Smith’s rather neglected political thinking and on how his vision of the ancient colonies nurtures his reflections on the fate of the British Empire. History is also at the heart of his theory of the progress of society, the famous “four-stage theory,” which is the main issue of two papers here. The first of these proposes to end the controversy over the paternity of that theory. Based on a new reading of the “Anderson notes,” it claims that Smith gives the first formulation of the four-stage theory in 1749 in a public lecture. The second shows how the importance of material progress in the four-stage theory went from a historiographical outlook to a political economy outlook in Smith. The last paper is about the idea of the invisible hand and its intellectual legacy, especially in natural sciences