The Wealth of Nations at 250: Still on the Run

The 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations challenges us to ask whether, and to what extent, the interdisciplinary developments in Smith scholarship deepen our understanding of Smith's economic ideas; and whether they can allow us to recover a stronger sense of unity and coherence to his work, or instead bring into sharper view its tensions, ambivalences, and internal fractures. This special issue of HOPE seeks to illuminate the book anew by offering a glimpse of what the Adam Smith of the twenty-first century might look like—contested and reinterpreted, as ever. The Smith who emerges is neither the prophet of spontaneous order nor merely the critic of its illusions; neither the theorist of self-regulating markets nor simply the moral philosopher called in to correct them from outside. He is, rather, a thinker of the fragile conditions under which improvement, liberty, and human flourishing might be brought into concord, and of the recurrent forces that pull them apart.