Saving Adam Smith: A Tale of
Wealth, Transformation, and Virtue
Jonathan B. Wight
Summary
A novel of markets and
morals.
Adam Smith is back to set the
record straight....
If Adam Smith returned to
life, would he admire the global capitalist system that honors him or would he be
horrified?
The Wealth of Nations is
Smith's most popular work, but Smith himself revered his Theory of Moral Sentiments, an
unread classic that searches for the wellsprings of human happiness and virtue. There is
virtue in markets, yet Adam Smith would have been appalled by a world that holds wealth
above human connections, a world of markets unsupported by an underlying moral fabric ...
a world like ours.
And so it is in Jonathan
Wight's Saving Adam Smith, a wondrous imagining in which Adam Smith stands before us today
generous, incisive, committed, and unflinchingly honest. As Smith was a revelation to his
contemporaries, so he is to us: a man whose true message obscured by centuries of
misinformation and caricature has never been more vital for sustaining business and
society.
Adam Smith has come back to
life ... and is he upset....
Adam Smith ... You've heard
of him. The Father of Modern Economics. Died in 1790 ... but two centuries later, Adam
Smith's spirit is tortured by what it sees on Earth. Tortured by the caricatures promoted
in his name. Tortured that we've forgotten the morality at the heart of his message on
wealth. Tortured enough to return to Earth ... in the body of an immigrant mechanic in
Virginia.
Is this madness? At first,
doctoral student Richard Burns thinks so. But not for long ....
In Saving Adam Smith,
Jonathan Wight summons Adam Smith back to life, in a heart-pounding adventure ripped
straight out of today's headlines. As the suspense builds, Burns rediscovers Adam Smith's
most profound insight about markets: Selfishness is simply not enough. But will he and
Adam Smith survive long enough to share it?
"Wight's book is
astonishingly good. The storytelling is as good as the business best seller, The Goal, and
the economics is better. A few more books like this and economics will no longer be the
obscure and dismal science it now seems to the public."
322 pages