Adam Smith's sociological economic

John Stuart Mill warned that the definition of a science, like the walls of a city, is usually constructed 'not to be a receptacle for such edifices as might afterwards spring up, but to circumscribe an aggregation already in existence. Aggregations change, and there is no reason to suppose that the scope and method of economics in the eighteenth century were the same as they are today, after making allowance for the fact that its techniques were less sophisticated and its scholars less enlightened. In particular, the attempt to interpret Adam Smith as a primitive forebear of Paul Samuelson (homo sapiens) rather than as a thinker in his own right, unique but equal, has led to a considerable misapprehension of Smith's theories of economics and sociology. It is the aim of the present study to show how synthesis and human society formed the basis of Smith's multidisciplinary model of man and to point out that it is precisely in these respects that his approach most differed from that of the present day.
In this book author will not attempt to answer the difficult question of how far Smith's own Weltanschauung was itself the product of the economic basis of his society, of how far he enunciated the new ideas generated by that new basis rather than by his own personality or through the abstract philosophical discussions in which he participated with friends. In any case, it is important not to oversimplify the complexity and organic solidarity of Smith's writings into a neo Benthamite utilitarian ideology which it most assuredly was not. Smith is a difficult author whose name has often been invoked by men he would instantaneously have disliked to support causes he would have viewed with extreme suspicion. The fact that he elected to write the economic sociology of a period of intense commercial and industrial activity does not mean he was forced to surrender his academic detach ment. The fact that he chose to be a philosopher of the business life does not mean he was any the less a philosopher.