Adam Smith’s Sufficient Conditions for Opulence

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

A while back, I cited a Forbes piece that included this statement from Adam Smith, supposedly presented two decades before The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776:

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”

Gavin Kennedy points out a slight problem:

It is true that Smith is believed to have read his paper at a Political Economy Club in Glasgow in 1755 and that it contained the passage quoted.

The problem is that only Dugald Stewart — the source for the quotation in 1793 — appears to have been the only person to have seen the paper and it was never published. His son, during a bout of mental illness, is believed to have burned it, along with some other of his father’s papers.

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