Adam Smith Archives - Public Seminar

North America

Elon Musk’s Cruel Moral Sentiments

What the world’s richest man has yet to learn from his study of the Bible

April 3, 2025 • by David Lay Williams

Elon Musk may or may not be “the world’s richest man” these days, depending on the wildly fluctuating value of his Tesla car company, a target for those protesting Musk’s “move fast, break stuff” approach to downsizing the federal bureaucracy through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk’s savage cuts ...

Finance

History Rhymes

As history’s pendulum swings back, the problems and promises of globalization’s fragmented frameworks become almost too evident

February 22, 2023 • by Rana Foroohar

The neoliberal thinking that has defined globalization in the West since the eighties decrees that state involvement in the economy is verboten-but that’s actually antithetical to America’s origins....

Finance

Austerity, Then and Now

An excerpt from The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

January 9, 2023 • by Clara Mattei

Part of what makes austerity so effective as a set of policies is that it packages itself in the language of honest, hardscrabble economics. Vague sentiments such as “hard work” and “thrift” are hardly novel; they have been extolled by economists since the days of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and ...

Capitalism

A Displaced Worker in a World of Goods

What Winslow Homer’s Old Mill teaches us about the world industrialization made

September 28, 2021 • by Steven Stoll

A woman in a red jacket, lunch pail in hand and eyes forward, travels to work. She ascends a ramp leading from a meadow of wildflowers, over a millpond to a small water-powered textile factory. Winslow Homer painted Old Mill in 1871, but its subject looks back fifty years to the first ...

Capitalism

Is Capitalism in Crisis, Dying, Dead — or Very Much Alive, for Better or Worse?

In search of an elusive concept

August 27, 2020 • by Ben Kodres-O'Brien

In 2014, a Museum of Capitalism opened for the first time, as if to commemorate a dying form of life. “The museum began just as capitalism ended,” declared the wall text for the most recent iteration of the travelling museum, at The New School in New York in fall 2019: ...

Is Capitalism in Crisis, Dying, Dead — or Very Much Alive, for Better or Worse?

Education

Reviving Humanities Education

A counterintuitive suggestion

May 23, 2018 • by Andrew Hartman

A 2017 Pew Research Center poll reveals a majority of Republicans believe American universities have a negative impact on the country. It seems the nation’s system of higher education is falling prey to growing political polarization. Just as Republicans have increasingly come to distrust other seemingly liberal institutions, such as the ...

Feature

Biofinance

Biological foundations of capital imaginaries

March 13, 2018 • by Marc Aziz Michael

Capitalism has been the subject of too many conflicting definitions for any of the claims that follow to have any purchase on truth -- understood as an adequation to the real. Beneath the numerous disagreements, however, a common substratum can be gleaned between the liberal Smithian, and the classical Marxist ...

Power and Crisis

Moral Sentiment and Moral Judgment after the Paris Attacks

On the problem of selective solidarity

November 18, 2015 • by Michael Weinman

Ever since the dust began to clear after what President Hollande rightfully called "the horror" of Friday night, my media consumption -- yes, especially my Facebook feed (constantly refreshed with reflections from Public Seminar) ...

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