アダム・スミス研究の動向

過去10年における内外の『国富論』研究を中心に

抄録

This paper aims to review the scholarship on Adam Smithʼs The Wealth of Nations （WN） in the past decade. The publication of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith （1976―1987） led to the so-called “Adam Smith Renaissance” that has encouraged many scholars from different disciplines to con-duct interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary stud-ies on Smith. In addition to the studies on Scot-tish Enlightenment, the establishment of the In-ternational Adam Smith Society （IASS） in 1995 and the publication of the Adam Smith Review (ASR） in association with the IASS since 2004 further promoted interdisciplinary studies on Smith. 　 Thus, the interdisciplinary wave of interest in Smithʼs moral philosophy is an outstanding feature of the latest scholarship on Smith. How-ever, as the interdisciplinary studies on Smith have advanced increasingly, there has been a definite waning of interest in his economics con-cerning WN. This phenomenon is indicated straightforwardly in Den Uyl （2008, 4） who mentions that “We can no longer say that WN is somehow the ʻessentialʼ Smith” and in Forman-Barzilai （2008, 219） who affirms that “Smithʼs political economy itself was not the centre on his thought, but rather its place in a lager project of moral philosophy.” Part I of this paper is a prologue to the man-ner in which the WN was studied in the past dec-ade. Part II discusses two excellent foreign works, Fleischackerʼs On Adam Smithʼs Wealth of Nations （2004） and Aspromourgosʼ The Sci-ence of Wealth （2009）. These two books sharply contrast with each other, because the former has a philosophical approach to WN, while the latter adopts an orthodox style used by economic his-torians. Part III considers the scholarship on the WN in Japan. Inamuraʼs Reconsideration of the system of The Wealth of Nations （2003）, Ta-jimaʼs Adam Smithʼs Institutional Economics (2003）, and Takemotoʼs Across The Wealth of Nations （2005） will be mainly reviewed in this paper. In part III, I aim to ascertain the ortho-doxy of our scholarship on WN and its transfigu-ration in comparison with the scholarship abroad. Part IV, the epilogue, briefly surveys the origin of WN （Smithʼs political economy） in or-der to understand the nature of modern econom-ics. JEL classification number: B12, B31, A12.