Friedrich List's Adam Smith Historiography and the Contested Origins of Development Theory

Matthew Watson

Third World Quarterly, 2012, vol. 33, issue 3, 459-474

Abstract: Friedrich List's National System of Political Economy continues to be positively received in ipe, where it is treated as a seminal text in development theory. Only a handful of ipe scholars have questioned the specific history of economic ideas through which List asserted the distinctiveness of his own position. They do so by showing that he deliberately put words into the mouths of his classical political economy predecessors to provide himself with something to argue against. His alleged authority on development issues rests in particular on purposefully caricaturing the arguments of Adam Smith. I use this article to suggest a plausible reconstruction of the route to List's Smith, one which recognises the possible intermediary influence of the early Dugald Stewart, John Ramsay McCulloch, the Earl of Lauderdale and Georg Sartorius. By following this complex trail to List's rather eccentric Smith historiography, it becomes possible to break down one of the most important oppositions in ipe pedagogy: that between List's National System and Smith's Wealth of Nations. It also becomes necessary to engage more circumspectly with List's history of economic ideas when searching for the origins of contemporary critically minded development theory.

Date: 2012
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DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2012.657482

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