Das Adam Smith Legacy Problem

Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from the last chapter (Ch. 13) of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold.) “Which questions should we pose to Adam Smith, and which questions remain open or unanswered? Or is it the other way around? After all, as we have seen throughout the pages of this book, it is Adam Smith who still poses questions to us, and it is Smith who leaves it up to us to provide our own answers. We conclude, then, with the most difficult and contested open question of all, Das Legacy Problem. Who was Adam Smith, really? How should he be remembered? What is his true legacy? “The deeper we dig into Smith’s life and work, the more surprises and contradictions we continue to find. He was a college dropout —but why did he drop out? He was a freelance lecturer — but where are those lectures? He is often described as an absent-minded college professor — but was he really all that absent-minded…