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- Herausgeber: Quickie Classics
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
First published in 1776, The Wealth of Nations advances a sweeping analysis of commercial society. Smith dissects the division of labor—famously, the pin factory—distinguishes natural from market prices, and traces capital, money, and trade. In lucid Enlightenment prose, he dismantles mercantilism, argues for freer commerce, and delineates limited public functions—defense, justice, infrastructure—founding classical political economy while grounding theory in historical examples and institutional detail. Adam Smith (1723–1790), Scotland's leading moral philosopher and Glasgow professor, carried into this work insights from The Theory of Moral Sentiments and a lifelong dialogue with David Hume. Travels in France while tutoring the Duke of Buccleuch brought him to the physiocrats, especially Quesnay and Turgot, sharpening his empirical method and his conviction that secure property and impartial justice foster prosperity. For readers of economic policy, intellectual history, or the ethics of markets, this book remains indispensable. It rewards careful study not as a brief for unbounded laissez-faire but as a nuanced blueprint that balances liberty with institutions. Students, policymakers, and reflective citizens will find lasting tools to think clearly about growth, taxation, trade, and the state. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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The Wealth of Nations (Summarized Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the heart of The Wealth of Nations lies the tension between private interest and the public good, a drama in which everyday acts of production and exchange can build collective prosperity only when shaped by workable institutions, dependable justice, and prudent limits on privilege, as Adam Smith explores how specialization multiplies productivity, how prices reflect conditions across distant markets, and how laws, customs, and taxation may either liberate or restrain enterprise across the commercial societies of eighteenth-century Europe, inviting readers to weigh the delicate balance between freedom and regulation that sustains national wealth while guarding against the distortions of monopoly, favoritism, and shortsighted policy.
First published in 1776 during the Scottish Enlightenment, this work is a landmark treatise in political economy, written by the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith and addressed to the commercial world of Britain and continental Europe. Its pages analyze the institutions and practices of an emerging market society marked by expanding trade, imperial connections, and fiscal pressures of war. The book engages with prevailing mercantile doctrines, measuring them against evidence drawn from prices, wages, and trade patterns. Without formal mathematics, it offers a systematic inquiry into how nations grow rich and why policies that appear prudent may in fact squander productive potential.
Readers encounter a patient, empirical voice that builds arguments from concrete observations: workshops, markets, taxes, and the routines of labor. Smith pairs clear definitions with historical sketches, allowing principles to emerge from familiar scenes rather than from axioms. The tone is measured and reformist, critical of error but attentive to unintended consequences. Chapters proceed by tracing causes and effects through chains of incentives, with digressions that illuminate money, trade routes, and public finance. The prose rewards slow reading: long sentences, careful qualifications, and examples that test general claims against the stubborn details of practice in agriculture, manufacture, and commerce.
A central theme is the division of labor, through which specialization raises output and links individuals by exchange. From this foundation, the book examines prices, wages, profits, and rents as signals that coordinate activity across dispersed producers and consumers. Competition disciplines power and reveals costs; scarcity and opportunity cost press choices. Yet markets depend on preconditions: trust, property rights, and impartial justice. Smith attends to the frictions of distance, regulation, and information, showing how transport, money, and credit ease or obstruct cooperation. The analysis uncovers how seemingly local rules and privileges ripple outward to alter national productivity, revenue, and opportunity.
Another throughline is public policy. The book challenges mercantilist restrictions that equate wealth with hoarded bullion or privileged trade, arguing instead for policies that enlarge productive capacity. It warns against monopolies and exclusive charters that distort prices and stunt innovation, while acknowledging cases where collective action is needed. Smith assigns the state essential tasks: security, justice, and certain public works and institutions that markets undersupply, and weighs taxes by their fairness and efficiency. The result is neither laissez-faire absolutism nor dirigisme, but a framework for judging when rules foster enterprise and when they entrench rent-seeking at the expense of broad prosperity.
Contemporary readers will find a toolkit for thinking about globalization, supply chains, antitrust, and the design of safety nets. Smith's analysis clarifies why tariffs can misallocate resources, why entrenched privileges raise costs, and why public goods (from infrastructure to basic education) can raise long-run productivity. His attention to incentives illuminates debates about industrial policy, while his emphasis on justice underlines the need for predictable rules that protect property and contract without granting favoritism. The book does not offer ready-made formulas; it provides durable questions that help assess new technologies, financial innovations, and shifting labor markets through the lens of incentives and institutions.
