2005 Volume 2 Issue 1 Pages 1-12
This is an attempt to revaluate the world of ideas of Adam Smith in an intellectual-historicalperspective. Instead of judging his system of ideas simply in terms of whether it is “modern” ornot, whether he is a founder of a system of “modern sciences” of society, or from a viewpoint oflogical or theoretical consistencies in his system, the author considers the whole complex of hisideas at those points where two different dimensions of thought meet together. Intellectualexperiments are made by putting his key concepts and main fields of intellectual inquiry at where ahorizontal anthropological plane of each individual field of thought is crossed by a verticalcosmological or theological axis of a hierarchy of values and orders. In this manner, by locatinghis notion of “economy” in the hierarchical order of “divine economy”, “cosmic economy” and“political economy”, as well as in the context of the history of the notion of economy that tracesback to the Aristotelian concept of “oikonomia”, we can get a definite notion of what “politicaleconomy” was about in its early days as a “modern” discipline, and also in what kind of climate ofopinion and against what intellectual background it made itself into what it really became. Thisis a frame of reference in terms of which the author is going to examine the whole world ofSmith’s ideas, so that he can understand what Adam Smith means to the present scene ofphilosophical thinking, and grope his way through an inquiry into what the Society of Mankindought to be in the 21st century.
