The pursuit of money

Jesse Norman is one of only three or four genuine intellectuals on the Tory benches in the House of Commons. It must vex him, as it does most of us with A-levels, to witness the distressingly ignorant, chaotic and unprincipled way in which the government, run by the party of which he is a member, conducts its business and that of the country. Those who control the destinies of that government would do well to read his book on Adam Smith, and indeed Adam Smith himself. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments — which Norman correctly esteems as a fine work of philosophy with a great bearing on how we should run a civilised society — would, like its successor The Wealth of Nations, give our rulers much to think about in respect of how they discharge their duties and what proper governance really means: if they had the wit, and lacked the venality, to act on it.

Norman, whose own hinterland in political philosophy is, as he shows here and in his previous life of Edmund Burke, deep and considerable, seeks to rehabilitate Smith, who (though he does not explicitly say so) has clearly been tarnished by some sort of association with Margaret Thatcher and libertarian think-tanks. This is an unnecessarily squeamish approach. At the core of the book, between a brisk but thorough biographical essay and a somewhat less brisk (and indeed at times ponderous) assessment of Smith’s thought and its relevance to today, Norman sets out five myths about the Sage of Kirkcaldy and effectively demolishes some of them.

He disputes that there is an ‘Adam Smith problem’, something invented, almost inevitably, by the Germans, that consists of a Smith motivated by altruism (as in The Theory) and a Smith who elevates selfishness and greed (The Wealth). Norman says the two works fit together, and he is right: one is the necessary prelude to the other, not least because it sets out the ground rules of the sort of society in which Smith’s economic inquiries take place.