Approached as a sustained argument rather than a set of slogans, The Wealth of Nations rewards readers who test its claims against present experience. Its durability comes from a humane realism: prosperity arises from countless decisions shaped by norms, knowledge, and rules, and reforms work when they respect that complexity. By mapping how production, exchange, and governance interlock, Smith equips citizens and policymakers to distinguish growth from mere transfer, liberty from license, and prudence from panic. To read him today is to gain a disciplined way of asking what policies expand capability and how a society may share the gains.
Synopsis
Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, sets out to explain how prosperity arises and how it is sustained. Written by a Scottish moral philosopher drawing on observation, history, and logical analysis, the treatise is organized into five books. It examines productive power, capital, the historical evolution of economic life, competing systems of policy, and the fiscal duties of the state. Smith’s central concern is to identify the institutions and incentives that shape output and incomes. He proceeds by linking individual behavior to broad social outcomes, aiming to distinguish durable causes of wealth from temporary or illusory gains.
Smith begins with the division of labor as the primary source of productivity. By separating tasks and allowing workers to specialize, output expands dramatically compared with solitary production. He illustrates this with a simple manufacturing example to show how coordination and repetition multiply efficiency. Specialization, however, depends on the extent of the market: improved transport, urban growth, and trade enlarge opportunities to exchange, which in turn support further specialization. He roots exchange in a common human inclination to trade and bargain, emphasizing that complex cooperation can emerge from local interactions without central direction.
Having established specialization as a foundation, Smith analyzes exchange and the role of money. Barter’s limitations prompt the adoption of a common medium, and metallic coin and later paper instruments facilitate trade over distance and time. He distinguishes the nominal prices expressed in money from underlying real values, often assessed in terms of labor or the purchasing power over goods. Market prices fluctuate with demand and supply, but competition tends to align them with a natural price reflecting ordinary wages, profits, and rent. This framework explains both short-run deviations and the longer-run gravitation of prices toward costs of production.
Smith then assesses the shares of income: wages for labor, profits for stock, and rent for land. He traces how bargaining power, legal rules, and economic conditions affect wages, noting that expanding economies typically favor workers more than stagnant ones. Profits, he argues, are influenced by competition and the abundance of capital, with rates tending to fall as markets deepen and rivals proliferate. Rent arises from the differential qualities and locations of land and from demand for its produce. Through these components, Smith connects distributive outcomes to growth, competition, and resource scarcity, avoiding simple one-cause explanations.
Turning to capital, Smith distinguishes between stock consumed for immediate enjoyment and stock employed to generate future output. He classifies capital into fixed forms, such as tools and machinery, and circulating forms, such as wages and materials. Accumulation depends on saving and prudent reinvestment, and Smith argues that parsimony, more than prodigality, advances national opulence. He examines banking as a means to mobilize idle balances, discussing how credit can expand industry when carefully managed and destabilize it when imprudent. By tracing how capital flows into different employments, he explains patterns of profit, interest, and the organization of production.
Smith’s historical analysis explores why some nations advance faster than others. He contrasts an ideal sequence, in which agriculture improves before manufacturing and foreign commerce, with Europe’s experience, where urban trade often flourished first and helped reform landholding and rural productivity. Feudal institutions, including inheritance practices and restraints on alienating land, impeded improvement by dispersing incentives and authority. Over time, commercial towns fostered order and security, encouraging investment and agricultural change. The account links legal and political arrangements to economic development, showing how shifts in property rights and urban-rural interactions altered the path of growth.
Smith next evaluates prevailing systems of political economy. He criticizes mercantilist doctrines that equate wealth with bullion and promote restrictive trade policies, arguing that such measures misread national interest and often protect narrow groups. He examines monopolies, colonial commerce, bounties, and prohibitions, contending that many interventions distort prices and misallocate resources. He also appraises the physiocratic belief that land alone is productive, finding merit in its emphasis on agriculture but rejecting its exclusivity. In place of system-building, he outlines a general approach favoring freer exchange and competition, while recognizing practical exceptions and the need for gradual, prudent reform.
In the final book, Smith considers the revenue and duties of the sovereign. He assigns to government the functions of defense, justice, and the provision of certain public works and institutions that markets underprovide, including infrastructure and aspects of education. He formulates principles for taxation emphasizing fairness, predictability, convenience, and economy, and reviews the incidence and effects of taxes on land, profits, wages, and consumption. He analyzes public debt and the fiscal strains of war and empire, warning of long-term burdens. His treatment blends normative guidance with institutional detail, showing how state finance shapes economic incentives and stability.
