Reading "Adam Smith": Desire, History, and Value (Modernity and Political Thought)

Shapiro, Michael J.

ISBN 10: 080394585X ISBN 13: 9780803945852

Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc, 1993

Synopsis

This innovative study, by one of the most progressive political theorists of his generation, challenges the traditional ways of constructing and celebrating the corpus of political theory.

Shapiro explores modernity via a reading of Adam Smith, confronting his philosophy and focusing on what he calls `the Smith effect', the dimensions of which are integral to modern capitalist political economy and the construction of the social, political and moral within that system.

About this title

Review

Not a book for Smith beginners nor likely to satisfy Smith devotees, Reading "Adam Smith" offers rich, scholarly, and provocative relocation of significant controversies in contemporary theory. Premised on the notion that "Adam Smith" is an important player in contemporary political discourse, Shapiro's book is less a close reading of Adam Smith than a late modern meditation on the problems of sovereignity, history, value, subjectivity, the real, and the nature of the social bond. Erudite and economically written, this book contributes significantly to the effort to navigate the murky seas of late modernity.--Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley

Michael Shapiro's Reading "Adam Smith" is a masterfully au courant dismantling of the linguistic conventions governing the constitution of subjectivity in modernity. Through a confrontation between the notion of sovereignity and the symbolic practices of exchange, Shapiro exposes the conceits that structure Smith's moral philosophy and political economy. But more than that, Shapiro deploys an impressively wide range of semiological, dialogic, phenomenological, and deconstructive theories to argue that Smith's texts are themselves constitutive of and constituted by the orders of sovereignity and exchange that characterize modernity and enforce particular subjectivities. Drawing on Lacan and Foucault, Shapiro goes on to offer a postmodernist conception of the malleable self that disrupts and transgresses these orders. The result is a book that itself disrupts and transgresses academic orders. This 'turning down' of disciplinary boundaries is long overdue and very welcomed.--Nicholas Xenos, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Shapiro invites his reader not to be interpolated by Smith's opus. [His] Smith is refractory and dissolving. Shapiro does not merely interpret texts, but reads them actively. There is an emphatic clarity and a lack of nostalgia.--Diane Rubinstein "The Journal of Politics "

About the Author

Michael J. Shapiro is professor of political science at the University of Hawaii.

About this edition

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 080394585X
• ISBN 13: 9780803945852
• Binding: Textbook Binding
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176