"Adam Smith's political economy, as we shall endeavor to show, has meaning for all times, and indeed in many ways even the modern era has not yet caught up with it." E. G. West, in his Prefatory Note. Adam Smith, author of "The Wealth of Nations," was no dry pedant. His lectures and writings are alive with examples taken from the busy eighteenth-century world around him, and Edmund Burke praised his literary style as "rather painting than writing." It was Adam Smith who taught moral philosophy and literary criticism to Boswell at the University of Glasgow, and in Smith's works we follow his...