The Wealth of Nations closes by relating individual incentives, legal frameworks, and market processes to national prosperity. Smith’s analysis underscores how self-interested actions, when channeled by competition and sound institutions, can yield broad social benefits, while privileges and restraints on trade often undermine growth. By integrating history, policy critique, and theory, the work established key concepts of classical political economy and a vocabulary for debates over trade, taxation, and the role of government. Its enduring significance lies in clarifying the conditions under which economic coordination advances the public interest without assuming that unregulated behavior invariably achieves it.
Historical Context
Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared in London in 1776, amid the Scottish Enlightenment and Britain’s expanding commercial society. Smith had been professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1751 to 1764, where he lectured on jurisprudence, political economy, and ethics, and earlier published The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). He composed much of his treatise after resigning to tutor the young Duke of Buccleuch and settling with a pension. The book emerged from academic institutions and civic life oriented toward trade and improvement, and it scrutinizes that world’s underlying economic order.
Britain’s imperial economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been shaped by mercantilist policies, especially the Navigation Acts that channeled colonial commerce through English ships and ports. Chartered monopolies, notably the East India Company and Royal African Company, received exclusive privileges in overseas trade. Policymakers emphasized accumulating bullion and running trade surpluses, and colonial markets were organized to benefit metropolitan producers. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) left Britain with heavy debts, prompting new revenue measures and renewed attention to trade regulation. Smith’s treatise directly addresses this mercantile framework, arguing against exclusive privileges and the balance-of-trade doctrine that dominated imperial legislation and debate.
The eighteenth-century Atlantic economy revolved around sugar, tobacco, and enslaved labor, linking British ports to Caribbean plantations and North American colonies. Triangular trade routes carried manufactured goods, enslaved Africans, and colonial staples, and customs regimes enforced metropolitan preferences. Controversies over monopoly and taxation intensified after 1763, as tighter enforcement and new duties strained colonial relations. Smith examined these arrangements as a system of economic incentives and costs, criticizing colonial exclusivity and assessing slavery as economically inefficient compared with free labor. By analyzing how coercion and monopoly distorted prices and productivity, the work cast a critical light on the commercial empire’s prevailing practices.
From 1764 to 1766, Smith traveled in France as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch, meeting leading figures of the Enlightenment. He engaged with the physiocrats, such as François Quesnay and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, who advanced a policy of laissez-faire and a single tax on the net product of land. Smith admired their defense of free trade and their emphasis on natural order, though he rejected their claim that only agriculture produced a surplus. Encounters in Parisian salons and academies deepened his comparative perspective. The book assimilates and revises these continental theories, adapting them to Britain’s mixed commercial and industrial realities.
Britain’s financial system featured the Bank of England (founded 1694), expanding public credit, and active markets for government debt and company shares. In Scotland, competitive note-issuing banks fueled commerce but also generated risks, epitomized by the 1772 credit crisis and the collapse of Douglas, Heron and Company (the Ayr Bank). Debates about paper money, usury laws, and the regulation of small-denomination notes intensified in the 1770s. Smith drew on these episodes and on Scottish experience to analyze money, banking, and interest, seeking rules that promoted liquidity without instability. His treatment reflects a milieu wrestling with the promise and perils of modern finance.
Across Britain, statutes and corporate privileges structured labor and trade. The Statute of Artificers (1563) regulated apprenticeships and wages, and guild traditions influenced town economies. At the same time, enclosure reshaped rural landholding, and infrastructure improved through turnpike trusts and projects like the Bridgewater Canal (opened 1761). Early mechanization in textiles—the spinning jenny (circa 1764) and Arkwright’s water frame (patented 1769)—signaled rising productivity. Smith’s famous examples of divided tasks in manufacturing echoed developments observable in workshops and mills. By weighing legal restraints against technological and organizational changes, the book evaluates how institutions can hinder or advance the division of labor.
The work matured within the Scottish Enlightenment, whose figures—David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, Henry Home (Lord Kames), and Adam Ferguson—pursued empirical inquiry into morals, law, and society. Hume’s essays on money, commerce, and the balance of trade challenged bullionist assumptions and explored public finance, themes Smith extended with historical depth and analytical system. Scottish jurisprudence and “stadial” theories of social development framed Smith’s account of economic evolution from hunting to commercial society. Newtonian ideals of explanation informed his method. In this context, the treatise advances a “system of natural liberty,” synthesizing moral philosophy with political economy to critique prevailing policy doctrines.
