Talk:Adam Smith

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Former good article nomineeAdam Smith was a good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
On this day... Article milestones
DateProcessResult
May 14, 2008WikiProject peer reviewCollaborated
June 15, 2008Peer reviewReviewed
September 13, 2008Good article nomineeNot listed
March 10, 2010Peer reviewReviewed
February 13, 2013Good article nomineeNot listed
On this day... A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on June 16, 2017.
Current status: Former good article nominee

Views on the working classes[edit]

There's an interesting excerpt in an article by Michael Perelman (1989) [1]:

Despite Smith's low regard for independent farmers and farm workers, he held them in significantly higher esteem than ordinary workers. He exclaimed, "How much the lower ranks of the people in the country are really superior to those in the town, is well known to every man whom either business or curiosity has led to converse with both" (Smith 1776, I.x.c.24, p. 144; see also Smith 1978, 539). Smith was especially belligerent toward the traditional working class cultural practices such as those that were embodied in what was called the moral economy (see Thompson 1971).

Perhaps someone wants to work it into the article? — Charles Stewart (talk) 12:40, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

"Criticism and dissent" section is misplaced and also confusing[edit]

Most articles like this have a criticism section, but here it's stuffed incongruously into the section about his published works as a subsection (???).

It's also worded confusingly with regards to what are his own views and what are his critics' views. For example,

Adam Smith explains the downsides of dividing the labor and the submission of labor to business owners in the Wealth of Nations. He explains that since the masters (business owners) are fewer in numbers, it becomes much easier for them to collaborate in order to serve common interests among them, such as keeping the wages of workers low, while it is much more difficult for the labor to coordinate in order to protect their own interests. Therefore, business owners have a bigger advantage over the working class. Nevertheless, according to Adam Smith, people rarely hear about the coordination and collaboration that happens between business owners as it happens informally.[1] Adam Smith also argues that dividing the labor leads to a nation of "helots"; meaning freedom would not exist. He mentions that in order to make the capitalist (owner) rich, the labor must be made poor and ignorant; repeating a few tasks over and over again, which undermines humans' mental capabilities. The dexterity of performing one task comes at the expense of intellectual, social and martial virtues but in every "civilized and improved" society, this is where the majority of people should fall, as per Adam Smith. He also writes that people should be educated but prudently (carefully) and homeopathically (slowly).[1]

This is cited with a pdf from a marxist website. I'm guessing this is based on that Marxist source's interpretation of what Adam Smith said, but in a case like that there needs to be better attribution than "Adam Smith explains".Nlburgin (talk) 22:35, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

Okay, I just dove deeper down the rabbit hole, and this (at least in some parts) isn't even correct according to the source it cites. That source attributed the part about "Helots" to a quote from "A. Ferguson, the master of Adam Smith". I think this paragraph definitely needs to be, if not removed altogether, than rephrased into speaking in terms of what A Critique of Political Economy says about Smith's theories. In the process, care should be taken to make sure it's accurate to what that secondary source is saying in the first place, which it isn't currently.Nlburgin (talk) 22:55, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
I went ahead and took action. I don't expect moving the section somewhere more appropriate to be controversial, so I did that. I also took the liberty of removing the paragraph listed above, leaving only the other one. Someone else can try to salvage it if they want, but right now it really shouldn't be in the article.Nlburgin (talk) 23:08, 26 April 2019 (UTC)
  1. ^ a b "A Critique of Political Economy" (PDF).
    2. Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Adam_Smith&oldid=896493061"