Adam Smith : critical responses v.1

Volume 1. contemporary response to the first of the posthumous works.

This is a collection of comments, reviews and introductions to all the works of Adam Smith, published and unpublished. It covers from the earliest comments on his Edinburgh lectures of 1748-51 to the post Second World War introduction to an Italian translation of the Wealth Nations. As his works and thought have been received positively or negatively nearly all over the world from continental Europe to the Far East, there is an accumulation of Adam Smith literature outside the Anglophone countries where there is their own long history of criticism.

All the introductions and supplementary essays, including substantial notes of the editors of the later English editions of his works, are included. Some articles. are added to them to show the development of Smith's scholarship. As to the non-Anglophone literature, in addition to the introductions to the Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish translations of his works, some Russians, Chinese and Japanese articles are included. All the non English languages in which those works are written are done into English by the translators mentioned in the Acknowledgements. An Indian work which consists in the excerpt from the second half of the Wealth of Nations is included because of the peculiar relation of India to Britain and the relevant contents of those chapters.

There is no duplication with the two sets of Critical Assessments but a few with the two volumes of the Contemporary Response to Adam Smith, edited by Ian S. Ross and John Reeder, respectively.

The collection consists of six volumes. Volume I contains contemporary comments, letters and reviews on Smith's works from his Edinburgh lectures to post humous Essays on Philosophical Subjects, together with the two earliest lives. The second and third volumes contain introductions, supplementary chapters and notes to the early English editions of the Wealth of Nations, together with early reviews of some of them. It also includes three critical remarks on his moral philosophy in the early ninteenth century and two studies by representative writers of the century. The remaining three volumes are for the overseas response to his works largely taken from the introductions to the translations of his works.