On the eve of publication, Britain faced intertwined imperial crises. Disputes over taxation and representation after the Stamp Act (1765) and Townshend duties (1767) escalated to armed conflict in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In India, the East India Company’s territorial rule and financial instability prompted parliamentary intervention through the Regulating Act of 1773. These controversies forced reconsideration of monopoly, taxation, and colonial policy. Smith’s book addressed legislators and citizens confronting such choices, advancing arguments for freer trade, restrained privileges, and equitable taxation. It both captured the pressures of wartime empire and offered principles to reform its economic governance.
Author Biography
Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a Scottish philosopher and political economist whose work helped define the Scottish Enlightenment and laid foundations for modern social science. He is best known for The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Writing in an era of expanding commerce and contentious debate over trade and statecraft, Smith sought to explain how moral norms, legal institutions, and market mechanisms interact. His analyses of sympathy, the division of labor, and the critique of mercantilism shaped intellectual life across Britain and continental Europe and continue to influence scholarship and policy discussion today.
Smith’s education linked him to the leading institutions and thinkers of his time. He studied at the University of Glasgow, where Francis Hutcheson’s lectures on moral philosophy left a lasting imprint, before continuing as a scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. After returning to Scotland, he delivered public lectures in Edinburgh that brought him visibility among learned audiences. These experiences helped him develop a comprehensive teaching program spanning ethics, rhetoric, law, and political economy. The intellectual milieu of the Scottish Enlightenment, including conversations with figures such as David Hume, provided a fertile environment for Smith’s emerging system of thought.
Smith’s academic career flourished at the University of Glasgow, where he first held the Chair of Logic and then the Chair of Moral Philosophy. His courses integrated natural jurisprudence, police (political economy), and the theory of ethics. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he advanced a powerful account of moral judgment built on sympathy and the “impartial spectator.” He explored virtue, propriety, and the formation of character, insisting that markets and manners cannot be understood apart from each other. The book earned him broad recognition and underwent multiple editions, with revisions that refined his views on moral psychology and social institutions.
In the mid-1760s, Smith left his professorship to travel on the Continent as a tutor, spending extended periods in France and elsewhere. Exposure to Enlightenment salons and the political arithmetic of the day deepened his interest in trade, taxation, and public finance. He engaged with physiocratic ideas circulating in Paris, while also reflecting on Britain’s commercial empire. Returning to Scotland, he devoted years to composing the Wealth of Nations, drawing on lecture notes, travel observations, and historical sources. The project sought to explain the origins of national prosperity and the institutional arrangements that foster or hinder economic development.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) examined how specialization, secure property, and open exchange encourage productivity. Smith criticized mercantilist restrictions and argued for freer trade, while defining essential public functions: justice, national defense, and public works, including certain educational provisions. He also warned that repetitive labor could dull workers’ capacities, urging remedies through public instruction. The book reached a wide audience, influenced debates on taxation and trade, and became a touchstone for policymakers and philosophers. Its analytic breadth—combining economic history, legal theory, and moral philosophy—helped establish political economy as a distinct field.
In later years, Smith served as a Commissioner of Customs in Scotland, residing in Edinburgh while continuing to revise his earlier work. He maintained an active role in the city’s intellectual circles and was associated with the founding of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Posthumous publications, including Essays on Philosophical Subjects and the “History of Astronomy,” along with student-based compilations such as Lectures on Jurisprudence, revealed additional dimensions of his thought. Near the end of his life, he directed friends to destroy many unpublished manuscripts, underscoring his care about the integrity of his corpus and the coherence of the ideas he chose to preserve.
Smith’s legacy has been remarkably durable. Often called a founder of modern economics, he is increasingly recognized as a moral philosopher whose analysis of markets presupposes social norms and institutional frameworks. Scholars continue to debate the relationship between his ethical theory and political economy, finding common threads in his attention to incentives, justice, and public goods. His work informs contemporary discussions on trade policy, antitrust, taxation, education, and the limits of regulation. New editions and historical studies keep his arguments in circulation, ensuring that both his humane vision and analytic methods remain central to thinking about commerce and society.
The Wealth of Nations (Summarized Edition)
Introduction and plan of the work
Each year a nation lives on the fruits of its labour, whether harvested at home or obtained abroad with that harvest. Plenty turns on how that store compares with the mouths that consume it. Two forces decide the balance: the skill, dexterity, and judgment guiding labour, and the fraction of citizens engaged in useful toil. Skill weighs heavier. In hunting tribes every able body works, yet poverty drives them to abandon infants, elders, and the sick to hunger or beasts. In flourishing states many idle persons squander vast produce, yet the total yield lets even the poorest diligent worker enjoy comforts no savage can reach.
