Reading "Adam Smith": Desire, History, and Value

At last a study of Adam Smith that fills a major hole in the historical literature of political theory. This innovative volume is not about Adam Smith in the sense in which "about" is usually understood, for it is neither a comprehensive explication of his views nor a careful tracing of the sources of them. Instead it is a confrontation. This is a book about modernity whose vehicle is a reading of Adam Smith--it is an enactment of the convention that despite the contribution Smith made to creating and legitimating the conceptual space for modern, commercial, liberal, and democratic society, his views are inadequate for those who want an effective, politicized understanding of the present. Shapiro's ultimate goal in this examination is to "exemplify a way of doing political theory--one that challenges some traditional ways of constructing and celebrating the 'political theory canon.'" This illuminating volume will be of benefit to academics and students in political science, political theory, and comparative politics. "Shapiro's account of 'Adam Smith' offers readers a welcome guide to postmodernist methods of confrontational reading and interpretive struggle." --Political Studies "Reading 'Adam Smith' offers a rich, scholarly, and provocative relocation of significant controversies in contemporary theory. . . . Reading 'Adam Smith' is full of unusual twists. . . . Moving elegantly across disparate topics and academic genres, Shapiro uses large quantities of contemporary French theory to reflect upon Adam Smith's narrative strategies, feminist theory, and postmodern international relations theory to consider Smith's formulation of the sovereign self and the sovereign nation, and fragments of popular culture to interrogate Smith's formulation of nature and the natural. Erudite and economically written, this book contributes significantly to the effort to navigate the murky seas of late modernity." --Wendy Brown, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton "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 sovereignty 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 sovereignty 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 academic orders. This 'turning down' of disciplinary boundaries is long overdue and very welcome." --Nicholas Xenos, University of Massachusetts at Amherst This product is now available from: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Phone: 800-462-6420 Fax: 800-338-4550 http:\\www.rowmanlittlefield.comShapiro, Michael J. is the author of 'Reading "Adam Smith": Desire, History, and Value' with ISBN 9780803945852 and ISBN 080394585X.