Adam Smith and Laissez Faire
Adam Smith and Laissez Faire
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亚当·斯密和自由放任
DOI：
10.1086/253837
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发表时间：
1927
影响因子：
8.2
通讯作者：
J. Viner
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
J. Viner
即使在今天，奋进对亚当·斯密对经济学说的最初贡献作出公正的评价，也是一项非常困难的任务。一方面，他的学说中有用的东西已经完全融入了我们的现代思想，以至于我们在读到他之前写的任何东西时，只要有一点刺激就能发现它，我们特别倾向于把他的前辈们的晦涩难懂当作一种美德，认为它理所当然地掩盖了过早的洞察力，而不是长期缺乏洞察力。总是有很大的危险，以免我们信贷的作家作为优先的学说可能在现实中不只是一个不雅暴露我们自己的无知有关他的前辈。然而，有许多权威和证据表明，斯密的主要独创性，至少在英国经济思想中，是他对经济现象的荒野的详细和精心的应用，即哲学家和神学家已经应用于一般世界的协调和相互依存的因果关系系统的统一概念。斯密的学说认为，经济现象是自然界中一种受自然力支配的基本秩序的表现，这一学说使英国经济学第一次明确地趋向于逻辑上一致的经济关系的综合，趋向于“体系的建立”。斯密的进一步学说认为，这种基本的自然秩序，为了其最有益的运作，需要一个自然自由的体系，在主要的公共管制中，1927年1月21日在芝加哥大学发表的一系列纪念《国富论》出版一百五十周年的演讲中。[1]亚当·斯密著作的参考文献是以下版本：《古代物理学史》和《道德情操论》，载于《亚当·斯密哲学与文学论文集》（Ward，Lock & Co.，伦敦，n. d.）;《国富论》，Cannan版;《讲座》，Cannan版，编辑。
An endeavor to make a just appraisal of Adam Smith's original contributions to economic doctrine would even today be a task of extraordinary difficulty. On the one hand, what was serviceable in his doctrines has become so thoroughly incorporated in our modern thinking that we discover it upon the slightest provocation in whatever we may read that was written before his day, and we are especially prone to make a virtue of obscurity in his predecessors by taking it for granted that it conceals premature insight rather than unduly prolonged lack of it. On the other hand, there is always great danger lest what we credit to a writer as priority of doctrine may not in reality be merely an indecent exposure of our own ignorance concerning his predecessors. There is much weight of authority and of evidence, however, that Smith's major claim to originality, in English economic thought at least, was his detailed and elaborate application to the wilderness of economic phenomena of the unifying concept of a co-ordinated and mutually interdependent system of cause and effect relationships which philosophers and theologians had already applied to the world in general. Smith's doctrine that economic phenomena were manifestations of an underlying order in nature, governed by natural forces, gave to English economics for the first time a definite trend toward logically consistent synthesis of economic relationships, toward "system-building." Smith's further doctrine that this underlying natural order required, for its most beneficent operation, a system of natural liberty, and that in the main public regulation * Lecture delivered at the University of Chicago on January 2I, I927, in a series commemorative of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Wealth of Nations. 1 References to Adam Smith's writings are to the following editions: History of Ancient Physics, and Theory of Moral Sentiments, in "Essays Philosophical and Literary by Adam Smith" (Ward, Lock & Co., London, n.d.); Wealth of Nations, Cannan edition; Lectures, Cannan, editor.