First comes the search for the causes that heighten labour’s power and the order in which its fruits spread among ranks. Next follows capital: its nature, accumulation, and the differing quantities of labour each investment sets in motion. A third part traces the diverse national policies that, since Rome’s fall, have favoured town industries over agriculture and the circumstances that fixed this preference. The fourth compares rival economic doctrines born of private interests, marking their influence on princes and states. The last examines the sovereign’s revenue, its necessary expenses, ways of raising them, the lure of public debt, and its effects on real wealth.
Part 1 Of the Causes of Improvement in the productive Powers of Labour, and of the Order according to which its Produce is naturally distributed among the different Ranks of the People
Chapter 1 Of the Division of Labour
The greatest leaps in productive power and skill arise from dividing labour. This truth appears most clearly in minor trades where every stage sits under one roof, unlike vast industries whose scattered crews hide their countless fractions. Consider the humble pin-maker: a newcomer, ignorant of the craft and its machines, might toil all day for a single pin, certainly not twenty. Yet modern practice isolates the work into many hands; one draws wire, another straightens, a third cuts, a fourth points, a fifth grinds a seat for the head, while separate specialists fashion and attach that head, whiten the metal, pack the pins.
In some shops the whole craft splits into about eighteen distinct motions; I once watched ten men, each handling two or three of them, produce roughly twelve pounds of pins a day—more than forty-eight thousand pieces, giving each man four thousand eight hundred. Working alone they could not have made twenty, perhaps not one. The same pattern holds everywhere: as societies grow polished, trades separate, farmers farm, weavers weave, and countless hands share a single bolt of linen or wool. Agriculture, bound to seasons, cannot divide so finely, so its yield lags behind manufactories whose goods outclass and underprice those of poorer lands.
Three causes explain this surge: first, the specialist’s heightened dexterity; second, the time saved by staying at one task; third, machines that let one person equal many. When every life is narrowed to a single motion, fingers learn lightning speed. A common smith pressed to forge nails shapes two or three hundred bad ones in a day, while a smith who nails often reaches eight hundred or a thousand. Boys reared solely to nail-making strike out more than two thousand three hundred. Pins and metal buttons, split into even simpler strokes, fly faster still, feats once thought beyond the human hand.
Time spared by avoiding constant shifts between trades is far greater than it first appears. One minute a country weaver must leave his loom for the field, then tramp back again; the journey alone steals hours, and even when both tasks sit under one roof he still drifts. In turning from one set of tools to another he idles, mind sluggish, hands trifling until zeal returns. Repeating this every half-hour breeds a settled habit of sauntering that dulls vigor even in emergencies. Apart from lost dexterity, this indolence alone severely cuts the quantity he can accomplish.
Proper machinery eases and shortens labour. Such devices spring from the division of labour, for minds fixed on a single, simple task eagerly seek quicker means. In many subdivided workshops the most ingenious machines were devised by ordinary hands. Early fire-engines, for instance, needed a boy to open and shut the boiler valve as the piston rose and fell. One playful lad tied a string from handle to beam; the valve thereafter moved itself, freeing him for games. A major improvement on that great engine thus emerged from a boy’s wish to spare his own effort.
Yet countless refinements come from those who never touch the finished tool. Once machine making becomes a separate craft, its artisans add inventions of their own; meanwhile philosophers—citizens whose business is to observe and combine—contribute by yoking distant powers together. As society advances, speculation itself subdivides, each thinker honing one branch; dexterity rises, time is saved, knowledge multiplies. The same rich multiplication of products flows through every art. Each worker produces more than he needs, exchanges the surplus with others doing the same, and in a well-ordered community a broad plenty spreads through every rank.
Notice the day-labourer in a thriving land. The rough woollen coat on his back unites the crafts of shepherd, sorter, carder, dyer, spinner, weaver, fuller, dresser, plus merchants and carriers who ferry materials across counties and seas; shipbuilders, sailors, ropemakers gather the dyer’s drugs from distant shores. Even his shepherd’s shears demand miner, smelter, charcoal burner, smith, mill-wright, and more. Extend the search to shirt, shoes, bed, hearth, coal, knives, plates, bread, beer, glass window, and the tools behind them, and thousands stand revealed as silent helpers. Thus a frugal peasant lives better than many a naked king.
