ABSTRACT

Nearly 250 years on, the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is widely understood as a germinal moment for modern (political) economic analysis. Within political economy, the text continues to be cited not only as the inauguration of a specifically liberal theoretical tradition, but also as a foundational statement of what it means to be doing political economy more broadly. Yet established readings of the work have reproduced, perhaps unwittingly, assumptions about the nature and remit of its content drawn from subsequent economic thought, obscuring crucial environmental ideas that underpinned its main conclusions. Though long overlooked within orthodox readings, Smith in fact insisted that essential to political economic analysis was a careful consideration of the materiality of evolving relationships between societies and the nonhuman environment – an approach that, I suggest, can justifiably be viewed as a kind of ‘social ecology’. Reassessing these theoretical foundations reveals, on the one hand, over-optimistic ecological assumptions that he bequeathed to subsequent liberal political economy. On the other, in light of today’s ecological crisis, it prompts us to reconsider the importance, for political economic analysis more broadly, of a materialised understanding of the relationship between human societies and the earth.

摘要

近 250 年后，亚当·斯密的《国富论》出版被广泛理解为现代（政治）经济分析的萌芽时刻。在政治经济学中，该文本不仅继续被引用为特定自由主义理论传统的开创，而且作为更广泛地从事政治经济学意味着什么的基本陈述。然而，对这部作品的既定阅读可能在不知不觉中复制了从随后的经济思想中得出的关于其内容性质和职权范围的假设，掩盖了支撑其主要结论的关键环境思想。尽管长期以来在正统解读中被忽视，但史密斯实际上坚持认为，政治经济分析的本质是仔细考虑社会与非人类环境之间不断变化的关系的重要性——我建议采用这种方法，可以理所当然地被视为一种“社会生态”。重新评估这些理论基础一方面揭示了他遗留给后来的自由政治经济学的过度乐观的生态假设。另一方面，鉴于当今的生态危机，它促使我们重新考虑对更广泛的政治经济分析的重要性，具体了解人类社会与地球之间的关系。