Introduction

Adam smith’s america offers a new way to understand the meaning and significance of Adam Smith’s ideas through the eyes of his past readers. It shows how Smith’s American reception teaches us just as much, if not more, about the political, ideological, and methodological commitments that those ideas were recruited to serve as they teach us about Smith himself. During the Founding Era, an elite cadre of American figures saw Smith’s works as contributions to the Enlightenment science of man. His writings were broadly useful because they distilled general, universal principles of man and society which could be set into